Glass Reflections within Francis Bacon’s work

Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours by Francis Bacon 1961

As you may have noticed when looking at works of art, most contemporary artists do not put their oil and acrylic paintings under glass. This practice is reserved mainly for works on paper as they tend to be fragile and can be damaged easily. Sometimes, museums may resort to protecting paintings that are prone to vandalism by installing a protective glass enclosure around the painting; otherwise, painters choose to leave their works free of glass so the texture and details of the brushwork can be visible and the works are free of the direct, harsh reflections which glass produces.

You may also have noticed that the paintings of Francis Bacon are always under glass. Let’s go directly to the artist for an explanation. The art critic and curator David Sylvester, who wrote extensively about Bacon, once asked the artist whether the reflections were something he positively wanted. Bacon replied: "I don’t want them to be there; I feel that they should be put up with. I feel that because I use no varnishes or anything of that kind, and because of the very flat way I paint, the glass helps to unify the picture. I also like the distance between what has been done and the onlooker that the glass creates; I like, as it were, the removal of that object as far as possible."

Since Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas, glass protects the fragile, unvarnished surfaces of his works and serves as a unifying element in bringing together the different textures of paint, pastel and raw canvas which he was prone to use. Glass also forces the viewer to step back to better view his work.

In the interview, David Sylvester persevered: "So it’s not that you feel that the reflections add something by adding to the scrambling of the forms?" Bacon rebutted: "Well, oddly enough, I even like Rembrandts under glass. And it’s true to say in many ways they’re more difficult to see, but you can still look into them." "I [David Sylvester] went on trying to get him to admit that he positively liked the reflections, perhaps because they forced the spectator to look harder. He [Bacon] dismissed that. ‘It’s the distance - that this thing is shut away from the spectator."

In the image above of me looking at the painting on view at Kunstmuseum of Den Haag, you see that my reflection has become part of the work and additionally elements of the room itself show up in the work. The entrance to the exhibition room could be mistaken for a door and since doors often appear in Bacon’s work, this seems to be adding and not subtracting to the work. 

Figure in a Landscape by Francis Bacon 1945

David Sylvester continues:"And the reflections can be a great enrichment. The large black void in Figure in a Landscape, 1945, mirrors bits of the jacket or the hand of someone standing in front of it so that those bits mix in with the bits of the jacket and the hand within the painting; and it mirrors a face or several faces where a face is lacking in the painting. In short, the reflections scramble painted fragments of reality that have been frozen with reflected fragments of reality that are still in motion. The suggestions of movement within the picture are complicated and enhanced by the real movement of the reflections."

When I was looking at the Francis Bacon’s painting at the Kunstmuseum of Den Haag, I moved all around the room to find a viewpoint free of reflections but I couldn’t. David Sylvester noticed the same thing: "At the same time, we do feel tempted to find a vantage point from which reflections are minimal or absent, and we do tend to settle in such a position. This is rarely a position face to face with the picture - least of all with the works that have a black area in the center - and all of this tends to pose the question as to whether the reflections weren’t a strategy of Bacon’s to encourage his paintings to be viewed obliquely rather than head on."

As a matter of fact, I wonder how difficult it must be to professionally photograph his work, not only because it is often monumental in size but also to make it reflection-free. But then again, nothing about the work of Francis Bacon is easy. You do have to put in time to decipher his message. And that makes me wonder if that was indeed part of Bacon’s strategy.