7 
N°IV 2024   MuseoMag 
MODERN ART 
1962. It is said that Lacy once 
threw Bacon through a window 
in a fit of passion, and the pair 
were known to engage in brutal 
yet consensual S&M practices. 
Bacon once said: “I couldn’t live 
with him, and I couldn’t live wit- 
hout him.” Lacy heavily featured 
in the artist’s work, often serving 
as the model for male figures 
and at times explicitly named in 
the titles. 
Study for Portrait of P.L. No. 2 
from 1957, for instance, depicts 
a naked Lacy confidently loun- 
ging on a dark, hard-edged sofa, 
the background more sugges- 
ted than sketched in any detail. 
His gaze is watchful, almost 
menacing, and his erect penis 
visible, though partially obs- 
cured by the dark undertones of 
the lower half of the canvas. The 
painting is an exploration of the 
physicality of the male body, 
one that Bacon would paint over 
and over again. “Being in love in 
that way, being absolutely phy- 
sically obsessed by someone, is 
like an illness,” the artist noted 
in a conversation with his bio- 
grapher Michael Peppiatt, un- 
derlining the compulsive, almost 
toxic, nature of their relationship. 
Lacy’s death in Tangier had 
a profound impact on Bacon, 
who produced a number of 
works in memory of his lover, 
including Landscape near 
Malabata, Tangier (1963), a 
charged, whirling depiction of anger and pain set 
in the city Lacy had made his home, and Study for 
Three Heads (1962), which bears a striking resem- 
blance to the portrait of Dyer painted a year later. 
The latter marked the end of one era and the begin- 
ning of the next. 
GEORGE DYER: 
THE EAST END CRIMINAL 
Bacon’s affair with Dyer was equally tempestuous; 
Dyer was said to be mercurial, aggressive and prone 
to depression and addiction, increasingly so over 
their decade-long relationship. Their intense rela- 
tionship fuelled Bacon’s creative practice, yet it was 
perhaps his overdose-induced suicide in the pair’s 
hotel room in Paris just days before Bacon’s retros- 
pective at the Grand Palais that marked his work the 
most. Haunted by the spectre of his lover, Bacon’s 
so-called Black Triptychs stage different phases of 
Dyer’s death in non-chronological order, with por- 
trayals of him in the hotel room and hunched over 
the toilet, punctuated by ominous shadows and a 
© 
The 
Estate 
of 
Francis 
Bacon. 
All 
rights 
reserved, 
DACS 
2024 
/ 
Photo: 
Éric 
Chenal 
/ 
MNAHA 
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer (detail), 1963, 
oil on canvas, in three parts, 35.5 x 30.5 cm (each). Detail of the portrait on the right.