Triptychs by Francis Bacon
His 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion, painted to coincide with his first retrospective at the Tate, marked a return to form and has been highly praised by critics and historians such as David Sylvester, Michel Leiris and Michael Peppiatt as a key turning point in his career.
The triptych format was attractive, he believed, because it physically broke the images and prevented forced or constructed narrative interpretation; a tendency in painting to which he was particularly opposed and found banal.
[2] As well as being Bacon's first large format triptych, Three Studies for a Crucifixion introduced the later and often repeated visual motif a human body turned inside out.
[5] Although the idea of torn flesh was present in early work such as his Painting (1946), in the 1960s triptychs and the two versions of the Lying figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963 & 1968), Bacon inverts the epidermis and guts of human torsos to create imagery, according to Sylvester, nearing the grotesque and horror of Rubens's Descent from the Cross, and the Crucifix panel of Cimabue.
[5] His first three major triptychs were of crucifixion scenes, and all bear debt to Rubens's The Descent from the Cross, a work the normally reticent Bacon praised time and again to critics.
On the opening day of his first Tate retrospective, he received word that his former lover Peter Lacey had died; news that had a devastating impact on him personally, and led him to produce his first triptych in the style to his heads of the mid-1950s, which had brought him to wider attention.
[6] The 1962 Study for Three Heads opened a dramatically new arena for the artist and was followed by similarly scaled triptychs for a series of works which can loosely be seen to be painted after his "Colony Room associates, including Dyer, Lucian Freud (for a period), Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes.
From the 1970s, as the artist himself approached later life, associates and drinking friends began to die, lending many of the portraits an added urgency and poignancy.
In Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem "Sweeney Agonistes", Bacon shows a couple erotically entwined in the right-hand panel, while a clothed male figure stands looking at them.
[2] Two days before the opening of Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais, George Dyer, his former lover and principal model for the past seven years, took his own life in the hotel room they were sharing.
[9] In each, Dyer is stalked by a broad shadow; which takes the form of pools of blood or flesh in the first and third panels, and the wings of the angel of death in the second and first.
