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.

If this show gets something right it is in refuting the hackneyed vision of Bacon-as-apocalyptic-magus

The artist’s powers were on the wane and he knew it. Self-parodic though the picture might be, it still carries the weight of pathos. Some years before, he had complained about being forced towards self-portraiture because his friends were ‘dropping like flies’. ‘I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself,’ he told David Sylvester. ‘I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven’t got any other people to do.’ He was exaggerating, but not by much. Of the recurring models pictured here, many were no longer: Muriel Belcher, the founder of the Colony Room, died in 1979; his abusive boyfriend Peter Lacy, captured here as some kind of demented jungle beast, in 1962; another lover, George Dyer – a Kray twins associate – the subject of this show’s big, climactic moment, ‘Triptych May-June 1973’, in 1971.