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.
