Double diamond | 13 June 2019

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is ‘to find a diamond or a pearl.’ He was quite correct. Truly marvellous pictures are extremely rare. To make one, Vincent went on, you have to ‘stake your life’ (as he, indeed, was doing).

Well, there is just such a jewel of a painting — only one by my count — in Francis Bacon: Couplings, an exhibition at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill. In some cases, the title of the show is literal. Several pictures depict two naked men in a ferocious sexual tangle. As a subject, this is perhaps still slightly daring today; it would have been astonishingly outré in 1953 when Bacon produced this dark masterpiece, ‘Two Figures’.

Its imagery was borrowed from a photograph of wrestlers in action by Eadweard Muybridge. But there is no suggestion in the painting that these naked men are taking part in a sporting contest. Bacon transferred the action to a bed. The lower figure’s mouth is pulled back in a spasm, whether of agony or ecstasy, it is hard to say.

Unsurprisingly, it was unsold when Bacon’s exhibition came to the end of its run, so the young Lucian Freud was able to buy it for £80. In comparison with Bacon’s current auction record — $142.4 million — that certainly seems like a bargain (though Freud liked to point out that 80 guineas was quite a sum in 1953).

There are several good Bacons elsewhere in the exhibition — ‘Two Figures in the Grass’ (1954), and ‘Painting’ (1950) — in particular. But none of them has the punch of the wonderful but fearsome ‘Two Figures’. Quite rightly the Gagosian gives it a room to itself.