Page 47 - Studio International - April 1967

Portrait of George Dyer crouching 1966
Oil on canvas, 78 x 58 in.
Marlborough Fine Art

Left, Portrait of George Dyer riding a bicycle 1966
Oil on canvas, 78 x 58 in.
Marlborough Fine Art

now likens his many paraphrases of Pope Innocent X by in his recent feature in an Observer colour supplement to
Velasquez to a schoolboy's crush on his housemaster. 'I've show that the head was based on the famous still of the
always thought this was one of the greatest paintings in screaming governess in Potemkin, and there is a sense in
the world, and I've had a crush on it, and I've tried very which Bacon was doing the same sort of thing to the
very unsuccessfully to do certain records of it. Distorted Velasquez that Duchamp did to the Mona Lisa when he
records. Of course I regret them because I think they're added a moustache. From this point of view, Bacon's
very silly.' Popes are Dada's greatest triumph. They exploit the
I think it might be true to say that after a time he went allure of the insulted masterpiece with a brilliance which
on painting them almost as if it had become a habit carries its own intimations of grandeur, and recall the
difficult to break, and the last one, painted in 1965, was spirit in which Caravaggio debunked Michelangelo's
probably his worst, totally out of touch with the spirit in superhuman nudes in his Nude Youth with a Ram.
which the earlier versions were conceived. At the time it Since then, the emotional and intellectual climate in
was exhibited I mentioned that it had gone dead and which he works seems to have assumed a weird peaceful-
looked like something stuffed. The critics who never had ness. Some of the paintings in his present exhibition
a good word to say about any of them will be congratu- would look at home beside the Velasquez, for he has
lating themselves on having been right all along, but it somehow come to a kind of neutrality. The paint has
never occurred to me that he might be attempting to never looked more authoritative and voluptuous, and it
emulate Velasquez. His Popes are not really paraphrases, gives what people think of as his 'tragic awareness' an
but deliberate travesties. There was an element of almost ingratiating blandness. Pulling vicarious flesh this
collage in them. Nigel Gosling reproduced one of them way and that, he has settled into a macabre serenity.
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