Head VI

Head VI, 1949. 93.2 × 76.5 cm (36.7 × 30.1 in), Arts Council collection, Hayward Gallery, London

Head VI is a 1949 oil on canvas painting by the Irish-born British figurative artist Francis Bacon, the final of the six heads in his highly regarded series of that year.^[2] It is noted for its physical, expressive brush strokes and for being Bacon's first work to refer to Diego Velázquez's c. 1650 Portrait of Innocent X, a painting that was to haunt the artist and become a recurring feature in his paintings for the next 25 years.^[3] It is the first of Bacon's long series of "screaming popes",^[4] which includes almost 50 individual works.^[5] It contains an early example of an indistinct hanging object that may be a light switch or curtain tassel, a feature that was to reappear over and over in his work. Head VI is the second – after the 1949 Study for Portrait – to employ a soundless glass cage to enclose and isolate the figure. The pope is bound and contained by horizontal curtain-like gold coloured drapes falling all around him.^[6] The overall effect is of a figure trapped and suffocated by his surroundings and circumstance, screaming in vain into an airless glass-sealed void.

At the time Bacon was a highly controversial but mostly respected artist, the enfant terrible of British art. This work drew mixed criticism. John Russell, who eventually became one of the artist's firmest supporters, dismissed it as a cross between an "alligator shorn of its jaws and a bespectacled accountant".^[7] In 1989 Lawrence Gowing wrote "it was everything unpardonable. The paradoxical appearance at once of pastiche and of iconoclasm was indeed one of Bacon's most original strokes."^[8] Head VI has been at the Hayward Gallery, London, since it was first exhibited in November 1949,^[9] in a showing organised by one of the artist's early champions, Erica Brausen.^[3] David Sylvester described it in 2000 as Bacon's most seminal piece from his unusually productive 1949–50 period and one of the finest 'Popes' that Bacon produced.^[10]

1949 Head series

Head II, 1949. Ulster Museum, Belfast

Bacon's output is marked by series or related sequences of images. He said in an interview with David Sylvester that his imagination was stimulated by sequences: "images breed other images in me".^[11] But the sequences were not discrete; there are a number which he painted together but that are internally disparate, either thematically or iconographically. This is especially evident in the 1949 heads, which are very uneven in quality. Yet they show a clear progression in the manner in which they utilise and present motifs that he was still clearly developing and coming to terms with. Head I and Head II show formless pieces of meat that broadly resemble human skulls; they have half-open eyes and a pharynx positioned much higher than expected in a human being. Both figures are enclosed in spaces that are overwhelmingly claustrophobic, reductive and eerie.

Study for Portrait, 1949. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

The series is the artist's first attempt at depicting figures on their own in rooms. For Bacon the key aspect was that the subject felt alone and unobserved, and no longer had to present any outward face. Under these circumstances, all pretence at outward presentation falls away, and the social being becomes the sum of its neurosis, which the artist attempts to convey by reducing him to his bare-bones features: a mouth, ears, eyes, a jaw. According to Russell, "the view out front ceases to be the only one, and our person is suddenly adrift, fragmented, and subject to strange mutation."^[9] Russell observed that while the depiction of figures in rooms is common through all eras of painting, the figures are always in a pose, and usually seemingly aware that they are being portrayed. This conceit breaks down in Bacon's series.^[9]

Figures in rooms is a setting Bacon was often to revisit, yet the idea of an almost melted, inhuman head was something he quickly abandoned. The first two heads are well regarded, but were something of a creative cul-de-sac. Heads III–V are usually less appraised and generally seen as intermediate to Head VI.^[12] Bacon was ruthlessly self-critical of his own work, and often destroyed or abandoned canvasses before they were completed. When pressed by Brausen in 1953 to produce for a New York show she had been publicising for the last year, he was full of doubt and destroyed most of what he had been working on, including several popes.^[13] A number of these popes resurfaced in the late 1990s and are considered among the strongest in his cannon.

Description

Velázquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. Although Bacon avoided seeing the original, it remained the painting that most affected him, and one that he was to refer to over and over.^[1]

The painting shows a pope closely modelled on Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X,^[14] shown at half length, enclosed and isolated in a three-dimensional glass case or cage. This framing device, which Sylvester described as a "space-frame", was to undergo several iterations through the artist's career.^[15] The pope's mouth is wide open as if screaming, an expression directly borrowed from a photographic still of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin.^[16] The pope is positioned behind full-length horizontal folds expressively coloured in gold paint. They appear like curtains and serve to cut off and distance the subject from the viewer.^[17] Through these the black ground-paint is visible, making the implied separation all the more affecting. Bacon had already used similar horizontal painterly forms in his 1949 Chicago Study for Portrait, and they were to become a feature of his most acclaimed 1950s works, especially with his "screaming popes".^[18] Bacon, who began his career as interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs, later said that he liked "rooms hung all round with just curtains hung in even folds.^[19]

Velázquez's influence is apparent in many aspects of the painting. The sitter's pose closely echoes the original, as does the violet and white colourisation of his cope,^[3] which Bacon builds up through broad, thick, painterly brush strokes. The influence can be further seen on the gold coloured ornaments on the back of the seat that extend on both sides of the figure. Art historian Armin Zweite describes Bacon's mixture of reverence and subversion as a tribute to the Velázquez portrait that at the same time destroys the original work, making it "nearly unrecognisable".^[3] When asked why he was compelled to revisit the Velázquez so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against popes per se, but merely sought "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner."^[20] He was impressed by Picasso's figuration and handling of paint; Sylvester suggests that the white blobs around the pope's cape may be influenced by the Spanish artist's 1913 Woman in a Slip Seated in an Armchair.^[21]

A cord hangs from the upper edge of the glass case, falling just before the pope's face and partially covering his eyes. It is too poorly and indistinctly drawn to make out for sure, but given the presence of similar objects in his later works it may be either the end of a hanging light switch or the tassel of a curtain. Either way it became a signature for Bacon. A similar object first appears in Head I, the first work of the series. But there it is at a slightly more sideways angle, which Sylvester calculates at around 80 as apposed to 87 degrees in Head VI. In the earlier example it seemingly comes to rest touching the ear, rather than the nose of the figure. Sylvester suggested that a hanging thread to an appendage may be suggestive of torture,^[22] but idly, and no art historian followed up on the notion. Apart from any symbolic meaning, it has a compositional function, aiding in lining the painting with a further series of horizontal, framing lines.^[22] It reappears prominently in the centre panel in his 1973 Triptych, May–June 1973, where it is clearly a hanging light bulb.^[17] For Bacon these motifs were intended to make the sitter seem to waver in and out of sight from the viewer, implied by the fact that light bulbs can be either switched on or off, and curtains can be opened or drawn.^[23]

The glass cage may imply a space from which the figure's voice cannot escape, as if he is screaming in silence. He later admitted that he "wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. I think, if I had really thought about what causes somebody to really scream, it would have made the scream ... more successful".^[24]

Head I, 1948. Collection Richard S. Zeisler, New York

Other art historians have drawn similarities between the glass case and the radio booths of late 1930 broadcasters, who warned in vain against impending calamity. Denis Farr develops this further. Noting that Bacon was sympathetic to George Orwell, he refers to the "shouting voices ... and trembling hands ... convey[ing] the harsh atmosphere of an interrogation."^[25] The Chicago panel's glass enclosure is often seen as prophesying photographs of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, in which the accused is shown within a glass cage.^[22] However, Bacon strongly resisted literal comparisons, and stated that he used the device so he could frame and really "see the image – for no other reason. I know it's been interpreted as being many other things."^[22]

The "curtain" folds serve a similar function to the light switch/tassel in that they imply an on/off position or opened/closed shutting, thus heightening the sense of alienation the figure is presumably intended to represent.^[23] Sylvester suggests that the heavy folds "push the viewer back", creating a gap between viewer and subject. This, he wrote, gives an effect similar to that of between orchestra and scenery. Others have speculated that they more resemble the bars of a prison.^[19] Sylvester suggested the influence of late works by Titian, especially in the deep and rich colourisation, but also of Velázquez's portrayals of the art-loving Philip IV, and some of the dusky pastels of Edgar Degas, from whom he believes Bacon borrowed the user of heavy folds to create the illusion to of what Degas described as "shuttering".^[26]

Gallery

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  Still from Eisenstein's 1925 The Battleship Potemkin. Bacon described this early film still as a key catalyst for his work^[1]

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