Head of Francis Bacon

Drawing, particularly of the human figure, was central to Kitaj's education as an artist during the 1950s and was to be foregrounded in his work from the mid-1970s, when he returned seriously to working from life in charcoal and in pastel. After completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in 1961 he had ceased to draw on paper, transferring that impulse to represent people into canvases in which human physiognomy was deftly delineated with fine, dry brushes. The freely brushed technique that had characterised some of his student paintings had given way, by the mid-1960s, to a much more precise and measured procedure, in such works as Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea 1964 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid). It was in a group of small portraits painted on canvas or canvas-board between 1964 and 1969, however, of which this head of Francis Bacon is a prime example, that Kitaj first clearly articulated his ideas about 'drawing-painting', pictures composed with paint and brushes but dependent largely on a use of line and tone proper to drawing. Paintings in this select group included portraits of historical figures such as Unity Mitford, La Pasionaria and Primo Rivera, as well as of people he counted as friends and acquaintances such as David Hockney and his then partner, Peter Schlesinger, and poets such as Michael Hamburger and Ezra Pound. Some of these images were painted from photographs rather than from life. A number of these paintings were destined to feature as elements of limited-edition screenprints. Ten of these portraits, depicting among others W. H. Auden, Robert Creeley (Tate, London), Hugh McDiarmid, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Kenneth Rexroth, found their way into the portfolio of screenprints Portraits - Poets, published between 1966 and 1969. The heads of Hockney and his lover were combined into the screenprint Plays for Total Stakes 1969.

Kitaj had joined Marlborough Fine Art, which continues to represent his work, shortly after his graduation, and he held his first solo show there in 1963. It was through the gallery that he got to know Francis Bacon, whose work he greatly admired but whose formidable presence and sharp tongue even Kitaj had reason to find daunting. He referred to him privately as 'The Wicked Witch of Reece Mews', but at a lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum at the time of his retrospective there in 1981 he acknowledged him as 'a very inspiring figure for a few of us in London'. It was with a view to publishing a pair of collage-based screenprints, Bacon I 1968 and Bacon II 1969, that in 1968 Kitaj painted two portrait heads, respectively the painting in question here and Study (Francis Bacon) (sold at Christie's, King Street, 17 February 2011, lot 248); for these, as he later explained to Julián Ríos, he worked from photographs given to him by Bacon as well as snapshots that he took himself. Like all the small portraits of that three-year period, the heads are painted more or less life-size in a monochromatic palette that emphasizes tonal gradations and firm outlines. Though he was transfixed by what he termed the 'sublime paint-trickery' of Bacon's painterly technique, Kitaj made his portraits of the master in a much more graphic technique that was unmistakably his own, the dry paint dragged across the surface so that the coarse weave of the support shows through. In 1968-9 he painted a large diptych, Synchromy with F. B. - General of Hot Desire (Tate, London), as the most ambitious of his homages to his fellow artist.

We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.