William Crozier was one of the foremost British artists addressing existentialism in the post-war decades. The Dancer is among his most striking works, marrying the historic skeletal imagery of ‘the dance of death’ with the dress of a top-hatted dandy. By eliding the two there is both irreverence, with the reaper’s faintly humorous costume, and a cautionary suggestion that death lurks in plain clothes. A concern with the afterlife, or the lack of one, was of central importance to existentialist thought. Crozier’s picture adopts the well-established iconography of death in art, overwriting it with a raw feeling of catastrophe distinctive to the twentieth century. The subject of death in The Dancer is informed by Crozier’s knowledge of twentieth-century atrocities. Following the example of his artist friends John Bellany and Sandy Moffatt, who had visited the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, Crozier went to see Bergen-Belsen in 1969. He had seen footage of the camps being liberated as a teenager in Scotland in 1945, and this visit brought to a head his long-running involvement with the horrors of the Second World War. It was shortly after this that he regained his confidence in figural painting, introducing skeletal figures as in the case of The Dancer, which belongs to a definitive series of work produced in the nineteen-seventies. The work is imbued with a sense of suffering and an overwhelming loss of faith in humanity, a powerful statement of mid-century angst. Crozier was acquainted with Francis Bacon, another painter whose practice drew from existentialism and the period’s troubled mood. As Crozier commented to Philip Vann in 2007, ‘we inhabited the same small world, spoke frequently, were never close friends and moved in different circles.’ Though they were never close, The Dancer bears a clear relationship to Bacon’s work. A looming, cloud-like shadow spreads out behind the dancer, emanating from his right foot and appearing to threaten him. Bacon used a similar device, introducing a shadow that seems to stalk its maker as in Painting (1950, Leeds Art Gallery). The incandescent landscape, awash with colour applied in broken brushwork, shares an affinity with Bacon’s African-inflected interiors from the early nineteen-fifties like Two Figures in the Grass (1954, Private Collection). These manifold points of comparison suggest the artists’ shared intentions, both of them working from similar feelings of anomie and disaffection. Crozier’s use of a curtain, hanging on rings and drawn to one side, is also of special notice. The curtain has long been used as a convenient device with which to create a shallow sense of pictorial depth. In The Dancer, this sense is further emphasised by the thin sliver of foreground on which the top-hatted figure stands, a narrow band of saturated earthen green that lines the lower edge of the picture. The curtain motif was also used by Bacon – in Study for a Portrait (1952, Tate Collection), for example, where it sits immediately behind the man’s head, seeming to push him in front of the picture plane. Crozier’s manipulation of space creates a sense of precariousness in The Dancer, suggesting an imminent fall or loss of balance. This work comes from a period of creative flowering in Crozier’s career, a productive phase which drew together his novel imagery of death with flamboyant colouring. Behind the figure a swathe of red paint is inflected with wet-in-wet additions of yellow, a decorative passage which seems to carry an association of nuclear holocaust. Marrying with this the playful imagery of swinging lightbulbs and a drawn-back curtain, the artist reached for a visually immediate effect that adequately expressed his disturbed mood. The memory of the concentration camps is the subtext for this painting and others from this time in Crozier’s work. Transforming that mood of disconsolation into a forceful and perhaps dystopian image, The Dancer is a superior painting of both menace and humanity, the response to moral catastrophe by a sensitive artistic observer.