The Black Triptychs

The Black Triptychs are a series of three triptychs painted by the Irish-born English artist Francis Bacon between 1972 and 1974. Bacon admitted that they were created as an exorcism of his sense of loss following the 1971 suicide of his former lover and principal model, George Dyer. Two days before the opening of Bacon's triumphant and career-making retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer, then 37, alcoholic, deeply insecure and suffering severe and long-term depression, committed suicide through an overdose of drink and barbiturates in a room at the Paris hotel Bacon had allowed him to share during a brief period of reconciliation following years of bitter recrimination.

Bacon, a near-alcoholic himself, felt an acute sense of mortality and awareness of the fragility of life after his former friend's death. This awareness was heightened by the death of many other close friends during the following decade. The most acute paintings after the loss of his friends are considered to be the many images of Dyer, including the three "Black triptychs", Three Portraits: Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self-Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud of 1973, and numerous heads painted within three years of 1972.

Each triptych shows views from moments before, during and after Dyer's death. The scenes are not represented linearly; they do not always read from left to right. Each shows a comatose man, collapsed or dead near the hotel room's lavatory seat. In most, Dyer is followed by black horizontal fleshy winged creatures, raw and red/pink blobs of dying flesh, or by painterly arrows. These devices act both as pointers to the depravity and tragedy of the scene and as manifestations of Bacon's guilt at the death of an emotionally dependent friend.

Bacon met Dyer—in an often repeated but likely fictitious story—when he caught the younger man breaking in through the roof of his flat in a failed burglary. Dyer was then in his early 30s, tall and athletic, and largely uneducated and from an impoverished East London background—all of which appealed to Bacon's taste for rough trade. There was an immediate connection between the two men, and from the mid-1960s Dyer became Bacon's principal model and muse. However, while Bacon's fame grew and critical attention of the successful portraits of Dyer brought the younger man a degree of fame and notoriety, the focus on Bacon as the star of the art world overshadowed Dyer's neediness, and he inevitably came to see himself as just another associate and hanger-on.

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