Bacon and Freud’s Self-Portraits or the Remains of the Self

Abstract

This paper reads self portraits of Bacon, Freud and Auerbach not as a representation, but as the visual form of a collapse. Ruins, like self portraits, give shape to the void, the emptiness, the damage. They are the remains which allow a reflection of/over time—a shattering, devastating time which is disfiguring the bodily architecture. ‘Bacon is a painter of the heads, not the faces . . . for the face is a structured, spatial organisation that conceals the head. . . . Bacon pursues a very particular project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face’, Deleuze writes about Bacon. What remains is a deformed and a deforming movement which leads to an aesthetics of the ruins: the fragmentation, the blurring and deforming of one’s face or body until only the flesh remains (or the meat, in Bacon’s case). The architectural structure of the body and the lines of the face are shattered. The environment (or decor), when there is any, seems to be there only to give a sense of the collapse. But this cannot be read as ‘an attempt to create an ephemeral art’ for this genre is rooted in the history of art as well as the history of the self. By ‘representing’ themselves whether with great violence or with an idea of decadence—if not decay—, the painters fix their image in an ambiguous position: etiam periere ruinae (even the ruins perish). The portraits are the marks of their physical existence/resistance and the material sign of their nothingness.

Keywords

• F. Auerbach
• F. Bacon
• L. Freud
• body
• disfiguration
• face-to-face