Francis Bacon was very particular about the way his works were displayed. He chose theatrical gold frames and decreed that the paintings themselves – the brushwork that “slips, slurps, smears, flares, blurs, fades, evaporates, abruptly dematerialises”, as the art critic Tom Lubbock put it – should be seen behind glass.
The glass was there to protect the canvases (usually in a sorry state once Bacon had had his way with them) as well as to bring some unity to the chaotic whole. But the reflective surfaces have another effect: anyone who steps closer, hoping to decipher those slurps and smears, soon comes face to face with their own mirror image. This was the experience of the author, Max Porter, a teenage Bacon superfan, when he went with his mum to see a Bacon exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1998, and stood before Triptych (May-June 1973), which depicts Bacon’s then lover, George Dyer, overdosing on the toilet. “I hated the glass,” Porter wrote in an essay on the painting. “How ludicrous, for a sheet of reflective glass to get in the way of me and this challenge. I can see myself, and all I want to see is paint. All I want to see is George.”
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