Francis Bacon

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner circa 1966
Thence by descent to the present owner

Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 188, illustrated

The intrinsic expressiveness of the human head fascinated Bacon from the very outset of his career: his first one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in 1949 showcased a series of anonymous Heads. Executed in 1961, Head (Man in Blue) is an extraordinary example of this genre, painted at a watershed moment in Bacon’s career. In its midnight tonality it recalls the Man in Blue series from 1954, in which Bacon explored, in a predominantly blue and grisaille palette, figures in bare, economically defined space. A seminal painting, its smaller scale and the compositional focus on the head simultaneously look forward to the portraits of the later 1960s and 1970s. Although marginally larger than the 14 by 12inch standard canvas that Bacon eventually settled on for his portraits the following year, its proportions and the close cropping of the image are prescient of his sustained study of the portrait genre of the next two decades. Ronald Alley records precious few small-scale works from this period, among them Head of a Man, 1959 and Head of a Woman, 1960, which, alongside the present work, show Bacon grappling with the imperatives of portraiture.

The sitter, clothed in the archetypal blue that characterised those earlier works, stares out at the viewer with hollow eyes in a psychologically compelling and physically arresting image.  From within the magma of robust fleshtones, more akin to a hunk of bovine meat in a butcher’s shop than living human flesh, we can discern a double portrait – a conflation of two blurred, contorted faces, their features savagely executed with broad, violent strokes. On the right, the unmistakably amorphous, moonlike, swollen physiognomy of the artist himself; on the left, the thinner, more angular features, confirmed in the swept back fair hair, are more reminiscent of Peter Lacy, a former battle of Britain fighter pilot, and Bacon’s tempestuous lover for over a decade. This portrait was painted just a year before Lacy’s death in 1962.

Combined into a single image, the viewpoint reveals a face caught both frontally and in profile, blurred as if caught in motion. The superimposed, conflated images create an unnerving, restless movement; the blurring of the twisted lower jaw creates a sense of primal, instinctual, animalistic motion. At the time of painting, Bacon was increasingly using photographic sources. He was fascinated not by the potential of photography to capture a pristine, literal image; on the contrary, he was interested in its inadequacies and the inability of sports and reportage photography to capture a figure in motion. Photography, for Bacon, was primarily a way of taking reality by surprise and the blurred images that Bacon found in the press provided him with a new vocabulary of forms, neither fully human nor fully abstract.

Bacon spoke admirably of Picasso, especially his cubist portraits from the early 1900s, in which he identified a new language of “organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it.” (Francis Bacon quoted in: Milan Kundera and France Borel, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 10).

Picasso’s highly structured multiple viewpoints find their apotheosis in Bacon’s fluid, contorted forms, and the present work with the angle of the neck and inclination of the shoulders bears a striking resemblance to Picasso’s painted and sculpted portraits of Fernande Olivier from 1909.

The condensation of several images in Head (Man in Blue), also reveals Bacon’s interest in sequence and presages his later use of the triptych format which he preferred for its filmic quality. Meanwhile, the horizontal line that meets the hair of the sitter recalls the space frames used by Bacon to define the pictorial space used in his earlier portraits. This delicate, spindly line contrasts with the forceful, expressive brush strokes of the head, and heightened by contrast with the crooked shoulder line creates an unsettling balance between order and chaos.  According to Bacon, these lines serve a compositional purpose and help distil the image.   He maintains: ‘I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down’ (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 40)

When discussing his own work with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon automatically and spontaneously turned to talking about the portraits, as if these paintings came closest to epitomising his creative ambition. The fascination stemmed from his desire to convey the principle tenets of portraiture as witnessed in Rembrandt – physiognomy, gesture and attitude, or what Bacon called “fact” – in a non-illustrative way. Straightforward representational verisimilitude, what he termed “illustration”, was as abhorrent to Bacon as it was to his abstractionist peers. Painting had to transcend mere representation to expose something more brutal, vital and irrational: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person… The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation.” (Francis Bacon cited in: David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 98).

Head (Man in Blue), with its organic distortions that simultaneously dismember and complete the human image, combines intimacy and brutality. In addition to his brush, he uses his hands, rags of wool or textile from his studio floor to apply and manipulate the paint, exploiting the malleability and tactility of the nearly-dry oils to create chance visual effects and blur the portrait to create a kind of spectral, haunting form. The robust flesh tones of the left side of the face are given bold relief against this pared down, deep midnight blue, flat colour-plane background. The rawness of the unprimed canvas contrasts with the glossy oils that violently express the face, particularly around the forehead.  While the unprimed canvas soaks up the thinner oils of the background, the copious smearing of paint used to delineate the face attains a rich texture.  As the raised texture of the bared canvas picks up the paint, it creates a rough gravelly texture. As it defines the cheek and sweeps around his eye socket, on the forehead the paint climaxes in a thick mountainous stroke. The painting is both mesmerising and disturbing in the absence of defined eyes, replaced instead by the cavernous space of blackened canvas.  This space becomes the left eye socket, like a shadow, a negative opening contained by a robust streak of flesh-coloured paint, and the right eye veiled with a swirl of skin tone, in a blurry haze.

In Head (Man in Blue) the inscrutable, amorphous forms of the head are inhuman, yet they bring us back most vividly to the very essence of humanity. They do not describe, they do not illustrate; but they unlock an area of sensation that brings us back to the physicality of the flesh, the brutal fact, in a violent and immediate way that mere illustration could never hope to achieve. Bacon stated that he wanted his portraits to clamp themselves onto the nervous systems of the beholder: “There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” It is this direct form of somatic, as opposed to cerebral, communication that makes the experience of looking at one of Bacon’s portraits so powerful, unique and compelling. What is so astounding about the present work is that it savagely hammers home the shock of what we are: the brutality of fact and the materiality of the flesh.