ITP 58: Portrait of Francis Bacon, by Lucian Freud

Date: 27-05-2001
Owning Institution: Tate Gallery
Publication:           Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:       Now  20th Century    

Today is the unlucky thirteenth anniversary of the theft, by a person or persons unknown, of Lucian Freud’s matchless portrait of his friend and fellow artist Francis Bacon. Until its recovery Freud will only allow the work to be reproduced in monochrome, as it is on this page. His friend and biographer, William Feaver, compares the embargo to a period of mourning. “Reproducing the painting in black and white emphasises the fact that all that can be seen of it, for now, is the ghost of a picture”.

The theft took place in more than slightly puzzling circumstances, as The Sunday Telegraph reported at the time:

“A well-known painting by Lucian Freud, Portrait of Francis Bacon, has been stolen from the National Gallery in West Berlin. Electronic security, now considered routine in protecting works of art, was not in use. The portrait, owned by the Tate Gallery, was part of a retrospective exhibition that was seen at the Hayward Gallery and is touring Europe. It is not known precisely when it was taken. One member of the public told police she noticed an empty space on the wall at midday on Friday, but it was three hours before the alarm was raised… Police are working on the assumption that the culprit was an art lover rather than a professional. A spokesman speculated that the thief acted on a ‘spontaneous’ impulse, adding – in an apparent contradiction – that it would have required ‘considerable skill’ to have removed the picture from its wire frame.”

A ransom of one million pounds was subsequently demanded for the safe return of the painting, but this was unpaid. It has never been seen since, except perhaps by those who stole it. Hope remains that it may one day be recovered. A poster campaign is planned in Berlin during the summer – a project which, as well as advertising the loss of the work, may also bring out some of its inherent qualities. It is a melancholy and morbid image, with something of the aura of a Missing Persons photograph about it.

Freud did the portrait in 1952, when he was thirty years old and Bacon was forty three. He greatly liked and admired his sitter and he seems to have intended the painting as a kind of tribute. Depicted in full face and shown disconcertingly close up, Bacon has been given the aspect of a truculent seer. His eyes, which seem almost impossibly large, gaze down and away at something unseen. The impression is of a man looking within, at the shapes created by his own imagination. A lick of his combed-back hair has fallen out of place, giving him an air of teddy-boy raffishness. His lip has begun to curl, as if he might be on the point of sneering. He emanates, in equal measure, sensitivity and disgust.

The picture is (or was) small, only a little bigger than its reproduction here. It was painted on copper, an unusual support for an artist to have chosen in the early 1950s, when expansive gestures on large canvases were more the order of the day. Copper, as Freud doubtless knew, had been one of the favoured supports of Northern Renaissance painters. Viewed in a Flemish light, his portrait of Bacon vividly reincarnates the tradition of the Van Eycks, of Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden (whose Deposition, in the Prado, Freud considers to be one of the world’s greatest paintings). There are other precedents too for Freud’s hypnotising evenness of attention to his subject. The picture reminds me of the early scientific illustrations commissioned by curious patrons and scholars such as Cassiano dal Pozzo in the seventeenth century – breathtakingly vivid and precise depictions of so-called “wonders of nature” such as the largest broccoli plant ever grown, or the most oddly shaped pumpkin. As Freud studied Bacon’s mumpish, pear-shaped face, noting every crease and wrinkle, marking down every nuance of contour, perhaps it too seemed like a sort of wonder of nature. How could a single human being contain so much life, and intensity? Bacon’s imposing face fills the frame, as if to amplify the question.

Depicting the sitter full face, front on, is very unusual in portraiture. The convention is traditionally associated with depictions of deities. Phidias is said to have used it in his lost Olympian Jupiter; Hubert and Jan Van Eyck adopted it for the figure of Christ the Priest at the centre of the Ghent Altarpiece. In oriental art, Buddha is generally portrayed full face. Bacon by Freud comes across as a kind of surly Buddha, a disconcerting god of untranquillity.

It is not surprising that Bacon should have seemed so deeply impressive to his younger friend and admirer in the early 1950s. While Freud was just beginning to find his way as a painter, Bacon was in full flow and creating what were, with hindsight, the finest pictures of his life. While Freud was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the tightness and smallness of his own work, Bacon was painting with enviable fluidity, on the scale of the great religious and mythological painters of the past. While Freud felt confined within the limitations of portraiture and still life, Bacon’s screaming popes, deformed children and crouching nudes seemed to encapsulate the bitter and disillusioned mood of those post-war times. Peering into Bacon’s face, Freud might almost have been looking for clues, for the hint of a way in which he, too, might make his own work more expansive and profound – might “deepen the game”, to use Bacon’s phrase.

As the two artists grew older, they also grew apart. Bacon did not like the artists whom he befriended to do well in their own right, feeling – as insecure people often do – that the success of others somehow diminished the nature of his own achievements. For his part, Freud increasingly lost respect for Bacon’s work, regarding his later pictures as little more than a pale imitation of his best work. All ties between the two were formally severed after Freud refused to lend one of Bacon’s early pictures, which he owned, to the latter’s second retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1985. Freud’s reasons for doing so were not simply malicious. He had lent the picture often before, and the Tate exhibition was to contain many works which he thought had little merit. After that, the two artists barely spoke to one another again, although after Bacon’s death in 1992 Freud did remember him generously to several obituarists. So as well as being “the ghost of a picture” the little black-and white image printed on this page contains, within it, the ghost of a friendship.