Digby Warde-Aldam

We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong

The National Portrait Gallery's excellent new show dispels the hackneyed vision of Bacon-as-apocalyptic-magus

‘Head of Boy’, 1960, by Francis Bacon. © The Estate ofof Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage2024.  
issue 16 November 2024

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with what might be the single worst picture it contains.

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