Triptych, May–June 1973
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Triptych, May-June 1973 is a 1973 painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The triptych was created in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer, who committed suicide in October 1971, on the eve of the artist's retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris. More static and monumental in style than Bacon's earlier triptychs, the work has been described as one of his "supreme achievements", and is generally viewed as his most intense and tragic canvas.[1]
The triptych is a portrait of Dyer dying.[2] Bacon's last twenty years were preoccupied by Dyer's suicide,[3] and he painted a number of such works in the years following Dyer's death. He later admitted to friends that he never fully recovered from the event, and described painting the triptych as an act of exorcism of his loss and guilt.[1] "Triptych, May-June 1973" is generally regarded as the most accomplished work in Bacon's "Black Triptychs" series, which he created in order to confronted his agony at Dyer's death.[4] In 1989, the Triptych set a record for a Bacon canvas when it sold at Sotheby's for $6,270,000.[5]
Background
Francis Bacon met George Dyer in 1962 when he caught the young man burglaring his home. Dyer was around thirty years old at the time, and had grown up in an East End of London family steeped in crime. He spent his life to that point drifting between theft, borstal, and jail. Dyer had a docile, inwardly tortured nature, belied by a compact and athletic build. The art critic Michael Peppiatt described him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch". Dyer was typical of Bacon's taste in men, and although he was no intellectual, he was fit and masculine. He was a borderline alcoholic, but took obsessive care with his appearance. Dyer was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and success, and the artist acted as a protector and father figure for the insecure younger man.[6] Bacon ensured Dyer ate well during drinking binges, although the younger man was usually unable to do so. Pale-faced and chain smoking, he normally confronted the horrors of his hangovers by drinking again. In response, Bacon provided Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk. Bacon's previous relationships had been with older men, and though similarly tumultuous, were effectively masochistic in nature. Bacon was attracted by Dyer's vulnerability and trusting nature, however over time those traits overwhelmed the relationship.
As Bacon's work moved from the exteme subject matter of his early paintings to his mid 1960s portraits of his friends, Dyer became a dominating presence in the artist's work. Bacon's treatment of his lover in these images emphasis his physicality, while remaining uncharacteristically tender. More than any of Bacon's close friends who were portraited, Dyer came to feel inseparable from his effigies. They gave him a stature and a raison d'etre, and meaning to what Bacon described as his "brief interlude between life and death".[7] They have been cited as a favourite of many critics, including Michel Leiris and Lawrence Gowling.
As the novelty of Dyer wore off on Bacon's circle of sophisticated intellectuals, he became increasingly ill at ease and bitter. Although he welcomed the attention the paintings brought to him, he did not pretend to understand or even like them. "All that money an' I fink they're reely 'orrible", he observed with choked pride.[8] He abandoned crime, and spiraled into alcoholism. Bacon's money allowed Dyer to amass hangers-on, who accompanied him on his massive benders around London's Soho. Although withdrawn and reserved when sober, Dyer was insuppressible when drunk, and would often attempt to "pull a Bacon" by buying large rounds, and paying for expensive dinners for his wide circle. Such erratic behaviour inevitability wore thin, with his cronies, with Bacon, and with Bacon's friends. Most art world contacts regarded Dyer as a nuisance; an intrusion into the world of high culture to which their Bacon belonged.[9] Dyer reacted by becoming increasingly needy and dependent. By 1970, he was drinking alone, and only in occasional contact with his former lover.
In October 1971, Dyer accompanied Bacon to Paris for the opening of his retrospective at the Grand Palais. The show was a peak in Bacon's career to that point, and he was at the time being described as "the greatest living painter". Dyer was by then a desperate man, and although he was "allowed" to attend, he was well aware that he was "slipping", in every sense, out of the picture. In an effort to draw Bacon's attention he planted cannabis in Bacon's flat before phoning the police, and attempted suicide in New York while traveling with the artist.
Bacon and Dyer shared a hotel room on the eve of the exhibition, and Bacon spent the day surrounded by people eager to meet him. In the mid-evening, he was informed that Dyer had taken an overdose of barbiturates and died. Though devastated, Bacon continued, and displayed powers of self control Russell has described as "to which few of us could aspire.[3] From this point on, death stalked both Bacon's work and life.[10] The loss of Dyer, along with the deaths of his friends Belcher, Rawsthorn, Watson, Deakin, and his nanny Winifred were harsh lessons in life, and though he gave a stoical appearance; he was inwardly broken. He gave no indication of his feelings to critics, but later admitted to friends that "daemons, disaster and loss" now stalked him as if his own version of the Eumenides.[11]
Bacon spent the remainder of his stay in Paris attending to promotional activities and funeral arrangements. He returned later that week to London to comfort Dyer's family. The funeral proved to be an emotional affair for all, and many of Dyer's friends—hardened East End criminals—broke down in tears. As the coffin was lowered into the grave one attendant screamed "you bloody fool". Yet Bacon remained stoic throughout, although in the following months Dyer preoccupied his imagination as never before. To confront his loss, he painted a number of number of small canvas tributes, as well as his "Black Triptych" masterpieces.[12]
The triptych
In each panel Dyer is framed by a doorway, and set against a flat anonymous foreground colored in black and brown. In the left panel, Dyer sits on a toilet, his head bowed. Although his arched back, thighs and legs are, according to the art critic Colm Tóibín "lovingly painted", Dyer is clearly a broken man. The center panel shows his head and upper body writhing beneath a hanging lightbulb, which throws a large bat-like shadow formed as a demon or fury. He is likely seated on a lavatory bowl, though it is not described.[2] Sally Yard had noted that in the portrayal of Dyer's flesh "life seems to visably drain… into the substantial character of the shadow beneath him".[13]
In the right panel, Dyer is shown with his eyes shut vomiting into a hand basin. In the two outer frames the figure is shadowed by arrows; a pictorial device Bacon often used to give energy to his paintings.[2] In this work, they point to a man about to die, and according to Colm Tóibín, scream "Here!", "Him!". The triptych is centralised by the lightbulb, and by the the fact that Dyer faces towards the central panel in the two outer canvases. The triptych's composition and setting are rendered to suggest instability, and doors of its side panels are splayed outwards into the darkness of the foreground.[14]
John Russell has observed that the painting's background is half-studio, half condemned cell. The work achieves its tension by locating voluptuously described figures in an austere, cage-like place. Bacon has stated that "painting has nothing to do with colouring surfaces", and in general he was not preoccupied with detailing his backgrounds. "When I feel that I have to some extent formed the image, I put the background in to see how it's going to work and then I go with the image itself".[15] Bacon told David Sylvester that he intended the "hard, flat, bright ground" to juxtapose with the complexity of the central images, and noted that "for this work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself". Bacon usually applied paint to the background quickly, with "great energy", however he thought of it as a secondary element. He used colour to establish tone, but in his mind the real work began when he came to the figures.
Confrontation with death
Throughout his career, Bacon consciously avoided explaining the meaning behind his paintings, and pointedly observed that they were not narratives, or open to interpretation. When the BBC braodcaster Melvyn Bragg challenged him in 1984 with the observation that "Triptych, May-June 1973" was the nearest the artist had come to telling a story, Bacon admitted that "it is in fact the nearest I've ever done to a story, because you know that is the triptych of how he was found". He went on to say that the work reflected not just his reaction to Dyer's passing, but his general feelings towards the fact that, at the time, his friends were "dying around me like flies". He continued to explain that they were "generally heavy drinkers", and that their passing lead directly to his composition of a series of self-portraits which emphasised his aging, and awarness of the passing of time. Bacon rendered this awarness by pronouncing a wristwatch intended as a countdown to death.
When Bragg inquired if he often though about death, the artist replied that he was always aware of it, and although "its just around the corner for [me], I don't think about it, because there's nothing to think about. When it comes it's there. You've had it." Reflecting on the loss of Dyer Bacon observed that as as part of the process of growing old, "life becomes more of a desert around you".[16]
The Black Triptychs
Bacon's work from the 1970s has been described by the art critic Hugh Davies as the "frenzied momentum of a struggle against death". Bacon admitted during an interview in 1974 that "the hardest thing about aging is losing your friends. My life is almost over and all the people I've loved are dead." His concern is reflected in the darkened flesh and background tones of his paintings from this period.[17]
Bacon's acute sense of the fragility of life was hightened by Dyer's death in Paris. During the following three years he painted many images of his former lover, including a series of three triptychs which have come to be seen as amongst his best work. They share a number of characteristics which bind them together. The form of a monochrome rendered doorway features centrally in all, and each is framed by flat and shallow walls.[17] In all three Dyer is staked by a broad shadow, which takes the form of pools of either blood or flesh in the first and third, and the wings of the angel of death in the second.[18]
The black triptychs display sequential views of a single figure, and were intended to be like stills from a film.[19] The figures rendered are not drawn from any of Bacon's intellectual sources; they do not depict Golgotha, Handes, or Leopold Bloom. Bacon strips subject of his black triptychs from context, and presents him as a nameless gathering of flesh slumped across toilets and basins; awaiting the onset of death.[20]
When asked by Bragg, Melvyn in 1984 if the portraits painted in the wake of Dyer's death were depictions of his emotional reaction to the event, Bacon replied that he did not consider himself to be an "expressionist painter". He explained that he was "not trying to express anything, I wasn't trying to express the sorrow, about somebody committing suicide...but perhalps it comes through without knowing it".[16] Describing the Black Triptychs in 1993, the art critic Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote that "the horror, the abjection that oozed from the crucifixes has been transformed in his last paintings into quiet solitude. The masculine bodies entwined in a carnal embrace have given way to the solitary figure leaning over the washbasin, standing firm on the smooth ground, neutral, bald-headed, his convex back deformed, his testicles contracted in a fold.[21]
Notes
- ^ a b Dawson (2000), p.108
- ^ a b c Tóibín, Colm. "Such a Grip and Twist". The Dublin Review, 2000.
- ^ a b Russell 1971, p.151
- ^ Davis, Yard (1986), p.65
- ^ "Post-War Works Shine at Christie's" Artnet News, 16 November, 2000. Retrieved on 07 May, 2007.
- ^ Peppiatt (1996), p. 211.
- ^ Peppiatt (1996), p. 213.
- ^ Peppiatt (1996), p. 214.
- ^ Russell (1971).
- ^ Russell 1971, p. 178.
- ^ Russell (1970), p. 179.
- ^ Peppiatt (1996), p. 243.
- ^ Davis, Yard (1986), p. 69.
- ^ Davies; Yard (1986), p.74
- ^ Sylvester
- ^ a b Bragg, Melvyn. "Francis Bacon". South Bank Show. BBC documentary film, first aired June 9, 1985.
- ^ a b Davies; Yard (1986), p. 65.
- ^ Davies; Yard (1986), pp. 67–76.
- ^ Davies; Yard (1986), p. 74.
- ^ Schmied (1996), p. 84.
- ^ Aliaga, Juan Vicente. "Francis Bacon — Galerie Marlborough, Madrid, Spain". ArtForum, February, 1993. Retrieved on May 8, 2007
Printed sources
- Davis, Hugh; Yard, Sally, (1986). "Francis Bacon". (New York) Cross River Press. ISBN 0-8965-9447-8
- Dawson, Barbara; Slyvester, David,(2000). "Francis Bacon in Dublin". Thames & Hunson.
- Peppiatt, Michael (1996). Anatomy of an Enigma. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-3520-5
- Russell, John (1971). Francis Bacon (World of Art). Norton. ISBN 0-5002-0169-2