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The show focuses on portraits of Bacon's friends and lovers, as well as other painters like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In their dual portrait, according to the Telegraph, "the poor artists come out looking like the masked women in the Demoiselles d'Avignon."

For these heads, Bacon did not sketch on the canvas before beginning to paint, using his brush instead of a pencil.

"The brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in," the artist has said.

According to Dorment, the show demonstrates Bacon's incredible range, from tender and protective in a portrait of his lover, Peter Lacy, to a painting of George Dyer, another lover, in which Dyer's "face comes out bruised and swollen, like a prizefighter after a match, as though, for Bacon, the act of painting were a substitute for what he would otherwise do with his fists."

The "narrow focus" of the exhibition, writes Dorment, "allows us to concentrate on the way Bacon actually lays paint on the canvas."

"Instead of covering his faces with an epidermis of flesh, he excavates parts of them, using concave sweeps of brilliant colour."

His recommendation? "See it if you possibly can."

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Telegraph: "A fresh side of Bacon"
Images courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998; Private collection; Tate Purchased 1966. Copyright The Estate of Francis Bacon / DACS, London, 2005.