Francis Bacon's portrait of his first partner Peter Lacy is somehow simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The monumental portrait dating from 1962 was unknown to the...

Francis Bacon's portrait of his first partner Peter Lacy is somehow simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The monumental portrait dating from 1962 was unknown to the public for a long time. Shortly after it was painted, Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni acquired the work and it remained in private hands for decades. This is a key work, created at a turning point in Bacon's oeuvre. Markus Rath embeds the painting into Bacon's visual world for the first time. The English painter reveals a biographically oriented representationalism in the portrait, concentrating his compositional arrangement on the stage-like interior and forcing a contrast between the two-dimensional ground and the colour-saturated figure - these are pioneering approaches to composition that shaped his late work decisively.