24 January – 5 May 2025
The Holburne Museum presents Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol, an exhibition exploring the use of photographic sources in painted portraits. Featuring major names of 20th century art including Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, the exhibition brings rarely seen works from private collections together with loans from major institutions to explore the ways artists can use photography as a source and as subject matter.
Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol presents works that are reflections on identity, fame and the tension between photography’s frozen images and the passage of time. The exhibition focuses on the period in the mid 20th century, particularly the 1960s, when many artists began to use photographs as sources for paintings. Often, the photographs were not simply appropriated as tools in picture making but were themselves the subject matter, resulting in paintings that are about imagery and the mediation of such images. The use of found photographs in particular – imagery happened upon in newspapers and magazines – imbued the resulting paintings with a sense of fragile transience, as in Francis Bacon’s work Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII) (1956), which used single images from Eduard Muybridge’s famous photographic sequences of the body in motion to accurately render the human form while also conveying vulnerability and isolation. A similar poignancy can be seen in another, earlier work included in the exhibition, Walter Sickert’s Walter Sickert (1935), while the passage of time is especially marked in works using film stills as their source.
The paintings in Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol also demonstrate a response to broader cultural preoccupations that had emerged in the post-war period, such as the potency of the media and the construction of celebrity. Many artists used photos of celebrities as the basis of their works and the exhibition includes examples such as Pauline Boty’s With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962), Joe Tilson’s Gagarin, Star, Triangle (1968) and Gerald Laing’s image of French actress Corinne Marchand, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962).
Several works on display illustrate a degree of nostalgia felt by artists, even for the very recent past, with Jann Haworth depicting stars of earlier Hollywood like Mae West and Shirley Temple in works such as Mae West Dressing Table (1965), while Peter Blake, with The Beatles 1962 (1968), looked back to The Beatles at the beginning of their career just six years earlier.
Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, said: “Referencing artists’ use of photographic sources, the critic Lawrence Alloway said Pop Art (a name he invented) started in London in 1949. We are thrilled to explore the development of portraiture from that moment and cannot wait to see the dialogue between them and the Holburne’s collection of paintings by Gainsborough, Zoffany and others that depict the social elite and celebrities of their time.”
Portrait of David Hockney in a Hollywood Spanish Interior, 1965, Peter Blake. © Peter Blake. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo Tate