Three Studies of the Male Back - Francis Bacon 1970 ★ No Pain No Gain (1) ★ 3D software reenactment H.Hoogerbrugge 2020 ★ Three Studies of the Male Back is a 1970 oil-on-canvas triptych by Francis Bacon. Typical of Bacon's figurative but abstract and distorted style, it depicts male figures isolated within flat nondescript interior spaces. Each figure is a portrait of Bacon's lover George Dyer. Working in a tiny bedsit studio in Kensington, London, Francis Bacon spent his earnings on champagne, fine wines and seafood feasts for his Soho friends. George Dyer became part of this slightly desperate bohemia. He went from being a good-looking, well-dressed, would-be gangster to a depressed and clingy alcoholic. As Picasso’s women had found, being a muse sucks. Three Studies of the Male Back was included in the Bacon retrospective held at the Grand Palais in Paris: Dyer committed suicide the evening before it opened in 1971. Bacon never really recovered from Dyer's suicide. He said, "people say you forget about death, but you don't. After all, I've had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I've been really fond of have died. And you don't stop thinking about them; time doesn't heal." Bacon, an avowed atheist, shows human life as pure animality. We’re bodies without souls. His modernism is pitiless. And at that momentous show in Paris in 1971, it thrust him into the pantheon of European art.