TRIPTYCH MAY-JUNE

  • TRIPTYCH MAY-JUNE, 1973, Francis Bacon

    TRIPTYCH MAY-JUNE, 1973

    Oil on canvas, Triptych: Each panel: 78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm)

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon. Image reproduced for educational purposes only. 

    Triptych May–June 1973 is one of Francis Bacon’s most powerful and personal works, painted in response to the death of his partner and muse, George Dyer. The triptych depicts scenes that allude to Dyer’s final moments and the emotional aftermath of his suicide in Paris two years earlier. In each panel, Dyer’s body is shown in different states of dissolution, his form twisting and fading within the confines of stark, empty rooms. The central image, based on the layout of the hotel bathroom where he died, carries a quiet but devastating tension.
     
    Rendered in deep blacks, fleshy pinks and muted creams, the triptych balances control and chaos, grief and detachment. Bacon’s brushwork is both precise and unrestrained, giving physical form to the trauma that haunted him throughout the 1970s. The work is often regarded as the last of his great Black Triptychs, a series that transformed personal tragedy into a profound reflection on death, memory and the passage of time. Triptych May–June 1973 stands not just as an elegy to Dyer, but as one of the most moving meditations on loss in twentieth-century art.

  • A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.

    - Francis Bacon

    The Black Triptychs are among Francis Bacon’s most deeply personal and emotionally charged works, painted in the years following the death of his partner, George Dyer. Created between 1971 and 1973, these large-scale three-part compositions confront the trauma of Dyer’s suicide, which occurred on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Rather than depicting the event directly, the Black Triptychs present fragmented, shifting images of Dyer’s final hours and Bacon’s own grief, set against dark, empty interiors that feel both real and psychological.