Thank You, George Dyer

The Most Painted Head

The Francis Bacon centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes it clear that Bacon got to be a better painter because of George Dyer. One look at the big head and that body and you can see why.

George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio, ca. 1964
John Deakin (British, 1912–1972)

What a man... As the exhibit progresses from the popes with the over-reliance on fudged anatomy, gimmicky obsessions, and white grids in place of structure to the paintings from photographs he commissioned, the work gets stronger, and Dyer's death brought out more detail and spatial and emotional meaning. The triptych In Memory of George Dyer is true, mysterious, sad, and cohesive, with its deep central retreating into the death hotel and the arching side portraits. And his self portrait with the sink, while rehashing, or pre-hashing, the twisted posture and memorial fixtures that would pre-occupy so many of his paintings following Dyer's death, is at the same time eloquent, histrionic, obvious, and elusive.

Dyer and Bacon

You have to wonder how Bacon had the energy to be consumed by gambling, alcohol, men and painting. The time. And the unluckiness, or was it luck, to find such doomed and beautiful men, dying to be dissolved into his paintings, destroyed by unhappiness, preserved in linen and oil, blessed by the pope, eternal footnotes to an art that seems half phony and half all-too-serious.