Triptych, May–June 1973
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 of the artist’s retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais on 24 October 1971. Bacon was haunted and preoccupied by Dyer’s loss for the remaining years of his life and painted many works based on both the actual suicide and the events of its aftermath. Tripty Ch was purchased at auction in 1989 by Esther Grether for USD 6. 3 million, then a record for a Bacon painting.
About Triptych, May–June 1973 in brief
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 of the artist’s retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais on 24 October 1971. Bacon was haunted and preoccupied by Dyer’s loss for the remaining years of his life and painted many works based on both the actual suicide and the events of its aftermath. The work is stylistically more static and monumental than Bacon’s earlier triptyChs of Greek figures and friends’ heads. It has been described as one of his “supreme achievements” and is generally viewed as his most intense and tragic canvas. Tripty Ch was purchased at auction in 1989 by Esther Grether for USD 6. 3 million, then a record for a Bacon painting. Bacon’s treatment of his lover in these canvasses emphasises his subject’s physicality while remaining uncharacteristically tender. More than any other of his close friends portrayed during this period, Dyer came to feel inseparable from his effigies. The paintings gave him stature, a raison d’être, and offered meaning to what Bacon described as Dyer’s “brief interlude between life and death”. Many critics have cited Michel Leiris and Lawrence Leiris as favourites, including Michel Gowling. Dyer welcomed the attention the paintings brought him, though he did not pretend to understand them or even re-ely ‘orrible’, he observed with choked pride.
He abandoned crime soon after Bacon’s money allowed him to attract hangers-on who would accompany him on massive benders around London’s Soho’s benders. Although Bacon’s younger circle of friends cited Dyer as a favourite, the man became increasingly bitter and ill at ease with the attention he was receiving from sophisticated intellectuals. He would often attempt to pull Bacon’s large rounds by buying him expensive dinners and paying for his drinks for him when sober, and would attempt to insuppress him when he was drunk. Bacon described Dyer to friends as a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance. He felt as if he had found a purpose, as the prominent artist’s companion. Bacon’s relationships prior to Dyer had all been with older men who were as tumultuous in temperament as the artist himself, but each had been the dominating presence. Peter Lacy, his first lover, would often tear up the young artist’s paintings, beat him up in drunken rages, and leave him on the street half-conscious. Dyer was then about thirty years old and had grown up in the East End of London in a family steeped in crime. He had spent his life drifting between theft, juvenile detention center and jail. He admired Bacon’s intellect and his artistic success and was in awe of his self-confidence, and Bacon acted as a protector and father figure to the insecure younger man.
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