Famous Works Of Art With Messed Up Backstories

April 2024 · 2 minute read

Francis Bacon's work is most recognizable today for its strange, unworldly figures, in which the blurring of detail means we can't quite pin down the form of the object we are viewing in the painting. The reason for this in some of his most famous paintings, his Black Triptychs, has its root in Bacon's own traumatized reaction to what he was trying to depict.

In 1971, Bacon was in Paris, overseeing the opening of a glamorous retrospective of his work at the Grand Palais, and his long-term lover and muse, George Dyer, was in the city with him. The two had had a tumultuous relationship, made rockier by heavy drinking and drug use, according to Sotheby's. Two days before the exhibition opened, Dyer was found dead in Bacon's hotel room, after having taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Bacon forced himself to continue with the exhibition as normal, but the death of Dyer never left him, and the artist painted him "obsessively" after his death, according to francis-bacon.com. The style that Bacon had mastered by the time of Dyer's suicide now came to take on a new significance – to visualize the horror of encountering such a death scene, and how the memory attempts to simultaneously revisit and distort the scene in question.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

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