Glass Reflections within Francis Bacon’s Work

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 typically reserved for works on paper, which are inherently fragile and easily damaged. While museums sometimes install a protective glass enclosure around paintings prone to vandalism, painters generally choose to leave their works uncovered so the texture and details of the brushwork remain visible and free from the harsh reflections that glass produces.

However, you may also have noticed that the paintings of Francis Bacon are always displayed under glass. To understand why, we can look directly to the artist. The art critic and curator David Sylvester, who wrote extensively about Bacon, once asked the artist whether these 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."  

Because Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas, glass protects the fragile, unvarnished surfaces of his pieces. It also serves as a unifying element, bringing together the disparate textures of the paint, pastel, and raw canvas he frequently used. Furthermore, the glass forces viewers to step back to better appreciate the composition.

In his interview, 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."

Sylvester pressed further, noting how the glass can actually become 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."

Bacon dismissed this interpretation, reiterating, "It’s the distance—that this thing is shut away from the spectator."

When looking at Bacon’s painting Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours by Francis Bacon 1961at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, I found myself moving all around the room, mimicking a behavior David Sylvester noted in all of the artist's viewers:

"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."

Experiencing this firsthand makes me wonder how incredibly difficult it must be to professionally photograph his work, not only due to its often monumental scale but also the technical challenge of eliminating those reflections.

But then again, nothing about the work of Francis Bacon is easy. You have to invest time to truly decipher his message, which leaves me wondering: was forcing us to struggle to even see the canvas without reflections all part of Bacon’s strategy?