1

Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted 28 known triptychs between 1944 and 1986. The Triptych pictured above was his final one. Using oil paints on prepared linen, Bacon painted from the left panel and worked across, usually completing each frame before beginning the next. Since he was very sick by 1991, art scholars have suggested that this piece represents Bacon painting his own death.

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A triptych tells a story in three pieces. There are three panels, a trio, a trinity — and the mind has to cross them, the mind has to mimic the structure of division. We face the triptych.

The word face comes from the Latin word fascia, meaning corresponding to form, figure, face; it is related to facere meaning to make, to do, perform. (This verb is the same in Romanian.)

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“What is the story of a face?” Dan Beachy-Quick asks in his essay, “Allegory of a Face” (on the work of Simon Dinnerstein):

“It is wounded, and it stares at us through its wounds, or eyes. It is wounded, and speaks through its wound, or mouth. The face that tells a story is also a story itself. It says: there is no art without damage.”

4

In Bacon’s triptych, the face stands apart from the flesh — it is tacked-on to the canvas like a self-conscious headshot doubling as a label which tells the viewer that this is a man, or two men.

The left panel faces us with its face — which is the face of a Brazilian racecar driver.

The right panel faces us with its face — which is Bacon’s face.

In iconography, which is where the triptych originated, the center panel exhibits the object of devotion.

Bacon’s central panel depicts two bodies, tangled, faceless. We are not allowed to read their facial expressions. Something is hidden from us. Something is made sacred in this hiding.

And yet — each figure seems to exist in its own black box, its own theatrical space where no other figures absorb or receive their gestures. “Every enacted calamity is presented as a mere collateral accident”: John Berger.

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Bacon tied his preference for making triptychs to his though of one day making a film. “I like the juxtaposition of the images seperated on three different canvases,” he said.

Historian Mark Harrison has said of Bacon’s early years:

“He had this strange, staccato early career. Not many of his early works survive because he tried to destroy them. It’s really because they stayed in the collection of friends and relatives that we have any.”

Although Bacon was Irish, his primary artistic influences were French. Monaco is “where Bacon became Bacon.” Drawn to the gambling, sunshine, and tonal friskiness, he lived in Monaco after the war with his partner Eric Hall and childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot.

John Berger didn’t begin to appreciate Bacon’s work until later in life, and he wrote about regretting this late discovery. Of Of Bacon he writes:

“What is different in Bacon’s vision is that there are not witnesses and there is no grief. Nobody painted by him notices what is happening to somebody else painted by him. Such ubiquitous indifference is crueller than any mutilation.”

6

One could take each panel of this triptych and write a small story, a character sketch from it, imagining the subject apart from Bacon and his work — I’m thinking of “Mr. Sandy” by Peter Orner as an example.

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Mark Harrison is the one who actually found Bacon’s final painting, as explained by Mark Brown:

Residing in a “very private, private collection” in London, Study of a Bull. 1991, came to light as Harrison worked on editing a catalogue of every work by Bacon . . .

“Bacon is ready to sign off ... he was so ill,” he said. “He knew exactly what he was doing here. Is the bull making an entrance? Is he receding to somewhere else? To his cremation?”

Most of the two-metre-high painting is deliberately raw canvas. Underneath the bull Bacon has used real dust from his famously shambolic studio in South Kensington. “To me that is terribly poignant,” said Harrison. “He often used to say: ‘Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust.’”