Francis Bacon
Three
Studies of Lucian Freud. 1969
Study of a Nude with
Figure in a Mirror. 1969
Study for Bullfight. 1969
Second Version of
'Study for Bullfight No.1'. 1969
Three Studies of the Male
Back, 1970 - Triptych. 1970
Studies of the Human
Body - Triptych. 1970
Studies of the
Human Body - Triptych. 1970 Oil on canvas. each panel 198 x
147.5 cm. Jacques Hachuel Collection
Study
for a Portrait. 1970
Triptych 1970
oil on canvas. each 198.0 (h) x 147.5 (w)
cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The features of the man, dapperly dressed in the
left canvas, and naked in the right canvas, are recognisably those of George
Dyer. Bacon met Dyer in 1964 and he became Bacon's close friend and primary
model for over a decade, his presence persisting in Bacon's work well beyond his
death in Paris in October 1971. Bacon preferred to work from memory and
photographs. As a point of departure he often used the serial photographs which
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) made in the 1880s of humans and animals in motion
and published in the enormous compendium Animal Locomotion in 1887. The
image in the central panel of the Canberra painting was adopted from Muybridge's
photographs of wrestlers. Bacon had used this image on a number of previous
occasions, at first in Two figures 1953 (private collection, London) and,
contemporaneously with the Canberra painting, in the central panel of
Triptych — studies from the human body 1970 (collection Jacques Hachuel,
Paris). However, Muybridge's photographs may also have been the source of
another feature that is unique to the Canberra Triptych - the suspended
platforms that support the figure in the left and in the right panels. While the
overlapping geometric forms of the platforms may recall Bacon's own early
designs for modernist furniture, the complex system of lines denoting ropes or
wires from which these platforms are suspended seem to be derived from
Muybridge's serial photographs of a woman getting into and out of a hammock -
also from Animal Locomotion.
Michael Lloyd & Michael Desmond European and American Paintings and
Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery 1992 p.402.
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