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''Head VI'' is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Irish-born English figurative artist Francis Bacon, the last of six panels making up his "1949 Head" series. It shows a bust view of a single figure, modelled on Diego Velázquez's ''Portrait of Innocent X''. Bacon applies forceful, expressive brush strokes, and places the figure within a glass cage structure, behind curtain-like drapery.〔Zweite, 244〕 This gives the effect of a man trapped and suffocated by his surroundings, screaming into an airless void. ''Head VI'' was the first of Bacon's paintings to reference Velázquez, whose portrait of Pope Innocent X haunted him throughout his career and inspired his series of "screaming popes",〔Although not all of Bacon's popes scream. Nor are they all after Velázquez, nor are they all enclosed or trapped. See Sylvester, 40〕 a loose series of which there are around 45 surviving individual works.〔Peppiatt, 28〕 ''Head VI'' contains many motifs that were to reappear in Bacon's work. The hanging object, which may be a light switch or curtain tassel, can be found even in his late paintings. The geometric cage is a motif that appears as late as his 1985–86 masterpiece, ''Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych''. ''Head VI'' was first exhibited in November 1949 at the Hanover Gallery in London, in a showing organised by one of the artist's early champions, Erica Brausen.〔Zweite, 74〕 At the time, Bacon was a highly controversial but respected artist, best known for his 1944 ''Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion'', which made him the ''enfant terrible'' of British art.〔Russell, 10〕 ''Head VI'' drew a mixed reaction from art critics; John Russell, later Bacon's biographer, at the time dismissed it as a cross between "an alligator shorn of its jaws and an accountant in pince-nez who has come to a bad end".〔Russell, 38〕 In 1989 Lawrence Gowing wrote that the "shock of the picture, when it was seen with a whole series of heads ... was indescribable. It was everything unpardonable. The paradoxical appearance at once of pastiche and iconoclasm was indeed one of Bacon's most original strokes."〔Richard, Paul. "(Sordidness, Ambition in Francis Bacon's Fiercest Portrayals: Display of England's master painter's works engenders the tension of transcendence and despair )". ''LA Times'', 9 November 1989. Retrieved 19 June 2013〕 Art critic and curator David Sylvester described it as a seminal piece from Bacon's unusually productive 1949–50 period, and one of Bacon's finest popes.〔Sylvester, 40〕 ==''1949 Head'' series== Bacon's output is characterised by sequences of images. He told Sylvester that his imagination was stimulated by sequences and that "images breed other images in me".〔Peppiatt, 87〕 His series were not always planned or painted in sequence; sometimes paintings are grouped for convenience but vary in execution and tone.〔Peppiatt, 122〕 The idea for the head series came after he returned penniless, late in 1948, from a stay in Tangier. In the previous three years he had been unable to find a voice; the last surviving canvas from this period is his ''Painting (1946)''. Although he continued to paint, he was a ruthless self critic, given to slashing canvases with blades, and no works survive from between 1947 and the winter of 1948.〔Those tasked with destroying canvases were not always loyal; in the late 1990s a number of major 1950s papal portraits and various sketches on paper resurfaced on the art market. See Hunter et al. for a catalogue of the paintings, IMMA for works on paper〕 Gallerist Erica Brausen offered Bacon the opportunity of a solo show for the opening of her new Hanover Gallery.〔Yard, in Farr; Peppiatt; Yard, 13〕 He agreed, but had nothing in reserve to hang.〔 In following years, Brausen became perhaps the most important of Bacon's early champions; she arranged this showing—his debut solo exhibition—publicised him widely and organised viewings for international buyers.〔 Already 40 years old, Bacon viewed the exhibition as his last chance and applied himself to the task with determination. Because he had destroyed all his out of the last three years, he had little choice but to present new works.〔Peppiatt, 130〕 He did not have a grand plan when he agreed to the show, but eventually found themes that interested him in his ''Head I'' of the previous year, and executed five progressively stronger variants in the final weeks before the November exhibition,〔Peppiatt, 127〕〔Peppiatt, 122〕 completing the series barely in time for the opening.〔 The paintings depict isolated figures enclosed in spaces that are undefined, overwhelmingly claustrophobic, reductive and eerie. Coming early in Bacon's career, they are uneven in quality, but show a clear progression especially in how they utilise and present ideas he was still clearly developing and coming to terms with. ''Head I'' (actually begun in the winter of 1948) and ''Head II'' show formless pieces of flesh that broadly resemble human heads; they have half-open eyes and a pharynx, though it is positioned much higher than would be expected in a human. Heads III, IV and V show fully formed busts recognisable as men, and are characterised by a haunted atmosphere.〔Zweite, 83〕 These two broad ideas coalesce in ''Head VI'', which is as physiologically tortured as the first two paintings, and as spectral as the middle three. In ''Head VI'' the figure has developed and is now shown wearing vestments, the first indication in Bacon's work of the influence of Velázquez,〔Dawson, 52〕 while the focus has become the open mouth and the study of the human scream.〔Peppiatt, 129〕 Bacon said that chance played a significant role in his work, and that he often approached a canvas without having a clear idea of what might emerge. This was especially the case in the mid to late 1940s, a period when he was drinking heavily and spending most nights in Soho casinos and poker rooms.〔Peppiatt, 112〕 The following morning he would often approach his canvas "in a bad mood of drinking ... under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing."〔Sylvester, 13〕 He incorporated his appetite for chance into his work: an image often would morph mid-way through into something quite different from what he had first intended. He actively sought out this freedom and felt it crucial to his progression as an artist. To him, lifestyle and art were intertwined; he said that "perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer."〔 This is very evident in the 1949 series, which began as a rather morbid study of a collapsed head, but evolved over the six surviving panels into a reworking of Velázquez masterpieces, and arrived at an image that was to preoccupy Bacon for the subsequent 20 years.〔 The series marks Bacon's first attempt at depicting lone figures in rooms. For him, the key aspect was that it appeared that the subject felt isolated, unobserved, and had abandoned the need to present an outward face. He believed that under these circumstances all pretence falls away, and the social being becomes the sum of its neuroses, which Bacon attempted to convey by reducing the subject to its bare-bones features: a mouth, ears, eyes, a jaw. According to Russell, "the view out front ceases to be the only one, and our person is suddenly adrift, fragmented, and subject to strange mutation."〔Russell, 38〕 Russell observed that while the depiction of figures in rooms is common through all eras of painting, the figures are always posed, and usually seemingly aware that they are being portrayed. This conceit is abandoned in Bacon's series.〔 ''Head I'', completed late in 1948,〔 is considered more successful than ''Head II''. Although it is well-regarded critically, ''Head II'' is seen as something of a creative ''cul-de-sac'', while ''Heads'' III, IV and V are usually considered as merely intermediate steps towards ''Head VI''.〔 It is exceptional in Bacon's oeuvre that works of their relative poor quality survive; he was ruthlessly self-critical and often slashed or abandoned canvasses before they were completed. When pressed again by Brausen in 1953 to produce works for a New York show that she had been publicising for a year, he was full of doubt and destroyed most of what he had been working on, including several other popes.〔Sylvester, 53〕 Brausen commissioned another showing to be held in 1950, for which Bacon painted three large popes modelled on Velázquez's portrait. The gallery advertised the show as "Francis Bacon: Three Studies from the Painting of Innocent X by Velázquez", but in the end Bacon was dissatisfied with the works and destroyed them before the show opened.〔Peppiatt, 141〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Head VI」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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