Portrait of Man with Glasses I

Bacon liked to think of himself as a reporter, as a painter of the real, or, as he put it, the “factual.”³ These self-characterizations need not be taken too literally. Apart from Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate, London), which has been interpreted as his response to the horrors of the Second World War, it is difficult to align his paintings with the tumultuous events that befell the world after 1945, notwithstanding his declared aim to paint the history of Europe in his lifetime. Yet to argue, instead, that he painted the human condition, we must ask, Which humans did he have in mind? Surely his motivations to paint were technical, formal, and, most significantly, personal; they stemmed from a conviction that raw flesh equated with beauty (or sex), and life and death with violence. Rather than representing something external, he was enacting his feelings in paint on canvas through a system of personal metaphors. Significantly, he described one of his most overtly violent subjects, Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), as “almost nearer to a self-portrait.”⁴ Following the implications of Bacon’s remark involves straying toward intentionality or etiological theorizing, hence the attraction in academe of Gilles Deleuze’s antibiographical/antipsychological/antinarrative stance that Bacon was a painter of abstract sensation. Love and death are, of course, abstract nouns, but Bacon expressed his feelings in images. We need to ask why Bacon painted the images he did, to interpret the marks on the canvas; the partial interpretations essayed here try to do this, while making no rash claims to resolution.

When Bacon was still in his teens, it was Picasso’s example that had inspired him to try to become a painter; in a sense, Bacon remained in a dialogue with him throughout his life. Picasso’s influence, which was overt in the period up to 1945, resurfaced in 1962, when, in the first of a celebrated series of interviews, Bacon suggested to David Sylvester that potential stimuli in Picasso’s Surrealist Cannes/Dinard period paintings had remained “unexplored”; he believed there were new possibilities in their “organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it.”⁵ Thus, Bacon reopened the dialogue, extending it in both Portrait of Man with Glasses I the following year and Study for a Portrait four years later.

As a figurative modernist, Bacon had few peers, although, intriguingly, the Lang Collection includes three of the most important among them—Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, and Philip Guston. Despite some of Bacon’s greatest paintings being held in American museums and private collections, his reputation in the United States has always been mixed, with critics from Clement Greenberg to Rosalind Krauss among the prominent detractors. For his part, Bacon has been portrayed as rigidly antipathetic to Abstract Expressionism. This is comprehensible, based as it is on repetitions of his inebriated rhetoric—a widely circulated remark being his characterization of Jackson Pollock as “the old lace-maker.”⁶ Yet a sober Bacon, interviewed by two Tate Gallery curators in 1983, discussed Pollock with sympathy and intelligence. He could seldom date his own paintings accurately, but he was aware that Pollock’s Blue Poles was made in 1952 and went on to demonstrate a keen interest in the artist’s partial return to figuration in 1953. Bacon increasingly simplified the grounds in his own later paintings, and the flat planes of color he employed indicate his awareness of, say, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, irrespective of his dismissive public statements about them: his supposed contempt for them is, therefore, a misperception based on casually uttered remarks and gossip.  

That Bacon described his paintings as essentially self-portraits, as noted above, is plausible given that he almost invariably painted his psyche. Nonetheless, a minority of his paintings are not readily classifiable as self-portraits, among them the four versions of Portrait of Man with Glasses he painted around July 1963. They were originally titled simply Head 1 through Head 4; the change to more descriptive titles, which was uncharacteristic, may embody a clue to his intention with the paintings. Unfortunately, Bacon remained resolutely silent about the man’s identity, but it nonetheless seems likely that he intended these works as portraits of a quite separate individual. A strong contender is Patrick Trevor-Roper, a leading London eye surgeon. Although Bacon disliked being seen in public wearing glasses, he had worn them when he was alone in the studio since the 1930s. Trevor-Roper treated Bacon’s horizontal astigmatism, and he and Bacon saw a lot of each other at the time these paintings were made as they socialized in London’s still semi-covert gay scene. If a specific individual was intended, alternative identifications include Mahatma Gandhi and James Joyce (Bacon had photographs of both in his studio).