The Black Triptychs are a series of three triptychs painted by the British artist Francis Bacon between 1972 and 1974. Bacon admitted that they were created as an exorcism of his sense of loss followi
Triptych–August 1972. Oil on canvas, Tate Gallery
Triptych, May–June 1973, 1973. Oil on canvas. Private collection, Switzerland. The alarm indicated by the arrows in this work betrays the stoicism Bacon displayed on the night of the suicide and premiere, when he acted the model host, and met politicians and dignitaries "as if nothing had happened"
Dyer photographed by John Deakin, retouched by Bacon, who often folded, creased or spattered with paint his photographs of friends so as to find distortions he could exploit in his paintings. Although Dyer was handsome and charming, he was out of his depth when dealing with both Bacon's wasp-tongued Soho set and intellectual art world friends.
Center panel from Bacon's Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86. This work was painted after an extended period of examination of the effect of age and time on both himself and his close friends, during a period when many of those around him died. Tied to the black triptychs in theme, format, structure and tone, this work is considered the masterpiece of his late period.
Triptych, May–June 1973 is a triptych completed in 1973 by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The oil-on-canvas was painted in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve o
The Black Triptychs
…was not his intention to convey any sort of narrative in his work. When Melvyn Bragg challenged him in a 1985 BBC interview with the observation that Triptych, May–June 1973 was the nearest he 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…
Study for the Head of George Dyer (1966)
Melencolia I, by Albrecht Dürer, 1514