Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol

Published 11/02/2025

Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol

There are no buts! This small exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath has considered every angle and every detail and the result truly is a bijou gem

Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol, installation view, Holburne Museum, Bath. Photo: Jo Hounsome.

Holburne Museum, Bath
24 January – 5 May 2025

by ANNA McNAY

An exhibition on portraiture at the Holburne Museum, renowned for its 18th-century collection? Hmm, so what’s new? Showcasing paintings for which photographs provided the source material? OK, that sounds rather different – 1822 at the earliest – and surely it must include something by Francis Bacon? Indeed, yes: the subtitle proposes the timeframe from Bacon to Andy Warhol. Aha, sounds interesting, but … Well, all I can say is that there are no buts! This small, one-room exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath has considered every angle and every detail and the result truly is a bijou gem.

In a sense, the exhibition begins on the landing, as the visitor steps out of the lift into a space with brick-red walls that make you feel absorbed into a safe and warm womb. And this colour goes with you into and around the exhibition. Although the walls within are a pale, bloodless grey, either end of the temporary wall in the centre is painted with the brick red, so that it holds you safe, like a pulsating umbilical cord.

Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol, installation view, Holburne Museum, Bath. Photo: Jo Hounsome.

The first work you see on entering the gallery at an initial glance looks like a Mark Rothko, radiating its broad and saturated colour fields, but no, it is Frank Bowling’s Dan with Map (1967). It continues the brick-red colour, with a surface like the lining of a womb or a sheet of glorious rust. And, as with either of those analogies, there are images underneath, hidden beneath layers of time and place. The work is layered with caustic-looking paint on top of a screen-printed photograph of the artist’s young son, Dan, and an (as yet) unidentified, stencilled map. Bowling, who was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), is reflecting on the notion of identity within the African diaspora. It seems to be a raw, exposing and painful occupation, peeling away the layers, eliciting tears as with an onion (the outer skin of which would, as a side note, also be a shade of this tawny painting as well). Close up, there is what looks like a giant thumbprint – presumably captured during the printing – adding yet one more layer of complex biographical DNA.

Next to this unconventional “portrait”, we encounter the other tone-setting work: one of Bacon’s popes. This is not a screaming pope (based on the portrait by Diego Velásquez of Pope Innocent X, c1650), but rather an “imaginary portrait” (Bacon’s term not mine, since – certainly by his standards – this appears rather life-like and recognisable) of Pope Pius XII (from 1956), a pope who was criticised for his silence during the second world war and the Holocaust. He sits facing forward, obscured eyes staring in their self-contained void, his hands raised, possibly protectively, possibly preparing for prayer, or possibly a little Lady Macbeth-like. It is well known that Bacon worked only from photographs, since he claimed he needed that level of distance to be able to carry out his painterly violence towards his sitters. His screaming popes conflated Velásquez’s painting with a still of the famous nanny scene from the film Battleship Potemkin. Yet this work shows none of that. Could it be that the violence is hidden behind a veil, as it was with the pope himself, hiding behind the protective veil of Catholicism? Either way, Bacon is a significant bookend to this exhibition, which was conceived with the intent to focus on pop-art portraiture, since, at the end of 1962, in a history of the movement published in the Listener magazine, the critic Lawrence Alloway claimed – unconventionally – that pop art began “in London about 1949 with work by Francis Bacon”.¹

Opposite, there is another Bacon – Study of a Nude (1952) – taken from one of his favourite sources, images from which were found littering his studio floor: Eadweard Muybridge’s time-lapse photographs of the human body in motion. The figure, seen from behind, reaches up, as if about to dive into a deep, blue pool below – all, of course, contained within one of the artist’s geometric and constricting “glass” boxes. Alongside, is Larry Rivers’ portrait of David Sylvester (Mr Art) (1962), which is fitting, since Sylvester was the most prominent art critic to champion Bacon’s work, becoming a valued friend of the artist – so much so that he was the original subject for what became the first painting in the “popes” series. Rivers depicts him fully frontal, manspreading so that a triangular slice of the seat of his chair is visible – is this a comment on his critical tone? It could be said that this is one of the more traditional portraiture poses included in the exhibition, with other works focusing more on the relationship between photography and celebrity.

A small black-and-white self-portrait of Walter Sickert, maintaining the pathos and poignancy of the monochrome of early photographs, isolating and freezing the figure, caught in a moment in time, has somehow snuck in, despite its early date of 1935. It fits the concept of celebrity, however, since it shows the artist in a dark alleyway, linking to the conspiracy theory that Sickert, who was openly fascinated by the popular press and sensational stories including those about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders, was, in fact, one and the same serial killer.

Rounding the corner, we encounter Pauline Boty’s With Love to Jean-Paul-Belmondo (1962), depicting, in black and white, the female alternative to Marilyn Monroe or Bridget Bardot (who feature in several of the works to come, including screen prints by Gerald Laing and Richard Hamilton). As is typical for the artist, she places her portrait against a brightly coloured abstract design, which, you have guessed it, here happens to be an amalgam of burning oranges and reds. The theme of cinema carries on in Colin Self’s works, which include Fallout Shelter Series (Ursula Andress) (1965), showing the moment from Dr No, when the actor emerges from the sea in a white bikini. Cinema Series (Batman) (1965) depicts what it says on the tin, while Cinema No 14 (1965) is from a series of drawings of the interior of Self’s local cinema in Muswell Hill, north London.

Although David Hockney has no work in the show – the desired piece was apparently too large to get up the stairs – he appears in a painting by Peter Blake (David Hockney in a Hollywood Spanish Interior, 1965), in which he is easily recognisable by his metonymic and iconic (in the truest sense of the word) glasses. The composition comprises two main sources: a portrait photo of Hockney and a shot of a young man in tight shorts, selected by Hockney. The phallic balloons and the sprinkling confetti bring Hockney’s then-still-illegal sexuality bravely to the fore. Again, sexuality is underlined by the target mark around Bardot’s face in Laing’s print (here I’m still thinking about sprinkling – or shooting, as the case may be) and the proliferation of Marilyns in Hamilton’s print, made from 11 stencils. Like a contact sheet, it showcases the actor’s well-known attempts to control her promoted image by scrawling over photos of herself that she did not like. This work, synchronous with Warhol’s multiplied Marilyns, was made using a set of photographs that Hamilton saw in a magazine a few months after Monroe’s death. Everything about it screams similarities with contemporary social media and the growing list of influencers who have killed themselves. The chosen Warhol, surprisingly, is not one of his Marilyns, but rather a self-portrait from 1967, printed in a bright blue and … yes, a brick red.

Jann Haworth and Mae West Dressing Table (1965), 2004. Courtesy of Pallant House Gallery. Photo: Michael Coo on per.

Next up, Jann Haworth’s rather amazing works – Mae West Dressing Table (1965) and Mae West, Shirley Temple and WC Fields (1967) – certainly grab attention with their dressing room lights, shiny fabrics and exploration of materials and mediums. They raise the question of what is more real: does something three-dimensional exceed the reality of a two-dimensional representation? Can photography also provide inspiration for sculptural works?

Two pieces by Joe Tilson present “icons” of a different ilk, drawn from news images so widely broadcast as to have been burned on to people’s retinas: the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. The composition of the latter mimics a 35mm slide, with Tilson’s name, and “Made in England”, proudly on the frame.

Richard Hamilton. Swingeing London 67, 1968-9. Tate. © The estate of Richard Hamilton.

Arguably the best-known “celebrity” painting (also involving an underlayer of screen printing) is Hamilton’s Swingeing London 67 (f) (1968-69), one of a series made using a newspaper photograph of the art dealer Robert Fraser and the music star Mick Jagger, hiding their faces in the back of a police van, arriving at court to be tried for – and convicted of, although only Fraser was sent to jail – possessing drugs. The question is raised as to whether someone can be so iconic that they can almost get away with murder (bringing us back round to Sickert). This painting is certainly burned on to my retina, exemplifying the possibility for secondary images to become as impactful as their primary sources.

The exhibition concludes in style with Gerhard Richter’s portrait of Gilbert and George (from 1975), a pair of artists who describe themselves as “a living portrait”, making themselves into a work of art. On the accompanying text panel, Richter is quoted as saying that he “needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct [his] own way of seeing”. We thus appear to have come full circle from Bacon, who, as has been noted, required photographs to inflict his own violent view.

The exhibition presents a concise remit and, in just 22 works, more than does it justice. It is coupled with an equally small exhibition of works by the contemporary British-Ghanaian artist Joshua Donkor (b1997, Bath, UK),² showing in the gallery next door and comprising painted family portraits, with prints and photographs embedded (much like the Bowling in method, if 180 degrees different in manner). Between the two, the Holburne Museum more than deserves a visit this spring.

References
1. “Pop Art” since 1949 by Lawrence Alloway in the Listener, 27 December 1962.
2. Joshua Donkor: I Have More Souls Than One is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, until 5 May 2025.