SECOND VERSION OF TRIPTYCH 1944, 1988

  • Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988.
    Francis Bacon, Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988.
    Oil and aerosol paint on canvas. 
    Triptych. 
    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon, Image reproduced for educational purposes only. 
    Created over forty years after his original Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Second Version of Triptych 1944 marks Francis Bacon’s return to the imagery that first defined his career. Revisiting those twisted, shrieking forms with greater technical control and a colder emotional distance, Bacon transforms the raw brutality of the 1944 work into something more monumental and reflective.
     
    The figures, now painted on a grander scale and set against blood-red backgrounds, are less about immediate horror and more about endurance, the persistence of anguish across time. This later triptych shows Bacon looking back on his own mythology, reinterpreting it with the weight of decades of painting, loss, and self-scrutiny. It stands as both a summation of his themes and a haunting dialogue with his younger self.

  • You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.


    - Francis Bacon

    The work revisits his breakthrough painting from 1944, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which had shocked postwar Britain with its primal energy and sense of despair. By the late 1980s, Bacon was an international figure, his reputation secure, yet he remained drawn to the same imagery of anguish and isolation that first made his name. Reworking the triptych allowed him to confront his own history, to measure the distance between the furious immediacy of youth and the cold clarity of age. Exhibited at the Tate soon after its completion, the painting was received as both a reckoning and a final statement, an artist facing the beginning and end of his career within a single, unflinching vision.