You’re not much of a burglar, are you? Take your clothes off. Come to bed, and you can have whatever you want.’
These are the first words uttered by British painter Francis Bacon to the young man who has just fallen through the skylight of his studio – while attempting a burglary – in John Maybury’s 1998 film, Love is the Devil. From this legendary midnight meeting in 1963, the biopic follows the unlikely relationship between the artist and an East London criminal, George Dyer, who became Bacon’s lover and greatest muse. His distorted face features in more than forty paintings by Bacon, including many of the artist’s most famous and haunting works.
Maybury’s cinematic version of events was based on Bacon’s own claim – that he had caught Dyer breaking into his apartment and studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington. However, the artist later admitted that this was a lie. What, then, is the true story between Bacon and the burglar, who appears as a tragic figure surrounded by shadows in the artist’s nightmarish canvases? If the painter had lied so easily about their first encounter, is this melancholy image of Dyer also fantasy? But let’s start at the beginning: how did the pair really meet?
It was in the autumn of 1963 when Dyer quite simply introduced himself to Bacon, in a pub in Soho. At a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, the area’s culturally liberated atmosphere did attract many gay men, as well as an eclectic mix of the city’s artists, musicians and even criminals. Bacon could frequently be found in the area with his inner circle of drinking buddies, and recalled the day when Dyer, who was ‘down the far end of the bar’, walked over and said in his cockney accent, ‘You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?’
Bacon, then in his fifties, was already a well-established figurative painter in Britain who had recently held a solo show at the Tate. Twenty-nine-year-old Dyer, on the other hand, was a petty thief who had drifted from juvenile detention centre to jail; to use Bacon’s words, he had ‘spent more time in prison than out’. Having been brought up in London’s East End by a family of law-breakers – even his mother attempted to steal from him while he slept – Dyer had followed the path most expected of him. ‘He only went in for stealing because he had been born into it… Everybody he knew went in for it,’ Bacon justified.
The art critic John Russell remembered Dyer as ‘a compact and chunky force of nature’ who ‘embodied a pent-up energy… a spirit of mischief, touched at times by melancholia’, describing ‘his wild humour, his sense of life as a gamble and the alarm system that had been bred into him from boyhood’. He maximised his athletic masculinity by wearing smart suits with braces and a narrow, tightly knotted tie, deliberately evoking the infamous British criminals the Kray Twins, whom he reportedly both feared and revered.
Bacon was immediately captivated by the dark-haired, handsome stranger who had made the first move. Not long after meeting Dyer, Bacon painted a small-scale triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963), which marks the beginning of the couple’s relationship – as friends, companions, lovers and, of course, as artist and muse. Dyer’s head is repeated across each of the three panels – turned to the left, turned to the right, and in a face-on view – against a shadowy black background. In each iteration he has been painted into life by Bacon’s sweeping brushstrokes of red, peach and white which twist his features, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.
This canvas undeniably shows the influence of Picasso’s cubism on Bacon’s fragmented approach to portraiture. In fact, the British artist attributed his entire career as a painter to Picasso; he had started out by working as an interior designer, leaving his native Ireland to travel across Europe during the early 1920s. However, in 1927 Bacon was so inspired by a Picasso exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg gallery in Paris that he decisively changed course: ‘Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.’
While the impact of Picasso’s style on Bacon has been well documented, the effect of the Spanish artist can also be found in the painter’s deeply personal subject matter and models. Picasso’s romantic partners – Marie-Thérèse Walter, Jacqueline Roque, Olga Khokhlova, Françoise Gilot and Dora Maar – are the women whose faces appear repeatedly in his most renowned portraits. If Bacon was to truly follow in the footsteps of Picasso, then he too would need a muse.
Before Dyer, he had taken numerous other male lovers as his models. These included the pilot and mechanic Peter Lacy, who was in a ten-year relationship with the artist from around 1952 and appears in several canvases, including the erotically charged Two Figures (1953). Within a dark bedroom, two blurred nude figures with short dark hair are found in a primal embrace, one dominating the other on a bed of roughly painted, white crumpled sheets; it hints at the sadomasochistic sex Bacon is known to have engaged in with Lacy.
Bacon was attracted to domineering types. ‘A man beyond good and evil who would stop at nothing was also the kind of man whom Bacon, in his active sexual fantasies, most hoped to meet’, reflected art historian Michael Peppiatt, also a close friend. Similarly, actor Paul Danquah, who shared a flat with Bacon for over five years, remembered how ‘three of Francis’s most important boyfriends came out of the East End. He seemed to like people who were bad news. Excessive manhood… Masculine in suits, that’s what he liked.’
It’s no surprise, then, that Bacon was drawn to Dyer, who deliberately played up to the image of the ‘gangster’. In many of his portraits, such as Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968), Dyer appears in his characteristically close-fitting suit, white shirt and tie, a vision of constructed hyper-masculinity imagined through Bacon’s male gaze. Just as Picasso had drawn attention to the interconnection between sex, love and art through the portraits of his many muses, Bacon had found in Dyer a man who could serve as both sexual partner and the subject of his art: ‘Men’s bodies sexually arouse me so I paint men’s bodies very often, it makes up almost all of my works.’
However, there is much more to Bacon’s depictions of Dyer than an emphasis on his sexuality. In Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror the muse stares into a mirror, positioned on a stand, within which his appearance has been split in two. It’s as if Bacon is breaking him open to reveal the man behind the facade of masculinity. As the artist later reflected, Dyer ‘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.’ Perhaps, then, Dyer did not quite fulfil Bacon’s masochistic fantasy; as if Dyer fell short of his expectations, the artist once lamented that his muse was ‘too nice to be a crook’.
This fragility is more pronounced in the slightly later Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966), in which the sitter has been stripped bare, with the exception of white underpants. In a full-length portrait, he sits on a swivel stool beneath a bare light bulb in a room painted lilac; with his legs crossed and hands clasped anxiously together. Using broken brushstrokes, Bacon seems to be pulling Dyer apart with paint to apprehend his inner psychology. There is an overall frenetic energy to this canvas, within which Dyer seems to spin restlessly. But beneath his feet is a shadow, rendered in a deep shade of maroon, lying perfectly still; it’s as if Bacon is shining a light on the true nature of his unsettled muse and the self which he tried to conceal.
This portrait was based on a photograph, George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio (c.1964), taken by Vogue photographer John Deakin, a friend of Bacon. Dyer posed for the camera – although looking nervously away from its lens – inside Bacon’s notoriously chaotic studio. He was one of very few people whom the artist allowed to enter into this sacred space, and was able to sit still for hours. Nevertheless, Bacon much preferred to work from photographs and, following his death, over a hundred images of Dyer were discovered at the artist’s home.
Bacon spoke about his favoured method of working from photographs, particularly when it came to painting the portraits of people he was close to: ‘If I like them, I don’t want to do, to practise the injury that I do to them in my work before them. If I like them, I would rather practise the injury in private, by which I think I can record the fact of them more clearly,’ he told David Sylvester for Fragments of a Portrait, a 1966 BBC documentary. It seems that Bacon, taking into some consideration his sitters’ feelings, did not feel able to distort them into such ghoulish visions before their own eyes.
But Dyer would have seen the unflattering portraits, and is reported to have declared his dislike for them: ‘I think they are really horrible and I don’t really understand them.’ It’s no surprise when Bacon – just as Picasso had portrayed Maar as The Weeping Woman – exposed Dyer in this way, constantly accompanied by uncanny shadows which assume a life of their own.
Bacon was, of course, painting during the post-Second World War era, when British artists began to emphasise themes of alienation and anxiety, and evoke the monstrous capabilities of mankind. However, the mood of unease – forever present in Bacon’s portraits of Dyer – also has its basis in a more personal reality. Dyer suffered from anxiety and depression, and turned to alcohol as a means of numbing this pain. Bacon, too, drank heavily and the pair fought frequently. The artist recalled how Dyer became, like many people, ‘totally impossible with drink’, although recognising that he, too, was to blame: ‘I also think that I have a difficult character. I’m a pain. I say the truth even if it hurts. I have the excuse of liking wine, and when I’m drunk, I talk a lot of nonsense.’
Bacon’s portraits betray not only Dyer’s nature but the pair’s increasingly destructive dynamic. In Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror (1967), a suited Dyer, seated on the same unsteady revolving stool again, stares at his own fractured reflection in a sinister black mirror on the wall; seemingly questioning his existence, the relationship with Bacon, his role as muse and even his place in this painting. In each portrayal of Dyer, Bacon plays with shadows, which typically fall at his muse’s feet – here, however, the darkness is cast within the mirror, surrounding him on all sides in the ominous reflection.
The recurring motif of the mirror also reflects back the artist’s own feelings towards his sitter, a fact that he recognised: ‘It’s true to say that of course, that when you paint anything you are also painting not only the subject but yourself as well as the object that you are trying to record, because painting is a dual performance.’ His image of Dyer is, then, filtered through his own obsession with this muse and growing anxieties about their unstable connection. This, of course, seems to have been exactly the sort of relationship that Bacon wanted, for the sake of both his sexual and creative needs, as he admitted: ‘I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.’
Bacon was less interested in depicting a likeness of Dyer than in capturing the toxic energy which they both created. His statement that real friendship consists of ‘two people pulling each other to bits’ can certainly be found in this vision of their bad romance. It’s as if Bacon required such overwhelming emotions, which he could then channel into the melancholic portraits of Dyer.
Just as Bacon seems to have needed a troubled muse, Dyer also enjoyed the protection of his older partner and, at least to begin with, benefited from this relationship. The painter paid him a salary of £60 a month, for posing and doing handyman work, and gave him additional money to add to his wardrobe of tailored suits. Bacon tried to encourage Dyer to find work, too: ‘If he’d had any discipline, he could have got a job easily, because he was very good with his hands. I got him something with my framer – he was going to learn gilding, which pays very good money. But he didn’t make anything of it. I can understand that it’s much more exciting to steal than to go out to a job every day, but in the end he did nothing but go and get completely drunk.’
It seems that Dyer didn’t help himself, but he must also have suffered from a lack of confidence; it couldn’t have been easy to exist beneath the shadow of the older, successful artist, and in the company of Bacon’s art-world friends, many of whom were known to dislike him.
By 1968, the relationship between these two men, who came from such different worlds and generations, inevitably started to fall apart. When Dyer discovered that Bacon was having an affair with another man, he took revenge by calling the police to tell them that the artist had drugs stashed in an African statue in his studio, resulting in a court case in 1968 – Bacon was eventually found not guilty, but the damage had been done.
Enraged by his muse, Bacon painted Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog (1968) in which Dyer is seated in just his white underwear within the same lilac room as in earlier portraits. Once again, Bacon has played with Dyer’s shadow – this time it doubles as both Dyer and the police dog in a muddied shade of green and a bitter expression of the artist’s anger at his muse. As Bacon recalled, ‘At the time of my arrest, and for a long time after, I stayed furious. To release some of the tension, I straight away went to my easel… did a large painting. He [Dyer] is sitting on a chair with the nasty flattened police dog at his feet sniffing towards the statue… which became George’s head.’
Although the romantic relationship between the two men was now over, in 1971 Dyer travelled to Paris with Bacon for the painter’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais. Bacon, having admired Picasso for so long, was about to achieve the same level of recognition as the French painter, joining him as only one of two living artists to have been awarded a major retrospective by the museum during their lifetime.
However, two days before the show opened, Dyer was discovered dead from a deliberate alcohol and drug overdose in the bathroom of the Hôtel des Saint-Pères. Given his history of several other suicide attempts, it seems that his depression had become too much to cope with. But was this also a way of getting back at the artist who had moved on? Bacon thought so: ‘Think of the timing. Of course it was deliberate,’ he whipped in one interview.
Not wanting Dyer’s death to overshadow his imminent success, Bacon managed to keep the suicide a secret. Supported by friends, who worked with the French authorities to stop the news getting out, he attended opening night alongside the art world’s elite and the president of France, Georges Pompidou. While suppressing the personal news, Bacon would have been confronted all evening long with the image of his late lover, given that Dyer was the star subject of many paintings on show.
While on the surface Bacon seemed unperturbed by Dyer’s death, in the years that followed he was agonised about it: ‘I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn’t gone out, if I’d simply stayed in and made sure he was all right, he might have been alive now.’ This wasn’t the first time it had happened to the artist either – just hours before the opening of his solo show at the Tate in 1962, he had received a telegram announcing that Peter Lacy had killed himself. Bacon had played a part in these unhealthy relationships and, in the case of Dyer, funded his alcohol addiction.
Although Bacon had soon moved on from Lacy to Dyer, he now seemed unable to let Dyer go: he continued to paint his late muse, drawing from photos, memories and his imagination, and even returned to stay in the hotel room in which Dyer had committed suicide, as if torturing himself. Possessed by guilt, he painted the triptych In Memory of George Dyer (1971) and then a further three, referred to as The Black Triptychs, between 1972 and 1974, in which Dyer appears in the moments before, during and after his death.
In Triptych May–June 1973 (1973), Bacon has confronted Dyer’s suicide: the muse appears three times – in the left-hand panel he is crouched naked on the toilet; on the right, he vomits into the sink; and in the central panel he is subsumed by a huge black shadow, which symbolises death. In 1985 Bacon told The Times, ‘This picture – it is of somebody – a great friend of mine. When I had a show in Paris in ’72 he committed suicide. He was found in the lavatory like that and he was sick into the basin. And I suppose in so far as my pictures are ever any kind of illustration this comes as close as any to a kind of narrative.’
In order to represent the horrifying reality of Dyer’s death, Bacon once again used symbolic shadows. Here, they loom large, suggesting the iconography of Greek tragedy. In each panel, Dyer is accompanied by a black spectre, evoking the form of the Furies, the three terrible ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance who lived in the Underworld; it’s as if he has succumbed to his final and tragic fate.
At the same time, this triple portrait also distils the feelings that Dyer evoked in the artist: guilt, loss, grief. While a candidly autobiographical artwork, there is a sense that Bacon is playing with the concept of both the tragic muse and the trope of the tortured artist, who has just lost their love. He wasn’t the first artist to have done so: Dante Gabriel Rossetti completed Beata Beatrix (c.1864–70), a portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, his wife and fellow artist, following her death. In this ghostly painting Siddall, whose eyes are closed, has been imagined in the character of Dante Alighieri’s beloved, Beatrice; Rossetti is drawing a parallel between the Italian poet’s despair at the death of his great love and his own grief. Similarly, Bacon, although he had initially hidden Dyer’s death, memorialised this tragic event in several of his greatest masterpieces.
The suicide of Dyer has subsequently become a legend, just as did the first meeting between the men about which Bacon had initially lied. The muse’s brother, Lee Dyer, thought rather generously that Bacon had concocted the burglar story for the sake of his new boyfriend who wasn’t as openly gay as the artist: ‘I think personally he may have made that story up because he didn’t want to say to my mother how he’d met him.’ But surely this man, who wanted to be seen in the same light as Picasso, was also constructing a myth that would secure his reputation as a great artist with remarkable muses of his own. Similarly, in commemorating Dyer’s death through art, Bacon was constructing another narrative about the fate of his doomed romantic muse.
But above all, Bacon was motivated by capturing truth rather than fiction on the canvas. As he once declared, ‘You can’t be more horrific than life itself.’ Without doubt, Bacon relied on his romantic muses, and particularly Dyer, for this truth. Fixated on the figure of Dyer during what was the greatest decade of his career, he attempted to distil the aura of this complex man and their fractious relationship through distorted visions in paint. Drawn to the darkness of humanity, Bacon felt compelled to express despair, fear and pain: ‘If you can talk about it, why paint it?’ he mused; his frightening but beautiful canvases certainly embody the most terrifying aspects of love, the true cost of which is inevitably loss.
‘We are all prisoners, we are all prisoners of love, one’s family, one’s childhood, profession,’ Bacon admitted, accounting for the fact that he could not fight his own fate, and was pulled towards Dyer whom he painted obsessively in life and death, until the day that he met his next muse, John Edwards, in 1974. In each of his living portraits, Dyer appears as a split character, accompanied by darkness and one half of a volatile relationship with Bacon. Within the final portraits, Bacon struggles to exorcise his sense of loss, as well as guilt, at the suicide of the great romantic muse whose shadow he could never quite escape.