The Postwar Figure
Bacon, Triptych - August 1972 Francis Bacon, Triptych - August 1972, 1972, oil on canvas, 72 x 61 x 22 in. (183 x 155 x 64 cm), (Tate Modern, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker For more: http://smarthistory.org/francis-bacon-triptych-august-1972.html
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- We're in the Tate Modern and we're looking at a Francis Bacon.
- Actually, we're looking at three Francis Bacons. This is one work of art but in three large
- painted panels. It's a triptych. In fact, that's the title.
- Normally when I think of a triptych I think of a renaissance or a medieval
- alter piece that's in three panels that're connected and therefore something that is
- spiritual, religious scenes, but here we are in the twentieth century using that format.
- But there is something dark and spiritual about these images.
- These were deeply personal paintings and the subject couldn't be closer to home for the artist.
- You know, you can tell how personal they are. On either side these figures are very, very powerfully
- depicted. That seems very psychological and personal and emotional and profound from the way
- that he's treating the human body. Tell me about what the personal aspect is.
- So, within these very spare renderings, we have the representation of George Dyer on the left.
- This is Francis Bacon's lover
- who had just recently commited suicide. In fact this painting is seen as one of
- a series of black paintings that are, in a way, a kind of chronicle of his response to this event.
- We have the artist himself as a self portrait and then in the middle we've got this composite creature.
- You can just make out two bodies in a kind of violent lovemaking.
- The reference that's usually drawn by art historians is to the English photographer Muybridge
- who invented the strobe light and was the first person to use photography to freeze animals
- and people in action. He did a famous series of wrestlers from which this is drawn.
- But of course that scientific context is completely transformed in this personal context.
- In the image of Dyer there is an immediate sense of death. There's an immediate sense of the flesh
- disintergrating. With Bacon there's a feeling of the flesh melting or being eaten away.
- In fact, in his torso that blackness that's that panel in the back seems to kind of move forward
- and take over this figure's body. And at the same time there's something very transendent about the face.
- The eyes are closed, the head tilts up slightly as though there's a way that the figure is somehow
- transcending the body as the body is being consumed.
- It's so interesting that you say melting. We can see that shadow that he seems to cast almost as
- a kind of a pool of flesh to the lower right in some terrible way.
- The pool is pink and flesh color and the body itself is being taken over by this black.
- It's also that it seems to have a kind of dimension. It seems to be literally seeping out of him.
- There's a real tension between surface and an illusion of depth to the body.
- The depicted space as opposed to the conceptual space. That alternation becomes a
- beautiful metaphor. The entire set of paintings places these figures in a kind of isolation in a
- very spare, very abstracted space. He's created this very uncomfortable, very tense kind of relationship.
- On the other hand, both panels on either side, although they are flat,
- they have some sense of dimension by the diagonal line that's in front of either one.
- And yet in the central panel which is the most abstract and, in terms of the space, right?
- Because we don't have that diagonal line, we can't locate depth at all.
- It's almost as though the middle space where those two figures are joined, perhaps where he's rejoined
- with his lover, in some space beyond the physical, we have the most abstracted space
- whereas in the two other panels, as you said, there's that conceptual transendent
- flat space that's in conflict somehow with the organic, three dimensional shapes of the figures
- But I also read something else into that diagonal on the right and left panels.
- Although these are hung on a flat wall these're hinged paintings. And they actually come out
- at an angle towards us slightly, referencing that bottom angle.
- The way a traditional triptych would unfold.
- Yes, exactly. There's tremendous energy being expended in the brushstrokes.
- I see it in the composition and I see it in the tension between the figures.
- Sexual or violent or both.
- Yeah, you have, in fact, that big broad white brush stroke.
- Yeah, that's interesting in another sense because of course Bacon, although he's working in Britain,
- is very much of the generation of the abstract expressionists.
- Bacon, quite distinctly, and very much unlike the Americans, is maintaining the primacy of the figure.
- So these are very hard edged, abstract shapes, yet one easily recalls the abstract expressionism.
- They're both responding to similar existential issues that have to do with the isolation of the figure,
- the meaning of the figure.
- These paintings are difficult to understand and to read. They take time to sort of grapple with.
- On the other hand, still having the presence of something that one can recognize,
- especially the human figure, does give us a handle.
- There's something really extraordinary about taking the human figure, painting it so beautifully
- but then attacking it, cutting into it, melting it away, making it so grotesque.
- I think that's what makes these paintings so tough.
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