Name: Triptych 1974-1977, 1981
Brand: Francis Bacon
Rating: 4.7 (11 reviews)

Triptych 1974-1977, 1981

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About the Item

This etching with aquatint is hand signed in pencil by the artist "Francis Bacon" in the lower right margin. It is also numbered in pencil "AP" (Artist Proof) in the lower left margin. This artwork was printed in a limited edition of 99 signed and numbered impressions on one sheet. There was another edition of 99 impressions made on three different sheets of paper. Ours in one the few artists proofs printed aside rge regular edition. The work was published and printed by Poligrafa, Barcelona in 1981. Note: The Tryptich of 1974-1977 is considered to be one of the finest Tryptichs ever created by Bacon. It was painted between May and June 1974 in response to the tragic death of his lover George Dyer in 1971. It was the last work the artist made before a major retrospective of his work that was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1974. It formed the culmination of this important survey of Bacon's career from the late 1960s onwards and was immediately recognised as both a major landmark and also perhaps a turning point in Bacon's career. From 1971, Francis Bacon had been preoccupied with Dyer and the tragic manner of his suicide. Triptych 1974-77 also borrows several elements from the three earlier so-called 'Black' triptychs (In memory of George Dyer, 1971, Triptych August 1972 and Triptych May-June 1973). In each of these great three-panel paintings, the figure of Dyer is presented on the threshold of entering a dark void, either in the form of his hotel room, or silhouetted against a sequence of black rectangles. At the bottom of this central panel on a pale blue, purple and black curved continuation of this arena-like circle, there originally appeared a bizarre prone and bespectacled slug-like figure. Based on one of Edweard Muybridge's photographs Man falling prone and aiming rifle, it is an extraordinary figure, whose wide circular eyes staring the viewer with cold circumspection. In 1977, Bacon decided that this figure interfered too much with the general homogeneity of the rest of the composition and carefully painted it out in a manner that would ensure that over time its ghost should not reappear under the surface of the painted sand. It was in this way that Triptych May-June 1974 became Triptych 1974-77. The left-hand head is based on an altered image of Raymond Poincaré as it appears in Baron von Schrenck-Notzing's 1920 book Phenomena of Materialisation. The right-hand head derives from a distorted photograph of Sir Austen Chamberlain that appears in Amédée Ozenfant's Foundations of Modern Art. The umbrellas are no sunny beach parasols. With their black presence in the picture, they are responsible for endowing this otherwise pleasant beach with a sense of melancholy. They also recall Bacon's earlier and more sinister use of umbrellas to crown and conceal the figures in his 1940s paintings, Figure Study II and the terrifying Painting of 1946. The use of sea landscape reinforces the psychological atmosphere of the painting that this work comes close to the psychological Expressionism of an artist like Edvard Munch and the tortured atmosphere he managed to achieve through similar means in a painting such as Melancholy of 1891. Munch was another artist that Bacon admired, though he was always fiercely resistant to any association between himself and Expressionism.It is only the sea, which Bacon once told Michael Peppiatt could convey a 'feeling of hope', that lends this work any sense of optimism. Bacon was able to convey not just the extraordinary visceral vitality of life through the shock, surprise and immediacy of his paint, but also a profound sense of alienation felt by modern man than perhaps any other Twentieth Century painter. Bacon's subject matter is, ultimately, the odyssey of human life and the strangeness and awkwardness of man's existence. Literature: Tacou, Alexandre. Francis Bacon,Estampes. Editions Bervillé. Reference: Tacou 13.

Creator:
Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992, British, Irish)
Creation Year:
1981
Dimensions:
Height: 24 in (60.96 cm)Width: 43.3 in (109.99 cm)
Period:
1980-1989
Condition:
Excellent.
Gallery Location:
London, GB
Reference Number:
1stDibs: G13040918013

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