Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads
Until September 4; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

The paint is streaked and scumbled, spattered and splashed, gritty and gashed. Whole swathes of canvas are exposed like raw wounds. Colours writhe in whispered cacophonies, inside rippling, sinewy curves, and escaping them.

Faces scream, dissolve and implode. They squirm like maggot-eaten corpses and twist like stolen sideways glances. Their eye sockets, dead and empty, offer no window on the soul, and their tautened throats are exits for screams that can’t get out.

For Francis Bacon, everyone was meat on a slab. We are all fleshy dramas in constant flux, our blood and muscle and slime holding us together while that inexplicable thing – our consciousness, or soul – battles to survive. Amongst the chaos of carnal life, Bacon finds beauty, and it is horror’s twin.

Dublin-born and London-based, Bacon’s life spanned most of the 20th century. Forging a path quite different from his contemporaries, Bacon took the baton directly from Velazquez, Rembrandt and Picasso, carving monumental figures, almost living, breathing, spitting and cursing, out of oil paint.

Bacon is best known for his large-scale triptychs of human suffering, often relating to the crucifixion. Half-human, half-carcass figures wrestle with each other, and while the specifics of their anatomies and their actions are unclear, the general air of violence is unmistakeable. Perhaps more horrifying, however, is the large proportion of Bacon’s work which emphasizes the isolation of the human being.

This exhibition, concentrating for the first time entirely on Bacon’s portraits and heads, is full of such isolation. In not one of the 54 paintings does any figure interact with any other. People’s own reflections look away from them. Every figure is absolutely, and irrevocably, alone.

The first room is a perfect example. It has five heads, four of them screaming. Alongside the crucifixion triptychs, Bacon is famous for his screaming popes, and his first ever is included here, along with two companion pieces shown in the artist’s first solo show, 56 years ago.

Based on Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon’s pope loses the domineering glare of the Spanish original, and is reduced to the state of vulnerable animal: screaming, trapped and disintegrating. Here, in a series of dry, rasping brush strokes, the pope is screaming himself out of existence. Or perhaps he is gasping for air – Bacon suffered badly from asthma.

The pope is trapped inside a box, typical of Bacon’s environments. A few thin lines suggest architectural space and the rest is left to the imagination. Here, the transparent box might be glass, a suggestion which is reinforced by the gallery’s decision to hang the glazed picture opposite a bright window. The light reflects on the actual glass, isolating the trapped figure even more in his own silent agony.

Although obsessed with Velazquez’s painting, Bacon took great care never to visit the original, perhaps fearing that it wouldn’t live up to his expectations. This is a hard fact to grasp, when standing among Bacon’s own work, because reproductions are nothing compared with the real thing.

When Warhol’s self-portraits were hanging on these same walls a month ago, they revelled in their own flatness. Mass-reproduction was the point for Warhol, who wanted to spread his images as widely and as mechanically as possible. Not so for Bacon, whose images exude a physical presence which can’t be translated onto the printed page.

The paint does something different on every canvas. Here, it’s a chalky patchwork of tones; there, it’s an intense, tarry snarl. And it really does seem to be an active player, not just a passive medium. The streaky paint snakes into one nostril and out of another. It loops into an eye socket and out, performing so many pirouettes that finally its gloopy trail has caressed the surface of a whole remembered head.

The paint is not the whole subject in the same way as it would have been for Jackson Pollock. Here, the paint is glorious indeed, but it engages with a long figurative tradition. At the same time it is so much more than an illustration of a person’s outer appearance. Bacon’s work walks that tightrope, tread by centuries of old masters, between inner and outer realities.

“I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance”, Bacon once said. “I can’t paint them literally.” So when the Tate’s portrait of his artist friend, Isabel Rawsthorne, has a splurge of white paint thrusting out from her jaw, it’s not spit or sweat or an unfortunate beard. Intuition tells us that it implies a certain stubborn determination, dynamic and sure. And while Rawsthorne’s right eye is intact, her left eyeball is blank, suggesting deep inward thought.

That’s not to say that one eye open, other eye shut always means the same thing in some handy pocket Bacon lexicon. The artist wasn’t aiming to appeal to the intellect, and he didn’t paint from it either. While operating somewhere below the level of the conscious, he wasn’t indulging in Surrealist symbolism. His aim was to fire straight for the central nervous system “so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain.”

Having said that, after pouring for years over the contents of Bacon’s studio, academics know much more about the well-thumbed sources which recur obliquely in his work. One image in particular seems to run through every head the artist ever painted, and that is the face of the screaming nanny in Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, The Battleship Potemkin. Her mouth is stretched open like the screaming popes’, and with one eye bleeding, her spectacles tilt, half-shattered, from her nose.

So the arc of shattered glasses looms large in Bacon’s portraiture. Sometimes it’s apparent only in the enlarged arches streaking through a forehead, sometimes it’s hidden in the black void of a cheek. Sometimes, as in this 1966 portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, it creeps in through the blankness of an eye. As a single forceful image it is deeply embedded in Bacon’s vision of the world, investing every face with a vestige of numbing shock. In that sense, at least, we are not alone. In that sense, every figure in this exhibition has been subject to attack.

Another of Bacon’s favourite sources was the collection of sequential photographs taken by 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Before the invention of film, Muybridge devised a way of photographing motion in tiny increments, and simultaneously from different angles. He applied these techniques to naked figures and animals, building up a library of movement which is still used by many today.

The scientific phenomenon called persistence of vision means that if we watch Muybridge’s photos in sequence, our mind fills in the gaps and sees, for example, a galloping horse. The Futurists and the Cubists soon picked up on this new technology, layering all the angles, and all the moves, on top of each other to create a single image. These concerns are echoed in Bacon’s work, for instance in the impressively claustrophobic series of Men In Blue.

The men, looming out of their static linear surroundings, look double-exposed in places. An ear shifts back while the eye slips down, and a ghost of a mouth sits behind the original. While the collar and tie – those anchors of male, western civilisation – are immaculately presented, the face seems to have the jitters, unable to play dead.

As Bacon’s painting developed, he left the layered images behind and instead explored the gaps between them. His later portraits don’t suggest multiple exposures, but the blurred memory in between. He could only paint people he knew well – friends and lovers, mostly – and he preferred to do it in their absence so he could work freely from his memory of the person’s “emanation”.

These heads, small and intensely focussed, look bruised and battered, maimed and swollen – “as though they had endured some terminal rearrangement by massage”, as Robert Hughes once said. But according to all who knew the subjects, they were wonderfully representative of the characters. For Bacon they were a synthesis not only of the different angles and movements of a person, but of their actions, and of his memories and experiences of them.

Think of someone close to you; it’s not exactly their complete physical form that you are picturing, is it? It’s a fluid image, some features looming large while others skulk in the background, the body imbued with attributes which are more about personality than physical fact. It’s that elusive vision which Bacon tried to nail on canvas, a project which places him firmly in the pantheon of great historical portrait painters.

And it is an old master show. That might seem odd, for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. But the walls are various shades of dirty buff, the frames are big and gold, the pictures are behind glass, and there is a thick air of reverence. It is wholly deserved. Each one of Bacon’s canvasses demands attention, and resists explanation. They are interesting in print, but compelling in the flesh. And flesh is in plentiful supply.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.06.05