Study for a Portrait
Francis Bacon’s painting Study for a Portrait (1952), at times known as Businessman I or Man’s Head deals with the motif of the scream, an important and recurring visual in Bacon’s body of work. The painting depicts the head and shoulders of a screaming male figure, who wears glasses, a suit and a tie. Study for a Portrait can be viewed as part of Bacon’s development in the genre of portraiture. Bacon’s engagement with the motif of a head in isolation began in 1948, and his first identifiable portrait was of his close friend Lucian Freud, Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951). Even though Freud and others posed for Bacon, the artist often preferred to work with photographic sources.
The motif of the screaming mouth became an important theme in Bacon’s art in the late 1940s and early 1950s in paintings such as Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) and Three Studies of the Human Head (1953). In 1949 the critic Robert Melville suggested a connection between Bacon’s painting Head VI (1949) and a scene from Battleship Potemkin (1925), a film by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. The film was based on the events of a 1905 mutiny of the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin. In the film, after the crew rebels against the officers, the Tsars soldiers carry out a massacre on the vast stairway in the city of Odessa. Although Bacon saw the film in 1935, he painted from the still images in Roger Melville’s 1944 book Film. He was particularly interested in the image of a wounded, elderly nurse, who wears cracked glasses and has blood running down her face into her open screaming mouth. This was possibly one of the images that inspired Study for a Portrait. Other paintings by Bacon such as Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1953) have also been linked to the image of the nurse from Battleship Potemkin. Bacon’s interest in the human mouth was also sometimes associated with a book Bacon bought in 1935 that featured sections about diseases of the mouth.
In Study for a Portrait Bacon employed the ‘space frame’ technique, that creates the illusion of a figure trapped in a transparent cage. Bacon’s use of ‘space framers’ was probably influenced by both contemporary works, such as Cage (1930-1931) by Alberto Giacometti as well as Renaissance paintings such as Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (ca. 1558) by Titian. For Bacon this pictorial device served as a visual representation of psychological entrapment.Bacon’s subject in the Study for a Portrait is a suited man, a recurring theme in Bacon’s work, for example in his Man in Blue series painted in 1954. In paintings Man in Blue I (1954) and Man in Blue V (1954), the suited man can be interpreted in two roles, that of an ‘interrogator’ and of a ‘victim’. Study for a Portrait is one of paintings in which Bacon explores themes of isolation and madness.
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