On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensbery gave his calling card to Oscar Wilde's London club in Mayfair, leaving a brief note on the back accusing the writer of sodomy in order to force Wilde to end his relationship with his son to end Alfred.

Just a few miles away and almost seventy years later, the young petty criminal George Dyer breaks into Francis Bacon's studio in London's East End at night and is caught by the painter.

The two become a couple.

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Two events that each ended in a deadly catastrophe for one of those involved.

Dyer killed himself in a hotel room in Paris in 1971, just as the opening of his partner's major retrospective at the Grand Palais was imminent.

Oscar Wilde's life also ended in Paris.

He had sued the Marquis for defamation but lost the case.

He was then immediately brought before the court in a second trial, in which he was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor for indecency.

Marked by deprivation, ill, embittered and completely penniless, he died in November 1900. Wilde was 46, Dyer 37 years old.

First, the stage of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus is immersed in complete darkness.

Robert Wilson, the now over eighty-year-old art director of his own light and shadow play factory, has invited to the world premiere: "Dorian" will be shown, a one-person play by the American writer Darryl Pinckney, who is also present.

Düsseldorf is upside down with excitement.

People like to do that here.

Then you hear Christian Friedel's voice: high, pleasant, versatile.

For a good ninety minutes we will hear no other voice than his, in a polyphonic monologue about love, violence and loneliness, passion and betrayal, egomania, society and the happy catastrophe of being an artist.

Dorian - forever young

But first the immense chaos of a studio gradually emerges from the darkness.

A figure in a long black coat turns its back to the audience.

The turned-up coat collar is huge, the hat is black, one glove is white, the other black.

Surrounding the figure: countless tubes of paint and paraphernalia, an easel, three huge lance-like brushes in a stand in the center of the stage, the floor of which is completely littered with crumpled newspaper.

This is Francis Bacon's studio.

But it is also the studio of Basil Hallward, the painter who created the portrait of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel of the same name: while the sitter remains unchanged young, the marks of age and vices etch themselves into the features of the painting.

Something similar was said of Francis Bacon,

whose excessive lifestyle seemed to leave him untouched for a long time.

Deformed, lifeless, destroyed by passion and violence, only the creatures in his paintings seemed to be.