FRANCIS BACON

In 1650, Diego Velazquez was commissioned to paint a portrait of Pope Innocent X. The resulting images is one of the most famous works in art history, but was received with controversy in its day for the accuracy of, and lack of flattering to, its subjects. Almost exactly three hundred years later, Francis Bacon - the great British post-war painter - took Velazquez’s vision and distorted, corrupted, and expanded it in a series of paintings known as the ‘Papal Portraits’. Much as the original work made Velazquez his name, Bacon is still remembered perhaps most strongly for these works. The artist never worked from life, instead drawing from photographs, found images, and visions in his mind, often with all three in combination. The resultant works are journeys into darkness, nightmarish visions where Innocent X becomes a prisoner in a glass box, tormented by brushstrokes and carcasses, his mouth open as he screams in silence. It is unclear if Bacon’s Pope is the butcher of the beef behind him, or an equal with it just waiting to be killed but the painting grapples with a complex relationship to religion, and an upturning of the art historical order.

PHILIP GUSTON

This remarkable double portrait of Guston and his wife Musa, who died the year this work was completed, shows the artist at his most vulnerable, personal, and revealing. Curled in the foetus position, his limbs emerging from crumpled covers, he holds with equal strength the two things that have kept him together in his turbulent life, love and art. The couples faces are pushed together in a kiss as they lie on the pillow, their forms merging together into a single, abstract block of flesh like a naive Klimpt. As the child of Jewish refugees in Canada, who witnessed the suicide of his father and death of his brother before he was 18, Guston began as an abstract expressionist until he moved into large scale, almost cartoonist works that addressed the contemporary injustices of the world and worked through his past trauma. Painted towards the end of his own life as well as his wife’s, the work is both ode and penance - after decades of strife and trouble, of personal trauma, financial hardship, ill health and plunges into darkness through his art and his mind, it is touching if not surprising that at the end of his career, Guston moves to the most simple and relatable imagery of his career. Gone are illusions to the Holocaust and the Klu Klax Klan, to violence and disharmony that featured in so much of his most celebrated work and instead, the artist becomes a child again, clinging on for dear life to to his dual salvation.

EDVARD MUNCH

Surreal manifestations of modern anxieties, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch used individual vignettes to speak to universal themes of loneliness, despair, and pain. Yet while his work has consistency in its emotional potency, his variation of style is enormous. This delicate, romantic image of girl, standing at the billowing curtains of a window in her flowing night dress as the light illuminates squares of darkness was painted in the same year as his more famous ‘The Scream’. While the latter work has become one of the most famous pieces of modern art, acclaimed for bold brushstrokes and radical composition that was inspired by his visits to mainland Europe and interactions with the impressionists and symbolistS, ‘The Girl by the Window’ speaks more to his native Scandinavia. Both in its romantic subject and its aesthetic style, it is a work firmly in the tradition of Northern Europe and yet for all of its simple, innocent beauty, there is the Munchian sense of disquiet across the canvas. We become voyeurs, peering in on our unknowing subject in the small of the night, watching a private moment of worry or despair as she contemplates, unaware of our presence.