Lot Essay
The second of four independent portrait heads executed in sequence by Bacon in the summer of 1952, Study for a Portrait not only boasts the largest format of the grouping but also is the most complex as regards its iconography. In it, Bacon explores the full litany of his most persistent obsessions and visual sources, from Velazquez's Portrait of Innocent X to Eisenstein's silent film classic Battleship Potemkin. The result is a contemporary icon of 20th century neuroses comparable in power to Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Bacon always refused to say exactly what it was about Velazquez's papal portrait that so obsessed him, simply stating that he considered it "one of the greatest paintings in the world". Its influence first became evident in Bacon's Head VI of 1949, where a screaming purple phantom of a Pope is depicted encased in a transparent box. This was quickly followed in 1951 by three full-figure images of a Pope, which showed him borne aloft on a sedan chair.
Bacon next returned to the theme in 1952 with the present series of four head and shoulder portraits. The first shows a frontal close-up of the Pope's screaming features, his status signified by his ecclesiastical vestments. But in the subsequent Study for a Portrait, Bacon exchanges these garbes with the formal suit and tie of a businessman/politician. For the artist the two guises were interchangable, each representing a man of high office and worldly distinction. By then portraying him reduced to the state of a mental and physical wreck, the chronicle of his fall is even more firmly exaggerated.
Hugh M. Davis provides further observations on this papal substitution. "This chronological alternation of sacred and secular screaming subjects no doubt influenced Werner Haftmann's observation of the implied irony that had the pope "been alive today he would be one of our politicians." Moreover, in the following year, when Bacon painted his definitive paraphrase of Velazquez's papal portrait, entitled Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953, it was immediately followed by an equally large portrait of a similarly isolated, screaming politician or businessman."
For the scream itself, Bacon turned to his other favourite source: a still of the dying nurse from the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, just at the moment when a bullet shatters her pince-nez spectacles and crashes through her scull. "It was a film I saw almost before I started to paint, and it deeply impressed me," Bacon told David Sylvester. "I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry. I was not able to do it, and it's much better in the Eisenstein and there it is." (David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1975, p.34).
In Study for a Portrait, Bacon literally superimposes the nurse's features onto his besuited figure. As in the film still, the smashed pince-nez hang precariously from the businessman's nose and the screaming mouth appears like a gaping black void. "People say that these [open mouths] have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth," stated Bacon. "I like the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." (Sylvester, p.48-50).
Art historian Dawn Ades sees the scream as the most animalistic of man's responses to pain and describes Bacon's heads as being "in the grip of a feeling so intense that the only expression of it brings him close to the beasts."
But what is the cause of this intense suffering? Is Bacon simply showing an intimate portrait of a man driven insane or is his painting more a universal comment on the absurd futility and inherent loneliness of the human condition. American critic Donald Kuspit certainly views Bacon's art as a visual equivalent of the Existentialist philosophies expounded by Jean Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Kuspit comments that Bacon's figures are "sick with death - not literal death, but rather the feeling of being nothing." Bacon himself maintained, "We are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."
Bacon emphasises his nihilistic ideas in Study for a Portrait by constructing a sound-proof cage around his figure, which is in turn placed within a suffocatingly black void. Bacon further encloses the pictorial space by transforming Velazquez's traditional baroque curtain into a hospital curtain, while the imprisonment of his subject is made clear by the taut linear construction of the businessman's suit, that acts as a virtual straight-jacket.
Bacon always refused to say exactly what it was about Velazquez's papal portrait that so obsessed him, simply stating that he considered it "one of the greatest paintings in the world". Its influence first became evident in Bacon's Head VI of 1949, where a screaming purple phantom of a Pope is depicted encased in a transparent box. This was quickly followed in 1951 by three full-figure images of a Pope, which showed him borne aloft on a sedan chair.
Bacon next returned to the theme in 1952 with the present series of four head and shoulder portraits. The first shows a frontal close-up of the Pope's screaming features, his status signified by his ecclesiastical vestments. But in the subsequent Study for a Portrait, Bacon exchanges these garbes with the formal suit and tie of a businessman/politician. For the artist the two guises were interchangable, each representing a man of high office and worldly distinction. By then portraying him reduced to the state of a mental and physical wreck, the chronicle of his fall is even more firmly exaggerated.
Hugh M. Davis provides further observations on this papal substitution. "This chronological alternation of sacred and secular screaming subjects no doubt influenced Werner Haftmann's observation of the implied irony that had the pope "been alive today he would be one of our politicians." Moreover, in the following year, when Bacon painted his definitive paraphrase of Velazquez's papal portrait, entitled Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953, it was immediately followed by an equally large portrait of a similarly isolated, screaming politician or businessman."
For the scream itself, Bacon turned to his other favourite source: a still of the dying nurse from the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, just at the moment when a bullet shatters her pince-nez spectacles and crashes through her scull. "It was a film I saw almost before I started to paint, and it deeply impressed me," Bacon told David Sylvester. "I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry. I was not able to do it, and it's much better in the Eisenstein and there it is." (David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1975, p.34).
In Study for a Portrait, Bacon literally superimposes the nurse's features onto his besuited figure. As in the film still, the smashed pince-nez hang precariously from the businessman's nose and the screaming mouth appears like a gaping black void. "People say that these [open mouths] have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth," stated Bacon. "I like the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." (Sylvester, p.48-50).
Art historian Dawn Ades sees the scream as the most animalistic of man's responses to pain and describes Bacon's heads as being "in the grip of a feeling so intense that the only expression of it brings him close to the beasts."
But what is the cause of this intense suffering? Is Bacon simply showing an intimate portrait of a man driven insane or is his painting more a universal comment on the absurd futility and inherent loneliness of the human condition. American critic Donald Kuspit certainly views Bacon's art as a visual equivalent of the Existentialist philosophies expounded by Jean Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Kuspit comments that Bacon's figures are "sick with death - not literal death, but rather the feeling of being nothing." Bacon himself maintained, "We are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."
Bacon emphasises his nihilistic ideas in Study for a Portrait by constructing a sound-proof cage around his figure, which is in turn placed within a suffocatingly black void. Bacon further encloses the pictorial space by transforming Velazquez's traditional baroque curtain into a hospital curtain, while the imprisonment of his subject is made clear by the taut linear construction of the businessman's suit, that acts as a virtual straight-jacket.