Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for Portrait. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2013

signed, titled and dated 'Study for Portrait 1981 Francis Bacon' (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 78 1/8 x 58 1/8 in. (198.4 x 147.6 cm.). Painted in 1981. Estimate $18,000,000 – $25,000,000

Provenance: Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1983

Literature: M. Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, Oxford, 1983, pp. 228 and 270, no. 135 (illustrated in color).

Exhibited: New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Important Paintings by Avigdor Arikha, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Balthus, Fernando Botero, Claudio Bravo, Lucien Freud, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Antonio Lopez-Garcia, Pablo Picasso, November 1982, p. 8-9, no. 6 (illustrated in color).
Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945-1982, June-November 1983 pp. 76 and 89, no. 43 (illustrated in color).

Francis Bacon: Study for Portrait, 1981.

"People say that you forget about death, but you don't. After all I've had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I've been fond of have died. And you don't stop thinking about them; time doesn't heal. But you can concentrate on something which was an obsession, and what you would have put into your obsession with the physical act you put into your work. Because one of the terrible things about so-called love, certainly for an artist, I think, is the destruction"--Francis Bacon.

While Study for Portrait, 1981, embodies many characteristic Bacon motifs, in some significant respects it is a decidedly sui generis painting. Since 1957 Bacon had painted, and would subsequently paint, many seated male nudes. But he had done so on only two occasions in the decade before embarking on Study for Portrait, which was, moreover, conceived in a unique configuration and in a highly distinctive palette.

The principal image in Study for Portrait is of a seated, nude George Dyer. Variations of Dyer's cross-legged pose had first been employed by Bacon in Portrait of George Dyer Staring at Blind-cord and Portrait of George Dyer Talking, in 1966, utilising John Deakin's photographs of Dyer, taken in Bacon's Reece Mews studio, circa 1965. Bacon would continue to paint variations on the theme of a nude male figure, seated and with crossed legs, up until 1990, latterly transposing the 'sitter's' identity, at least facially, to John Edwards.

George Dyer had died in Paris on October 24, 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon's major retrospective at the Grand Palais. Motivated by remorse as well as grief, Bacon painted many posthumous portraits of Dyer, most notably the three large and profoundly moving memorial triptychs made between 1971 and 1973. The representation of Dyer in Study for Portrait, 1981, was the ultimate exposition in a continuum that had its origins in the seated figure of Dyer in the left panel of Three Portraits: Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer; Self-Portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1973; this was further developed in Study for Portrait, 1978, which also anticipates, in broad terms, the compositional format of the present painting.

A ruthless self-editor, Bacon not only destroyed innumerable canvases with which he had become dissatisfied, he frequently made changes to ostensibly completed paintings. He had paintings immediately recalled that had left his studio and been delivered as finished to Marlborough Fine Art; these he would subsequently alter, to a greater or lesser degree, or sometimes even destroy. Study for Portrait, 1981, is in the former category, and it underwent major modifications in several of its decisive aspects.

The most plausible explanation for the fundamental re-conceiving of Study for Portrait is that Bacon came to see it as a kind of cathartic, and specifically as a marker of the tenth anniversary of George Dyer's death. If this seems uncharacteristically emotional or sentimental on Bacon's part, it should be remembered that the Dyer Triptychs he made between 1971 and 1973 were arguably the most overtly biographical paintings he made. In the very few of Bacon's diaries that have survived, most pages are left blank, yet he recorded in his entry for October 24th 1972, "George died a year today": any ambivalence he may have once felt towards Dyer appears to have been vitiated by regret. It is surely no less significant, in the context of this biographically-orientated exegesis, that Study for Portrait, 1981, was the last painting of Dyer that Bacon ever made.

Study for Portrait was probably begun in July 1981. After the painting had been completed and delivered to Marlborough Fine Art, Bacon recalled it on August 3, 1981, intending to re-paint the leg. But Bacon made much more radical changes to the painting during August 1981, and it was finally re-delivered from the Reece Mews studio in its present state on September 3rd 1981. Bacon had altered a great deal of the figure's anatomy and turned the head from (almost) frontal to face right. The biomorphic form at the upper right in the original painting was transformed into a bust of George Dyer, framed by random lettering and pinned to a (now blue) circle - a compelling Bacon mise-en-abyme in an unprecedented formulation.

The most substantial formal change that Bacon made was the introduction of the pale blue geometrical passage that divides the picture field, thereby creating a pregnant void across which Dyer's distinctive profile head (itself a recurrent device and also based on John Deakin's photographs) is metaphorically projected. Painted in pink flesh tones, not as a conventional shadow but as a silhouette, the head became an ethereal, feature-less presence, identifiable only by its outline. This unexpected representation may allude to the low-relief Egyptian tomb sculpture that Bacon deeply admired, and the abstract Letraset surround, therefore, to hieroglyphics. The pale blue 'folded rhomboid' is another of Bacon's atavistic self-quotations, for its first manifestation dated back to Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952; here, however, it is employed not so much as an element of Bacon's presentational dynamics but to create a chasm (in time as well as space) across which Dyer's image is cast.

Apart from the addition of the circular pale blue 'mirror', Bacon retained a large proportion of the two black zones present in the earlier version (themselves a signifier, especially in his later paintings, of mortality), but this sombre note is counterbalanced by the dialogue he introduced in the final version between the pinkish flesh and pale blue zones: the prevailing mood, rather than mournful or straightforwardly valedictory, becomes one of unusually reflective tenderness. It is evident that Bacon lavished considerable attention on the flesh painting, partly no doubt in order to incorporate and emphasise the element of affection in the modified portrait. He made subtle adjustments in the final version that softened and simplified the representation of the face and body, but also, for example, amplified the definition of the musculature of Dyer's left leg. Chromatically, Study for Portrait is pitched in the lyrical mode that Bacon had begun to explore again in 1980, reminiscent of the pastels of Chardin and Degas, and referred to by him, humorously but not entirely irrelevantly, as "my Impressionist period."

(c)Martin Harrison, May 2013
Martin Harrison is editor of the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné

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