In Memory of George Dyer, 1971

The setting of the centre panel is based on a stairway in the Paris hotel in which Dyer died. The twisting of the naked arm to turn the key stresses the abiding significance for Bacon of the implications of Picasso’s surrealist figures of 1928/29, opening the doors of bathing cabins. Bacon also related the gesture to the Thunder God’s imperative in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘I have heard the key / Turn in the door and turn once only / We think of the key, each in his prison’.
Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 2016, p. 988