MuseoMag: MuseoMag 2024_04

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Title:: MuseoMag 2024_04

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Title:: Obsession and desire: Francis Bacon's lovers

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.

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