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Self-Portrait
Artist
Francis Bacon
(Born 1909, Ireland; died 1992, Spain)
Date1956
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 78 x 54 in. (198.12 x 137.16 cm)
Framed: 86 1/8 x 62 1/4 x 3 1/8 in. (218.76 x 158.12 x 7.94 cm)
Framed: 86 1/8 x 62 1/4 x 3 1/8 in. (218.76 x 158.12 x 7.94 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of The Burnett Foundation in Honor of Marla Price
Object number2002.64
Status
Not on viewCopyright© 2020 The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / ARS, New York / DACS, London
Category
Label TextDuring an era when avant-garde art in America and Europe was synonymous with abstraction, Francis Bacon and a number of his peers in London, including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, pursued modern forms of figuration to express the existential nature of human experience in the postwar age. The Modern’s Self-Portrait, 1956, completed at the age of forty-seven, is the earliest surviving example of fifty-one self-portraits that expose material and psychological truths of the human condition.
Bacon painted not from a mirror reflection but from memory. In the Modern’s full-length painting, he presented himself as a suited figure crouched on the edge of a low bed with a yellow rail in pitch-black darkness. A frame of thin white lines anchors and contains him within the otherwise boundless void. Bacon first explored the format of the solitary figure caged in a “space-frame” in the early 1950s, in his series after Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c. 1650. But where Bacon’s popes sit static in imperial command, the artist depicted himself with shoulders hunched and legs twisted awkwardly beneath him.
Bacon captured several of his distinctive features—namely, his broad face, deep-set eyes, and commanding stature. But he subjected his image to severe distortion, most prominently in his sharply raised left eye. Although figurative, Bacon’s expressionistic painting technique was highly influenced by abstraction: a few thick, curving swipes indicate the hands and white outlines delineate shoes. Large passages of dark background remain exposed through the artist’s loose and patchy brushwork, leaving the figure in a state of semi-transparency, like an X-ray. Bacon’s smeared features perhaps suggest that the self is ultimately incapable of being captured—or can be represented only insofar as it is vulnerable and mutable
Bacon painted not from a mirror reflection but from memory. In the Modern’s full-length painting, he presented himself as a suited figure crouched on the edge of a low bed with a yellow rail in pitch-black darkness. A frame of thin white lines anchors and contains him within the otherwise boundless void. Bacon first explored the format of the solitary figure caged in a “space-frame” in the early 1950s, in his series after Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, c. 1650. But where Bacon’s popes sit static in imperial command, the artist depicted himself with shoulders hunched and legs twisted awkwardly beneath him.
Bacon captured several of his distinctive features—namely, his broad face, deep-set eyes, and commanding stature. But he subjected his image to severe distortion, most prominently in his sharply raised left eye. Although figurative, Bacon’s expressionistic painting technique was highly influenced by abstraction: a few thick, curving swipes indicate the hands and white outlines delineate shoes. Large passages of dark background remain exposed through the artist’s loose and patchy brushwork, leaving the figure in a state of semi-transparency, like an X-ray. Bacon’s smeared features perhaps suggest that the self is ultimately incapable of being captured—or can be represented only insofar as it is vulnerable and mutable