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 . 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 . 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 " . 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 . " 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 .