TRIPTYCH AUGUST (CENTRE PANEL), 1972

  • The central panel of Triptych August (centre panel), 1972, is the emotional core of the work and the image most...
    Triptych August (centre panel), 1972
    Lithograph, edition size of 180, 61cm x 49 cm 
    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon 
    The central panel of Triptych August (centre panel), 1972, is the emotional core of the work and the image most directly connected to George Dyer’s death. Here, Dyer’s body appears slumped and contorted on the ground, reduced to a distorted mass of flesh and shadow. The figure seems suspended between presence and absence, still tethered to life through memory, yet already claimed by death.
     
    Bacon renders this state with characteristic restraint: the space is sparse, the background dark and unyielding, the figure both emerging from and dissolving into the void. The ambiguity of form captures the instability of grief itself, where the boundaries between the living and the dead blur. In this panel, Bacon transforms a moment of unbearable loss into a visual meditation on mortality, memory, and the impossibility of holding on.
     
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  • I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.


    Francis Bacon

    George Dyer’s death in October 1971 remains one of the most tragic moments in Francis Bacon’s life. Dyer took his own life in a Paris hotel room, just hours before the opening of Bacon’s grand retrospective at the Grand Palais - an event meant to celebrate the artist’s career at its height. The contrast between public acclaim and private devastation could not have been starker.
    Though Bacon maintained his composure during the exhibition, the loss haunted him for the rest of his life. He rarely spoke about it, but the grief surfaced repeatedly in his art, particularly in the Black Triptychs, where Dyer’s image reappears as both memory and apparition. His death marked the beginning of a more introspective period for Bacon, one in which mortality, guilt, and the passage of time became central to his work.