Francis Bacon, Triptych – August 1972, 1972, oil on canvas, 72 x 61 x 22″ / 183 x 155 x 64 cm, (Tate Modern, London)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] We’re in the Tate Modern, and we’re looking at a Francis Bacon. Actually, we’re looking at three Francis Bacons. This is one work of art but in three large painted panels. It’s a triptych. In fact, that’s the title.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:17] Normally, when I think about a triptych, I think about a Renaissance or a medieval altarpiece that’s in three panels that are connected, and therefore, something that is spiritual, a religious scene. But here we are in the 20th century using that format, but there is something dark and spiritual about these images.
Dr. Zucker: [0:35] These were deeply personal paintings. The subject couldn’t be closer to home for the artist.
Dr. Harris: [0:39] You can tell how personal they are. On either side, these figures are very, very powerfully depicted. That seems very psychological, and personal, and emotional, and profound from the way that he’s treating the human body. Tell me about what the personal aspect is.
Dr. Zucker: [0:55] So within these very spare renderings, we have a representation of George Dyer on the left. This is Francis Bacon’s lover, who had just recently committed suicide.
[1:06] In fact, this painting is generally seen as one of a series of black paintings that are, in a way, a chronicle of his response to this event. You’ve got the artist himself, the self-portrait. And then in the middle, you’ve got this composite creature.
[1:21] You can just make out two bodies in a violent lovemaking. The reference that’s usually drawn by art historians is to the English photographer, Muybridge, who invented the strobe light and was the first person to use photography to freeze animals and people in action.
[1:37] He did a famous series of wrestlers, from which this is drawn. But of course, that scientific context is completely transformed in this personal context.
Dr. Harris: [1:46] In the image of Dyer, there’s an immediate sense of death. There’s an immediate sense of the flesh disintegrating with Bacon. There’s this feeling of the flesh melting or being eaten away. In fact, in his torso, that blackness that’s that panel in the back seems to move forward and take over this figure’s body.
[2:08] At the same time, there’s something very transcendent about the face. The eyes are closed. The head tilts up slightly as though there’s a way that the figure’s now transcending the body as the body is being consumed.
Dr. Zucker: [2:23] So interesting that you say “melting.” We can see that shadow that he seems to cast almost as a pool of flesh to the lower [left], in some terrible way.
Dr. Harris: [2:31] The pool is pink and flesh-colored. The body itself is being taken over by this black.
Dr. Zucker: [2:40] It’s also that it has a kind of dimension. It seems to be literally seeping out of him.
Dr. Harris: [2:44] There’s a real tension between surface and an illusion of depth to the body.
Dr. Zucker: [2:49] The depicted space as opposed to the conceptual space. That alternation becomes a beautiful metaphor, the entire set of paintings places these figures in a kind of isolation, in a very spare, very abstract space.
Dr. Harris: [3:02] Space.
Dr. Zucker: [3:03] He’s created this very uncomfortable, very tense kind of relationship.
Dr. Harris: [3:07] On the other hand, both panels on either side, although they are flat, they have some sense of dimension by the diagonal line that’s in front of either one. And yet, in the central panel, which is the most abstract in terms of the space, right, because we don’t have that diagonal line, we can’t locate depth at all.
Dr. Zucker: [3:25] Right.
Dr. Harris: [3:26] It’s almost as though the middle space, where those two figures are joined, perhaps where he’s rejoined with his lover in some space beyond the physical, we have the most abstracted space. Whereas in the other two panels, as you said, there’s that conceptual, transcendent, flat space that’s in conflict somehow with the organic three-dimensional shapes of the figures.
Dr. Zucker: [3:47] I also read something else into that diagonal on the right and left panels. Although these are hung on a flat wall, these are hinged paintings and they actually come out at an angle towards us slightly, referencing that bottom angle.
Dr. Harris: [3:59] The way that a traditional triptych would unfold.
Dr. Zucker: [4:02] Yes, exactly. There was tremendous energy being expended in the brushstrokes. I see it in the composition and I see it in the tension between the figures, sexual or violent or both.
Dr. Harris: [4:12] Yeah, and you have in fact that big broad white brushstroke.
Dr. Zucker: [4:16] Now that’s interesting in another sense, because of course Bacon, although he’s working in Britain, is very much of the generation of the Abstract Expressionists. Bacon, quite distinctly and very much unlike the Americans, is maintaining the primacy of the figure.
Dr. Harris: [4:30] These are very hard-edged abstract shapes, yet one easily recalls Abstract Expressionism.
Dr. Zucker: [4:36] They’re both responding to a similar kind of existential issues that have to do with the isolation of the figure, the meaning of the figure.
Dr. Harris: [4:42] These paintings are difficult to understand and to read. They take time to grapple with. On the other hand, still having the presence of something that one can recognize, especially the human figure, does give us a handle.
Dr. Zucker: [4:57] There’s something really extraordinary about taking the human figure, painting it so beautifully, but then attacking it, cutting into it, melting it away, making it so grotesque. I think that’s what makes these paintings so tough.
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