A lthough his work and personal reputation were still highly controversial, Francis Bacon received official consecration when his first retrospective exhibition opened in May 1962 at London’s Tate Gallery. For the artist, it was a major step in a career that would lead to every art world honour – and a kind of international stardom that very few artists ever achieve.
Among the telegrams congratulating him on the event, one amid the general jubilation stopped him in his tracks: Peter Lacy, a violent but vulnerable alcoholic with whom he was caught in a tumultuous love affair, had died in Tangier. Bacon saw Lacy’s death as a suicide by alcohol (three bottles of whisky per day) deliberately timed to coincide with his first real breakthrough. He mourned Lacy as the only man he had really loved and remained convinced that he might never experience another intimate relationship again.
Exuberant and gregarious by nature, Bacon nevertheless resumed his round of the bars and drinking clubs of Soho with a wide circle of friends, drifters and hangers-on. One evening, a handsome young man joined in the merry throng by offering to buy a round of drinks. Bacon was quick to appreciate both George Dyer’s directness and his athletic build. He was also intrigued by his background as an East Ender born into a life of petty crime. Like Oscar Wilde, who had gone there to ‘feast with panthers’ before him, Bacon was fascinated by the East End’s mystique as a lawless area where bourgeois values were scorned and tough, working-class young men might be seduced. Bacon’s lovers had previously come from a leisured, well-off background similar to his own. Dyer represented a new, almost Nietzschean ideal of virile youth unfettered by moral constraints. A few months after I met and began interviewing the artist in summer 1963, Dyer had become the focus of Bacon’s obsessive affections.
The early days of their affair were light-hearted and touching in a father-son kind of way, since in age the two men were separated by a quarter of a century. Their behaviour together also frequently bordered on the comic, with Bacon playing the sophisticated older man to the East Ender’s bafflement at the ‘ways up West’ as they moved from champagne at the Ritz to dinner in an elegant restaurant and gambling in a Mayfair casino. Their duo act became particularly entertaining at private views of Bacon’s work where Dyer (whom Bacon called ‘Sir George’) openly derided the paintings on view (‘I fink they’re ‘orrible,’ he would venture in a thick, nasal Cockney) while reeling off the prices they fetched in amazement.
For a while Dyer’s antics, which included wresting priceless vintages from haughty wine waiters to fill every glass to the brim, amused Bacon and his entourage. Once he could rely on his older friend to fund his new, lavish lifestyle, Dyer gave up up his ‘career’ as a burglar, not least because he had been frequently caught and imprisoned. But he felt increasingly purposeless and began drinking heavily day and night. The situation worsened once Bacon, disappointed to find a gentle soul where he had expected a ruthless, whip-wielding dominator, began distancing himself from their affair.
Increasingly desperate, Dyer set about trashing Bacon’s belongings and paintings, and at one point planted marijuana in the artist’s studio after tipping off the police to initiate a search. This manoeuvre resulted in a court case during which, although he was eventually acquitted, Bacon was subjected to unwelcome media attention and landed with hefty legal fees. The relationship unravelled further, but since so many portraits of Dyer were included in the major Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in autumn 1971, the artist felt obliged to invite his former lover to the opening. Although he had followed a strictly non-alcoholic regime until then, poor Dyer went back on the drink with a vengeance once he arrived in Paris and, shortly before the show opened, killed himself by ingesting massive doses of sleeping tablets and alcohol. As if pursued by the Furies that haunt his paintings, Bacon found himself once again torn in two by the highest critical acclaim and the most bitter guilt and grief.
A lthough he often spoke derisively about Bacon’s art, Dyer had found in the portraits of himself a new notoriety. If he could no longer claim any criminal prowess, he was known as a famous artist’s companion and muse. In the end he achieved considerably more, since he would be commemorated after his death in the greatest (so-called ‘black’) triptychs Bacon ever painted. What singles Dyer out more especially in Bacon’s work is that the large number of pictures of him can now be seen as one of the great pictorial stories, featuring Dyer, the clumsy crook and tender tough guy, the debonair athlete and hopeless alcoholic, in a variety of memorable roles and scenes.
‘Story telling’ had long been a dirty word in the artist’s vocabulary, evoking the once popular Victorian narrative painters whom English Modernists – and none more so than Bacon – reviled and rejected root and branch. Yet in George Dyer we can trace the history of a love affair in all its more fraught and dramatic moods – George in a rage, George calmed after coition, George bewildered by drugs and drink – as well as in more tender and even playful guises. Tender and playful: whoever would ever imagine those words being applied to the maestro of the macabre, the ‘satanically influential’ nihilist and prophet of existential doom? Yet we find George on a wobbly bicycle; George with a dog, inspired by the police’s drug-sniffer hound; George wearing a flat cap; George watching himself in a mirror; George staring, as if hypnotized, at a blind cord. These scenes of ordinary daily life, in themselves portending nothing, are transformed into lasting icons through the inventiveness of the artist’s visual imagination: fleeting appearances captured so alive that they go on breathing and transforming under our eyes.
What then of that most enigmatic, and perhaps most intimate, of Bacon’s portraits, George Dyer Crouching? Bacon frequently wanted to seal secrets into his pictures, like a miser hiding his gold. I remember, when we were discussing a large picture he had just finished after looking at some favourite Muybridge photographs, Bacon exclaimed ‘Well, that’s one the critics won’t get!’. The artist had good reason for such caution, since he believed that as soon as an image could be explained, it was bled of its mystery, and hence its power. In this highly charged portrait, I think he succeeded more than usual since the fleshy apparition hovering on a gangplank over a well-like structure serenely defies analysis, hinting that Bacon had gone further here than ever in his manipulations of the endlessly fluid, suggestive medium of oil paint. My own, tentative reading is that the image refers to Dyer’s stay in a sanatorium (possibly when he underwent apomorphine cures for addiction), or even in a sauna, given the inclusion of the otherwise inexplicable, knotted handkerchief that Englishmen used to wear on their heads during a hot spell. Similarly, one is hard put to identify the green and black protuberances sprouting from the head like horns, although they lend the head a Minotaur-like look and, as we know from Bacon himself, Picasso was never very far from his mind. One detail – the white linen opposite the figure – can be securely interpreted, however, given a note in Bacon’s diary, dated 4 January 1966, that reads: ‘George crouching looking at shirt.’
"In this highly charged portrait, I think he succeeded more than usual since the fleshy apparition hovering on a gangplank over a well-like structure serenely defies analysis, hinting that Bacon had gone further here than ever in his manipulations of the endlessly fluid, suggestive medium of oil paint. "
Dyer is presented in an almost simian pose, squatting on his haunches, with one long limb drooping down towards the structure’s plughole. For all the body’s Michelangelesque contours, the figure looks as much animal as man, a theme explored recently in the Royal Academy’s exhibition, ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’. The figure comes across as confined, almost caged, as if Dyer had been corralled into some sexual, possibly sadomasochistic, captivity. Contradictorily, the figure also looks about to leap into its strange, circular arena – which in turn resembles the tubs in which Degas, an artist Bacon revered, posed his female figures bathing and drying themselves.
Through the flurry of red, green, white, pink and black brush marks raining down, brutally, making and unmaking the head, the most alarming detail jumps out: a single, reptilian eye that stares out of the scumbled pigment fixedly at the viewer. The eye is Bacon himself, and that complex, glittering organ contains all the paradoxes and predictions that the artist explored through a lifetime of creating images that would resonate down the generations to come. It challenges all comers. Sixty years after this unquiet image was begotten, we approach it, much as the ancients approached their sybils and their soothsayers, clamouring for an answer to the riddles of existence.
