We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong

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. ‘Self Portrait’ (1987) speaks of everything that Bacon got wrong in his final decades: it’s recognisably the 78-year-old artist, dressing up as a younger version of himself. His lips are pursed, his face pockmarked with a spray of tiny red dots, his pate capped with a page-boy fringe, features delivered in the borderline cartoonish idiom he seemed to lean on whenever a picture demanded something faithful to life.

The artist’s powers were on the wane and he knew it.