"A compact and chunky force of nature, with a vivid and highly unparsonical turn of phrase, he embodied a pent-up energy... a spirit of mischief, touched at t.mes s by melancholia... his wild humour, his sense of life as a gamble and the alarm system that had been bred into him from boyhood... George Dyer will live for ever in the iconography of the English face."
Charged with extraordinary intimacy and emerging from a seductive dark ground, Francis Bacon's Study of George Dyer is a masterpiece of intense physiognomic analysis that perfectly summates his incredible working process. Within the grand theatre of Bacon’s life and work, George Dyer inhabits a position of paramount importance. Appearing in over forty paintings, with as many created following his death as executed during his lifet.mes , Dyer wields a power unlike any other. His portrayal spans the full extent of human drama: at once vulnerable, brooding, romantic, surreal, heroic and tortured Bacon’s painterly incarnations of Dyer reveal a multifaceted, tempestuous and passionate love affair. Painted in early 1970, during a period of exceptional turmoil in their relationship, this mutating and vibrant portrait combines masterfully scumbled, scraped and diffused painterly bravura with arresting intensity and consummate psychological depth.
Not only is the present work outstanding in its execution, presenting a virtuosity of brushwork and exuberance of colour that rivals any other masterpiece the artist produced, but it is also extraordinarily rare, as the very last intimately scaled portrait of Dyer completed before his tragic death the following year. It serves as an apt counterpoint to the so-called 'Black Triptychs' of the early and mid-1970s that commemorate Dyer, which are widely considered to be among the greatest triumph of Bacon's whole output. An exceptional work therefore that possesses an equally exceptional exhibition history, Study of George Dyer was hand chosen by the artist for inclusion in the single most important exhibition in Bacon’s lifet.mes , the grand scale retrospective held at the Grand Palais in 1971 (an accolade only previously afforded to Pablo Picasso among living painters). Tragically, this apogee in Bacon’s career would be the catalyst for Dyer’s inevitable demise: on the eve of the opening, he was killed by an overdose of barbiturates. Thus the present work—the last portrait electrified by the fervour of Bacon’s passion for his living lover—remains an incredibly rare gemlike composition that exudes emotion, vitality and an ardour that has immortalised both Bacon’s deep infatuation with his muse as well as his inimitable style.
Francis Bacon’s “Black Triptychs” of George Dyer
The compositional catalyst for this work was a series of photographs of Dyer taken by John Deakin in Soho in about 1964. Bacon had commissioned Deakin to capture a multitude of images of his most frequent sitters, as he preferred to paint in absentia relying predominantly on the combination of photographic material and memory to inform his image creation. He viewed painting by nature as an artifice and felt that having the model before him suffocated spontaneous creative invention. In the way it both correlates with and departs from its source Bacon's painting is one of the most sophisticated uses of photography in the history of painting. As a surviving eulogy to the Bacon-Dyer relationship, this work's rarity is amplified by Bacon's practice of destroying any canvas that he deemed unsatisfactory. Indeed, despite one hundred and twenty-nine photographs of Dyer being found in Bacon's studio after the artist's death, a number vastly exceeding that for any other subject, this painting is one of only two known designated portrayals of Dyer in this single fourteen- by twelve-inch format. Of this jewel-like size, John Russell has said, “The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot somet.mes s leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 99). As a result, these extraordinarily rare small portraits of Dyer represent a life-force that with his passing, were never to return.
George Dyer was twenty-nine when he met Francis Bacon, by contrast almost fifty-four, in the autumn of 1963. Contrary to the myth that they met when Dyer broke into Bacon's mews house, popularised by accounts such as the 1998 film Love is the Devil starring Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as Dyer, according to Bacon they actually met in a Soho drinking den when Dyer introduced himself to the artist's party with the gambit "You all seem to be having a good t.mes . Can I buy you a drink?" (the artist quoted in: Jonathan Fryer, Soho in the Fifties and Sixties, London 1998, p. 9). Hailing from London's East End, Dyer had received little formal education, possessed a criminal record and had served several short prison terms for theft and petty crime. Bacon found Dyer, who was physically fit and possessed a stocky build, immensely attractive. The collision of the two personalities: Bacon's rarefied intellectualism versus Dyer's rough innocence, resulted in a highly charged, impassioned, and tumultuous relationship.
Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909. Musée national Picasso, Paris. © SUCCESSION PICASSO / DACS, LONDON 2024
Francis Bacon, Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967. Sold Replica Shoes ’s London, July 2008 for £13.7 million. © The Estate of Francis Bacon / DACS 2024 Francis Bacon
"When [George] was sober, he could be terribly engaging and gentle. He used to love being with children and animals. I think he was a nicer person than me. He was more compassionate."
Their relationship was marked by a polarity of extremes, and a full range of emotional and psychological heat seethes beneath the richly textured surface of the present work. Framed within a dramatic background of a dense lustrous black, this portrait masterfully illustrates Bacon’s twisted, torqued and scraped handling of paint. Sinuous sweeps and paroxysmal thrusts of pigment.mes rge, recede, and dissolve across the figure’s battered visage in a symphony of expression. Rendered in bruise-like hues of blue, mauve, yellow and blood red, punctuated by a heavy white projectile of impasto obscuring the figure’s mouth, Bacon’s contorted portrait takes on a physical and emotional sense of torment. With obscured eyes, curved nose, hollowed jawline, and torqued lips, Dyer’s visage bears the scars of the artist’s painterly catharsis. All this is set against a velvety matte black ground, soaked into the absorbent unprimed canvas, which alternately emphasizes the brilliantly hued subject and threatens to swallow it whole. Highlights of tone and hue constantly converge and dissemble to describe the dancing passages of light across the surface: of the myriad dramatic gestures it is the white brushwork that injects formal power into this painting. The ghostly swathes lend a sensation of movement and perspective, their fluid lines creating a remarkable multitude of angles and expressions. John Russell described: “Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image. The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, New York, 1971, p. 168).
Bacon’s radical handling of paint and perspective was profoundly inspired by his voracious devouring of canonical precedent. With ferocious alacrity, he consumed and digested the pictorial conventions of masterpieces and the terms of their execution. Whether cast from mythical allegory, classical Antiquity or contemporary culture, devices invented by such masters as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Pablo Picasso, to name but a few, provided supreme examples of psychological cross-examination and perspective. Bacon spoke most admirably of Picasso, especially his work of the 1920s and 1930s, in which he saw a syntax of "organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it" (the artist quoted in: Milan Kudera and France Borel, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 10).
Furthermore, renderings by such titans as Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Alberto Giacometti were influenced by subjective experiences of their deeply familiar sitters, often chosen from a small circle of family and friends, and repeatedly depicted. Indeed, David Sylvester has described how "Bacon had something of Picasso's genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight" (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 186), and Study of George Dyer superbly projects personal experience from Bacon's microcosmic realm onto the macrocosmic stage of global relevance. On the one hand it is devoted to the character and psychology of George Dyer, yet from another it is a metaphor for inner conflict. As a symposium of virtuoso expression and profound universality, Study for George Dyer is poised between chaotic immediacy and syncopated rhythm that finds few parallels within Bacon’s pantheon of small portrait studies.
“Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.”
Bacon’s increasingly mutated depictions of Dyer mirrored the intensifying turmoil of their private life. With little sense of purpose, except to live vicariously through his own painted effigy, Dyer became increasingly listless – an aimlessness that in turn exacerbated worsening alcoholism, erratic behaviour, and the onset of depression. In the autumn of 1971, less than two years after the present work’s execution, the pair travelled to Paris for the major retrospective exhibition that had been organised for Bacon's work at the Grand Palais. An avowed Francophile, it was Bacon’s reverence for the intellectuals and artists working in Paris, particularly Picasso and Giacometti, that made the accolade of a retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971 such a profound honour for Bacon, and one he considered his greatest achievement. However, on 24 October, barely thirty-six hours before the opening, Dyer was found hunched over the lavatory in the bathroom of their shared suite at the Hotel des Saint-Pères, dead from an overdose of sleeping pills exacerbated by alcohol abuse. Despite suffering from numbings shock and a despairing guilt that would linger for twenty more years, Bacon continued with the opening apparently unabated; the present work’s unique poignancy is heightened by its inclusion in that exhibition as the last intimate portrait of Dyer during his lifet.mes . In that brief but tragic sequence of events, the shadow of Dyer was cast over Bacon and remained there for the rest of his life. The creative fecundity of these seminal years, both the decade prior to and following 1971, is predominantly owing to the abiding and all-consuming impact of George Dyer. Painted obsessively, Dyer’s likeness utterly dominates Bacon’s production: as strongly present in this extremely rare portrait, Dyer fuelled the tortured and extraordinary talents of a Modern master at the apex of his imaginative and technical powers.
"t.mes does not heal. There isn't an hour of the day that I don't think about him."
As arguably Bacon's most intense study of Dyer from his partner's lifet.mes , the present work must be considered as a masterpiece of the highest order. Martin Hammer has asked “how can intimacy and the apparent brutality of Bacon's distortions be understood in tandem with one another” (Exh. Cat., Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (and travelling), Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, 2005-06, p. 16), a point that is readily amplified here in Bacon's brutal depiction of someone for whom he felt so much affection. This painting is the manifestation of pure emotional honesty, or what Bacon called the ‘brutality of fact.’ A supreme entombment of Bacon's achievement of “setting the standard for what art in the twentieth century could achieve: depicting the individual in the moment of disintegration” (Exh. Cat., Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung, Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, 2007, p. 35), this portrait is a masterwork of psychological intensity and personal significance as great as any in Bacon's momentous corpus.
