Head VI

Head VI was first exhibited in November 1949 at the Hanover Gallery in London, in a showing organised by one of the artist's early champions, Erica Brausen.

[4] At the time, Bacon was a highly controversial but respected artist, best known for his 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which made him the enfant terrible of British art.

[5] Head VI drew a mixed reaction from art critics; John Russell, later Bacon's biographer, at the time dismissed it as a cross between "an alligator shorn of its jaws and an accountant in pince-nez who has come to a bad end".

[13] In following years, Brausen became perhaps the most important of Bacon's early champions; she arranged this showing—his debut solo exhibition—publicised him widely and organised viewings for international buyers.

[15] He did not have a grand plan when he agreed to the show, but eventually found themes that interested him in his Head I of the previous year, and executed five progressively stronger variants in the final weeks before the November exhibition,[16][10] completing the series barely in time for the opening.

In Head VI the figure has developed and is now shown wearing vestments, the first indication in Bacon's work of the influence of Velázquez,[18] while the focus has become the open mouth and the study of the human scream.

"[21] This is very evident in the 1949 series, which began as a rather morbid study of a collapsed head, but evolved over the six surviving panels into a reworking of Velázquez masterpieces, and arrived at an image that was to preoccupy Bacon for the subsequent 20 years.

He believed that under these circumstances all pretence falls away, and the social being becomes the sum of its neuroses, which Bacon attempted to convey by reducing the subject to its bare-bones features: a mouth, ears, eyes, a jaw.

[13] It is exceptional in Bacon's oeuvre that works of their relative poor quality survive; he was ruthlessly self-critical and often slashed or abandoned canvasses before they were completed.

[29] For Bacon, these elements were intended to make the figure waver in and out of sight for the viewer, alluding to the fact that bulbs can be on or off, curtains open or closed.

[22][31] In 1984, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg asked Bacon about the still, and observed that in his earlier career the artist seemed preoccupied with the physicality of the human mouth.

The glass enclosure of his 1949 Chicago Study for a Portrait is often seen as prophesying photographs of Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial before a Jerusalem District Court, when he was held within a similar cage.

Denis Farr notes that Bacon was sympathetic to George Orwell and referred in interviews to Orwellian "shouting voices ... and trembling hands ... convey[ing] the harsh atmosphere of an interrogation.

[26] The full-length golden curtain-like folds painted in heavy brush strokes are in part influenced by Degas but also similar to Titian's 1558 Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto.

[33][36] Bacon adapts the Old Master's device to isolate and distance the sitter from the viewer;[29] the black ground-paint is visible through the folds, making the separation all the more affecting.

[39] Veils or curtains appear in Bacon's earliest works, notably the 1949 Study from the Human Body, always in portraits and always in front of, rather than behind, the figure.

This was already a common technique in commercial, promotional photography but in Bacon's hands, art historian Weiland Schmied argues, the angle places the pope on a kind of stage for the viewer to coldly observe.

[42] Bacon's approach was to elevate his subject so he could knock him down again, thereby making a sly comment on the treatment of royalty in both Old Master and contemporary painting.

The sitter's pose closely echoes the original, as does the violet and white colouring of his cope,[4] which is built up through broad, thick, brush-strokes.

Art historian Armin Zweite describes the work as a mixture of reverence and subversion that pays tribute to Velázquez, while at the same time deconstructs his painting.

"[46] Schmied sees Head VI as a reaction against Velázquez, and a commentary on how the papacy is "obsolete and decayed", with a pope resistant to both modernisation and secularisation.

Technically they are superb, and the masterly handling of large areas of pearly grey, flushed with a sudden pink or green, only makes me regret the more that the artist's gift should have been brought to subjects so esoteric".

While some found the inherent violence of the paintings distasteful, Brausen was a skilled publicist and turned the bad press into notoriety, and brought Bacon's work to national attention.

Peppiatt notes that the exhibition showed Bacon no longer needed sensationalist material to make an impact, and was now capable of creating an intense emotional response through more subtle means, and had found a way of presenting the human condition in the way he had sought, by presenting his sitter "in a vestigial setting, a cage or [behind] a parted curtain ... the rest, the most essential, lay in the manipulation of the infinitely suggestive medium of oil paint".

His reputation and the value of his panels rose dramatically, and after the showing he was sought after by European, American and African collectors and galleries, commanding prices as high as £400 for single works, unusual for a contemporary British artist of the time.

[50] The Hayward has loaned it out a number of times since, including for major retrospectives at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971, and the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, in 2000.