The Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted 28 known triptychs between 1944 and 1986. He began to work in the format in the mid-1940s with a number of smaller scale formats before graduating in 1962 to large examples. He followed the larger style for 30 years, although he painted a number of smaller scale triptychs of friend's heads, and after the death of his former lover George Dyer in 1971, the three Black Triptychs.
Overview
Bacon was a highly mannered artist often preoccupied with forms, themes, images and modes of expression that he would rework for sustained periods, often across decades. When asked about his tendency for sequential paintings, he explained how, in his mind, images revealed themselves "in series. And I suppose I could go long beyond the triptych and do five or six together, but I find the triptych is a more balanced unit." His career began with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, an instant critical and popular success. The format appealed to him; he said, "I see images in series", according to Bacon images suggested other images and series became his dominant motif. He moved past the triptych format, and from the late 40s to the late 50s produced works in series of up to 10 works, many of which rank amongst his finest, including his series of Popes, heads and men in suits.
Bacon fell from critical favour in the late 1950s having been a darling for the previous 10 years. He later admitted he had lost his voice and was seeking a new way to express himself which involved a lot of transitional work, much of which he destroyed, and much of which he preferred not to be included in his canon. 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.
He told critics that his usual practice with triptychs was to begin with the left panel and work across. Typically he completed each frame before beginning the next. As the work as a whole progressed, he would sometimes return to an earlier panel to make revisions, though this practice was generally carried out late in the overall work's completion.
Works
During the late 1940s and 1950s, Bacon worked on several series, such as his screaming heads, popes, animals in prey and men in blue suits. The use of reworked and revisited imagery transferred into regular use of a triptych format in the early 1960s. In interviews, Bacon said that when he daydreamed, images occurred in "hundreds at a time, some link up with one another." 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.
Bacon began his first large triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion in February 1962. Although he often completed a major canvas in a day, this work was not finished until the following March. At 194 cm x 145 cm, it is four times the size of his previous triptych and his first major work, the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with which the 1962 work shares both theme and title. In 1964, he extended the standard width of each canvas by 2.5 cm, and discounting the mid-1960s heads and early-mid "Black Triptychs", retained the larger, monumental scale for all triptychs painted in the remaining thirty years of his life.
In 2000, the art critic David Sylvester categorised Bacon's large triptychs into three groupings: 18 showing a dramatic or erotic event, six showing three full-length seated portraits, and four containing single nude figures. 36 contain a single nude figure, 24 a single clothed figure. Five show a biomorph, 4 contain still lives. 28 are large, generally five times bigger than the small format works. Bacon was highly self-critical and destroyed a great many canvases. It is known that at least five were destroyed, while two or three were likely split by dealers and sold as individual canvasses.
Crucifixions
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. This idea was drawn from a long tradition in art history, and was influenced strongly by Rembrandt's Side of beef and Chaïm Soutine's Carcass of Beef.