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Lot Essay
A rare and seminal masterpiece that stands among Francis Bacon’s most poignant paintings, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier is a powerful and passionate memorial to his great love Peter Lacy. It was painted in London in 1963, the year after Lacy’s tragic death in Tangier, and depicts the landscape where he was laid to rest. Here, the artist pays tribute to their relationship in a singular image of grief, desire and longing. Two shadowy forms orbit a luminous vortex, bound together by the sweeping gestural motion of Bacon’s brush. Hauntingly anthropomorphic, they dissipate like spirits beneath the glaring North African sun. Visually unparalleled within the artist’s oeuvre, the work serves as a summation of his entire practice, drawing together elements from his early portraits of Peter Lacy and his Van Gogh-inspired paintings of the 1950s, while pointing towards the elliptical arenas and metaphorical landscapes that would evolve over the next two decades. With exceptional provenance, it is one of the artist’s most prominently exhibited paintings: an extraordinary portrait of love and loss, capturing the inevitable circularity that eventually returns flesh to earth.
Martin Harrison, author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, describes the work as ‘Bacon’s ultimate, oblique memorial to his lover, and one of his greatest, most impassioned paintings’ (M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, London 2016, p. 720). Its history, indeed, bears witness to its significance. Shortly after its creation, it was unveiled at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and featured in the pages of Vogue, where the critic Lawrence Alloway hailed its ‘dazzling colour range, and the emotive power of [its] imagery’ (L. Alloway, ‘Francis Bacon: A great, shocking, eccentric painter’, Vogue, vol. 142, no. 8, November 1963, p. 182). Not long after, it was acquired by the celebrated author Roald Dahl, who purchased a number of masterworks by Bacon including the landmark Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963). Over the years, critics from David Sylvester and Grey Gowrie to the writer Colm Tóibín have named it among his finest and most important paintings. It has been included in almost all of his major retrospectives across twenty-seven cities worldwide, most recently featuring in Bacon’s acclaimed survey at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2022.
Among the work’s most significant exhibitions was Bacon’s career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971. The show was a triumph for the artist, but was also marked by tragedy. Less than thirty-six hours before its opening, George Dyer—his lover after Lacy—was found dead in their hotel room. At that moment, in a cruel twist of fate, history seemed to repeat itself. On 24 May 1962, the official opening day of his first retrospective, held at Tate Gallery in London, Bacon had sent Lacy a telegram in Tangier with news of the show’s success. The answering telegram shattered him: Lacy was dead. With its deep dark void and fleeting shadows, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier seems to anticipate the historic ‘black triptychs’ that Bacon produced in posthumous memorial to Dyer. The curved arena, punctuated by ghostly figments that revolve around its perimeter, would find itself echoed in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Fondation Beyeler, Basel). Life, Bacon came to realise, was a sequence of inevitable cycles, replaying themselves to often devastating ends.
Bacon and Lacy had first met in 1952. Some trace their first encounter to the artist’s beloved Colony Room in Soho; others suggest they may have met at Careless Talk, where Lacy worked as a pianist. ‘I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,’ Bacon recalled; ‘… he had this extraordinary physique—even his calves were beautiful. And he could be wonderful company … he had a real kind of natural wit’ (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 145). Beneath this exterior, however, Lacy was a troubled man: a former pilot who had served during the Second World War. Both he and the artist were tempestuous, mercurial characters, and their relationship—from Lacy’s home near Henley-on-Thames, to trips to the South of France and Rome—was fuelled by a turbulent mixture of passion, infatuation, violence and hysteria. On one occasion, Lacy hurled Bacon’s clothes off the side of a ship in anger; on another, he reportedly pushed the artist himself out of a window. ‘I couldn’t live with him’, Bacon confessed, ‘and I couldn’t live without him’ (ibid., p. 151).
The complex, fragile feelings that Bacon and Lacy shared for one another wrote their way into the artist’s practice. During the 1950s Lacy became the artist’s first true portrait subject, and featured in some of his most ground-breaking paintings. Among the earliest of these was Study of Figure in a Landscape (1952, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), inspired by Bacon’s time in South Africa. The painting, in a poignant piece of symmetry, foreshadows much of the present work’s language. So, too, do the seminal Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954), which Lacy is said to have inspired. His likeness haunted Bacon’s landmark Man in Blue series, as well as portraits including Lying Figure (1958, Kunstmuseum Bochum) and Seated Figure (1961, Tate, London). He continued to punctuate the artist’s practice after his death: Study for Portrait on Folding Bed (1963, Tate, London) features the same black void and sweeping central ellipse as the present work, while the now-destroyed Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs (1963) depicted Lacy on a striped mattress inspired by the bedding in Tangier.
It was there, under the dazzling Moroccan sky, that the couple’s relationship reached its explosive denouement. Ever-restless and dissatisfied with his life in London, Lacy had moved to Tangier in 1955. Though his affair with Bacon had already approached breaking point, the artist visited him every summer, and the two continued their volatile liaison abroad. With its glistening sun, lively expatriate community and liberal gay scene, Tangier quickly surpassed Monte Carlo as Bacon’s favourite exotic retreat. Among its residents were Beat Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who was working on his 1959 novel The Naked Lunch, as well as the playwright Tennessee Williams and the composer Paul Bowles. Lacy, too, had carved a new life for himself, playing the piano in Dean’s Bar. Increasingly penniless and dependent on alcohol, however, his feelings towards Bacon spiralled out of control. ‘Consider me dead!’, he had said to the artist in a burst of rage after a visit in 1960. The artist’s final trip in 1961—intended to patch things up—was a disaster, punctuated by cold-shouldering and betrayal. Bacon never heard from Lacy again.
With its windswept trees and grassy sand dunes, the landscape around Cape Malabata—some six miles east of central Tangier—had made a deep impression on Bacon. It was a place he had undoubtedly visited with Lacy: a site to which he would return after his death, and a scene he had attempted to paint many times. The present work is one of only two canvases in which the artist would make direct reference to Morocco, and is the only one of these painted from memory. Its extraordinary conflation of figure and landscape—described by Ernst van Alphen as a ‘bodyscape’—stands alone in Bacon’s oeuvre (E. van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London 1992, p. 145). While the artist’s later landscapes would extend its metamorphic language, none would so powerfully unite human presence and absence. The standing figural form resembles a tree, its arms spread wide in cruciform surrender. The lower figure, meanwhile, is reduced to an animalistic blur: a corporeal whisper on the breeze. Together they spiral into abstraction, locked together—and held apart—like hands on a clockface.
Bacon claimed that he found the light in North Africa too bright to paint. Instead, in the basement of his newly acquired studio in London’s Reece Mews, he conjured its glow from the depths of his psyche. The work bears witness to the lasting influence of Van Gogh upon Bacon’s imagination, channelling the opulent palette that had dominated his tributes to the artist during the second half of the 1950s. During this period, as his feelings towards Lacy continued to oscillate between hope and despair, the artist found great comfort in the Dutch master’s psychologically charged portraits of human solitude in nature. The present work shares much in common with Bacon’s magnificent suite of homages to Van Gogh’s The Painter on His Way to Work (1888). It also recalls his 1957 painting Van Gogh in a Landscape (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), itself inspired by the countryside surrounding Tangier. Bacon echoes Van Gogh’s electric palette and raw, expressive brushwork: vivid streaks of red and teal glow brightly amidst the gloom, while each blade of grass seems to quiver with a life of its own.
Elsewhere in the work’s depths, other art-historical spectres abound. Sylvester writes that ‘the work is a superb example of the influence on Bacon of Soutine’s Céret landscapes. Their surging convulsive forms and brush marks often turn the trees and houses and hills of Céret into writhing animals, and this transformation is here on a majestic scale’ (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon in Dublin, exh. cat. Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin 2000, p. 69). Dexter Dalwood, meanwhile, notes that Bacon’s vivid range of hues demonstrates his engagement with Colour Field painting during this period (D. Dalwood, ‘Francis Bacon: London’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CL, no. 34, December 2008, p. 841). Though the artist fervently denied comparisons with Abstract Expressionism, he had been deeply affected by the Tate Gallery’s 1959 exhibition The New American Painting. The present work’s distinct zones of colour recall the planar divisions of Mark Rothko, while its entanglement of body and ground conjures the Women of Willem de Kooning. Bacon would come to identify particularly with the latter’s works: the critic Robert Hughes, indeed, later named the two artists as the twentieth century’s most important exponents of ‘the disquieting human figure’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, BBC, 1980).
The painting’s circular arena, inherited in part from Van Gogh in a Landscape, would come to feature with increasing intensity throughout Bacon’s oeuvre. Harrison links it to his fascination with the greyhound racetracks; elsewhere, it has been attributed to the sweep of the casino tables in Monte Carlo, or his admiration for Picasso’s bullfighting paintings. More broadly, however, it might be said to resemble a vast, all-seeing eye. As a young man in 1920s Paris, Bacon had lived among the Surrealists, absorbing the work of Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Their use of ocular imagery, most notably in the latter’s Un chien andalou (1929), has been posited as a potential source for Bacon’s elliptical spaces. The artist famously spoke of his ability to ‘see everything’ and recall imagery ‘like slides’. The present work, indeed, flickers with memories of his own visual archive. The lower figure is derived from a photograph found in the artist’s studio, depicting an owl wrestling a snake. The tall tree-like presence, meanwhile, conjures Bacon’s fascination with Cimabue’s depiction of the Crucifixion: an image that haunted his early oeuvre.
Such qualities undoubtedly appealed to Roald Dahl, who acquired the present work with his wife, the American actress Patricia Neal. He professed that ‘I myself had become an enthusiastic collector of pictures as soon as World War II ended, in 1945. Each time I sold a short story I would buy a picture [and] when there was a bit more money in the bank I began buying pictures for keeps’ (R. Dahl, ‘Architectural Digest Visits: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal’, Architectural Digest, February 1981, p. 74). Buoyed by the triumphant professional and financial success of the publication of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl bought four other Bacon canvases between the years 1964-68. Dahl enthused about his ownership of seven of Bacon’s paintings; an exaggeration made on more than one occasion, which his biographer Donald Sturrock regarded as typical of Dahl’s character and a reiteration of the high esteem he held for Bacon’s work. He declared that the artist was a ‘giant of his time’, admiring his ‘blend of economy and profound emotion’ (R. Dahl, quoted in D. Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London 2011, p. 440). Under his stewardship, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier was loaned to both the Grand Palais exhibition and to the Southampton Art Gallery, where it remained on view for five years.
Bacon himself had a profoundly literary imagination. As tragedy came to mark his lifetime and again, he believed himself doomed to suffer at the hands of fate, informed by his readings of Shakespeare, Aeschylus and others. Harrison compares the work’s foreground figure to the ‘Furies’—inspired by the latter’s Oresteia—that came to punctuate the artist’s later oeuvre. Gowrie, meanwhile, in his analysis of the painting, invokes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Shakespeare’s King Lear (G. Gowrie, Francis Bacon Paintings, exh. cat. Central House of the Union of Artists, Moscow 1988, p. 18). Perhaps ultimately, suggests Harrison, Bacon looked to one of his favourite poems: W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer’, runs the opening stanza. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Time spins on its axis; life and death flit across the stage. In Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, the artist captures the eternal cycles by which we are all bound: from body to earth and back again.
Martin Harrison, author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, describes the work as ‘Bacon’s ultimate, oblique memorial to his lover, and one of his greatest, most impassioned paintings’ (M. Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, London 2016, p. 720). Its history, indeed, bears witness to its significance. Shortly after its creation, it was unveiled at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and featured in the pages of Vogue, where the critic Lawrence Alloway hailed its ‘dazzling colour range, and the emotive power of [its] imagery’ (L. Alloway, ‘Francis Bacon: A great, shocking, eccentric painter’, Vogue, vol. 142, no. 8, November 1963, p. 182). Not long after, it was acquired by the celebrated author Roald Dahl, who purchased a number of masterworks by Bacon including the landmark Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963). Over the years, critics from David Sylvester and Grey Gowrie to the writer Colm Tóibín have named it among his finest and most important paintings. It has been included in almost all of his major retrospectives across twenty-seven cities worldwide, most recently featuring in Bacon’s acclaimed survey at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2022.
Among the work’s most significant exhibitions was Bacon’s career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971. The show was a triumph for the artist, but was also marked by tragedy. Less than thirty-six hours before its opening, George Dyer—his lover after Lacy—was found dead in their hotel room. At that moment, in a cruel twist of fate, history seemed to repeat itself. On 24 May 1962, the official opening day of his first retrospective, held at Tate Gallery in London, Bacon had sent Lacy a telegram in Tangier with news of the show’s success. The answering telegram shattered him: Lacy was dead. With its deep dark void and fleeting shadows, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier seems to anticipate the historic ‘black triptychs’ that Bacon produced in posthumous memorial to Dyer. The curved arena, punctuated by ghostly figments that revolve around its perimeter, would find itself echoed in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Fondation Beyeler, Basel). Life, Bacon came to realise, was a sequence of inevitable cycles, replaying themselves to often devastating ends.
Bacon and Lacy had first met in 1952. Some trace their first encounter to the artist’s beloved Colony Room in Soho; others suggest they may have met at Careless Talk, where Lacy worked as a pianist. ‘I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,’ Bacon recalled; ‘… he had this extraordinary physique—even his calves were beautiful. And he could be wonderful company … he had a real kind of natural wit’ (F. Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 145). Beneath this exterior, however, Lacy was a troubled man: a former pilot who had served during the Second World War. Both he and the artist were tempestuous, mercurial characters, and their relationship—from Lacy’s home near Henley-on-Thames, to trips to the South of France and Rome—was fuelled by a turbulent mixture of passion, infatuation, violence and hysteria. On one occasion, Lacy hurled Bacon’s clothes off the side of a ship in anger; on another, he reportedly pushed the artist himself out of a window. ‘I couldn’t live with him’, Bacon confessed, ‘and I couldn’t live without him’ (ibid., p. 151).
The complex, fragile feelings that Bacon and Lacy shared for one another wrote their way into the artist’s practice. During the 1950s Lacy became the artist’s first true portrait subject, and featured in some of his most ground-breaking paintings. Among the earliest of these was Study of Figure in a Landscape (1952, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), inspired by Bacon’s time in South Africa. The painting, in a poignant piece of symmetry, foreshadows much of the present work’s language. So, too, do the seminal Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954), which Lacy is said to have inspired. His likeness haunted Bacon’s landmark Man in Blue series, as well as portraits including Lying Figure (1958, Kunstmuseum Bochum) and Seated Figure (1961, Tate, London). He continued to punctuate the artist’s practice after his death: Study for Portrait on Folding Bed (1963, Tate, London) features the same black void and sweeping central ellipse as the present work, while the now-destroyed Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs (1963) depicted Lacy on a striped mattress inspired by the bedding in Tangier.
It was there, under the dazzling Moroccan sky, that the couple’s relationship reached its explosive denouement. Ever-restless and dissatisfied with his life in London, Lacy had moved to Tangier in 1955. Though his affair with Bacon had already approached breaking point, the artist visited him every summer, and the two continued their volatile liaison abroad. With its glistening sun, lively expatriate community and liberal gay scene, Tangier quickly surpassed Monte Carlo as Bacon’s favourite exotic retreat. Among its residents were Beat Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who was working on his 1959 novel The Naked Lunch, as well as the playwright Tennessee Williams and the composer Paul Bowles. Lacy, too, had carved a new life for himself, playing the piano in Dean’s Bar. Increasingly penniless and dependent on alcohol, however, his feelings towards Bacon spiralled out of control. ‘Consider me dead!’, he had said to the artist in a burst of rage after a visit in 1960. The artist’s final trip in 1961—intended to patch things up—was a disaster, punctuated by cold-shouldering and betrayal. Bacon never heard from Lacy again.
With its windswept trees and grassy sand dunes, the landscape around Cape Malabata—some six miles east of central Tangier—had made a deep impression on Bacon. It was a place he had undoubtedly visited with Lacy: a site to which he would return after his death, and a scene he had attempted to paint many times. The present work is one of only two canvases in which the artist would make direct reference to Morocco, and is the only one of these painted from memory. Its extraordinary conflation of figure and landscape—described by Ernst van Alphen as a ‘bodyscape’—stands alone in Bacon’s oeuvre (E. van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London 1992, p. 145). While the artist’s later landscapes would extend its metamorphic language, none would so powerfully unite human presence and absence. The standing figural form resembles a tree, its arms spread wide in cruciform surrender. The lower figure, meanwhile, is reduced to an animalistic blur: a corporeal whisper on the breeze. Together they spiral into abstraction, locked together—and held apart—like hands on a clockface.
Bacon claimed that he found the light in North Africa too bright to paint. Instead, in the basement of his newly acquired studio in London’s Reece Mews, he conjured its glow from the depths of his psyche. The work bears witness to the lasting influence of Van Gogh upon Bacon’s imagination, channelling the opulent palette that had dominated his tributes to the artist during the second half of the 1950s. During this period, as his feelings towards Lacy continued to oscillate between hope and despair, the artist found great comfort in the Dutch master’s psychologically charged portraits of human solitude in nature. The present work shares much in common with Bacon’s magnificent suite of homages to Van Gogh’s The Painter on His Way to Work (1888). It also recalls his 1957 painting Van Gogh in a Landscape (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), itself inspired by the countryside surrounding Tangier. Bacon echoes Van Gogh’s electric palette and raw, expressive brushwork: vivid streaks of red and teal glow brightly amidst the gloom, while each blade of grass seems to quiver with a life of its own.
Elsewhere in the work’s depths, other art-historical spectres abound. Sylvester writes that ‘the work is a superb example of the influence on Bacon of Soutine’s Céret landscapes. Their surging convulsive forms and brush marks often turn the trees and houses and hills of Céret into writhing animals, and this transformation is here on a majestic scale’ (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon in Dublin, exh. cat. Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin 2000, p. 69). Dexter Dalwood, meanwhile, notes that Bacon’s vivid range of hues demonstrates his engagement with Colour Field painting during this period (D. Dalwood, ‘Francis Bacon: London’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CL, no. 34, December 2008, p. 841). Though the artist fervently denied comparisons with Abstract Expressionism, he had been deeply affected by the Tate Gallery’s 1959 exhibition The New American Painting. The present work’s distinct zones of colour recall the planar divisions of Mark Rothko, while its entanglement of body and ground conjures the Women of Willem de Kooning. Bacon would come to identify particularly with the latter’s works: the critic Robert Hughes, indeed, later named the two artists as the twentieth century’s most important exponents of ‘the disquieting human figure’ (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, BBC, 1980).
The painting’s circular arena, inherited in part from Van Gogh in a Landscape, would come to feature with increasing intensity throughout Bacon’s oeuvre. Harrison links it to his fascination with the greyhound racetracks; elsewhere, it has been attributed to the sweep of the casino tables in Monte Carlo, or his admiration for Picasso’s bullfighting paintings. More broadly, however, it might be said to resemble a vast, all-seeing eye. As a young man in 1920s Paris, Bacon had lived among the Surrealists, absorbing the work of Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Their use of ocular imagery, most notably in the latter’s Un chien andalou (1929), has been posited as a potential source for Bacon’s elliptical spaces. The artist famously spoke of his ability to ‘see everything’ and recall imagery ‘like slides’. The present work, indeed, flickers with memories of his own visual archive. The lower figure is derived from a photograph found in the artist’s studio, depicting an owl wrestling a snake. The tall tree-like presence, meanwhile, conjures Bacon’s fascination with Cimabue’s depiction of the Crucifixion: an image that haunted his early oeuvre.
Such qualities undoubtedly appealed to Roald Dahl, who acquired the present work with his wife, the American actress Patricia Neal. He professed that ‘I myself had become an enthusiastic collector of pictures as soon as World War II ended, in 1945. Each time I sold a short story I would buy a picture [and] when there was a bit more money in the bank I began buying pictures for keeps’ (R. Dahl, ‘Architectural Digest Visits: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal’, Architectural Digest, February 1981, p. 74). Buoyed by the triumphant professional and financial success of the publication of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl bought four other Bacon canvases between the years 1964-68. Dahl enthused about his ownership of seven of Bacon’s paintings; an exaggeration made on more than one occasion, which his biographer Donald Sturrock regarded as typical of Dahl’s character and a reiteration of the high esteem he held for Bacon’s work. He declared that the artist was a ‘giant of his time’, admiring his ‘blend of economy and profound emotion’ (R. Dahl, quoted in D. Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London 2011, p. 440). Under his stewardship, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier was loaned to both the Grand Palais exhibition and to the Southampton Art Gallery, where it remained on view for five years.
Bacon himself had a profoundly literary imagination. As tragedy came to mark his lifetime and again, he believed himself doomed to suffer at the hands of fate, informed by his readings of Shakespeare, Aeschylus and others. Harrison compares the work’s foreground figure to the ‘Furies’—inspired by the latter’s Oresteia—that came to punctuate the artist’s later oeuvre. Gowrie, meanwhile, in his analysis of the painting, invokes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Shakespeare’s King Lear (G. Gowrie, Francis Bacon Paintings, exh. cat. Central House of the Union of Artists, Moscow 1988, p. 18). Perhaps ultimately, suggests Harrison, Bacon looked to one of his favourite poems: W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer’, runs the opening stanza. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Time spins on its axis; life and death flit across the stage. In Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, the artist captures the eternal cycles by which we are all bound: from body to earth and back again.