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"Perhaps one day I will manage to capture an instant of life in all its violence and all its beauty. That would be the definitive painting." Francis Bacon succeeded in capturing that "instant of life," while no other artist was able to convey as he did the most sordid and frightening sides of human nature. With his existentialist character, Bacon has been the painter who has most fully and successfully represented modern man's alienation and vulnerability.
His art is firmly based in the British figurative tradition and is usually linked with the so called School of London, a varied group of artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Michael Andrews, all of whom are represented in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. They share an emphasis on individuality, an interest in the human figure, a certain Expressionism and a rejection of academic naturalism.
This double Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror is one of the numerous portraits which Bacon made of Dyer, his lover from the mid 1960s until his suicide in 1971. Here he is depicted alone like all Bacon's characters, isolated in an empty space and representing man's loneliness in a hostile world; it is as if by solely concentrating on the figure Bacon wanted to remind the viewer of the autonomous nature of existence.
Dyer sits in a chair opposite his own image reflected in a mirror which is placed above a strange piece of furniture with a pedestal, a sort of combination of a television set and an x ray machine. The violence and brutality of the image, centred on the distorsion of the main figure with its face twisted by a spasm as if it were exposed to a series of shocks from which it cannot escape, is emphasised by a circular halo of light coming from a source outside the painting. In contrast, the face reflected in the mirror, split into two by a strip of luminous space which seems to be a reflection in the glass, is not contorted in the way that Bacon's figures usually are. In fact the two halves of the face could be brought together into a fairly realistic portrait of Dyer with his angular profile and hooked nose and an expression which combines desire with death.
Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror should be seen within the context of the modern portrait and its new approach in modern art. Bacon was able to develop a highly individual interpretation of this genre, eliminating any physical individuality in his portraits and emphasising instead the fact of individual existence. His portraits depict the unique destiny of each human being rather than representing individual characteristics. The Expressionist technique used in this painting is a combination of oil applied with the paintbrush and then worked in with the fingers. Bacon, as on other occasions, deliberately rejects traditional techniques and takes risks which produce disconcerting results, such as the thick white strokes brutally splashed on to the surface on top of the image. These splashes could be a type of symbolism within the painting which Bacon leaves unexplained, but they also suggest an element of fate which he wishes to remind us of: "My ideal," he said, "would be to take a handful of paint and throw it on the canvas in the hope that the portrait would be there."
Paloma Alarcó
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