Word: triptychs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Picasso was the first source. In the central panel of one of Bacon's great works from the 1970s, Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso's seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed...
...first of those images he set loose in public was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych he exhibited in 1945, when he was 35 years old. On three panels of bright reddish orange scuffed with grey, a trio of mutant figures grimace, snarl and bark. In two of them, the most expressive feature is the gaping mouth. What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes in any face painted...
...always a mistake to understand Bacon's work too quickly by way of his life. That's true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon's 1971 Paris retrospective. With a picture like Triptych - August 1972 Bacon didn't simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to an even starker abbreviation of a pitiless world. All through the '70s Bacon would flatten and simplify the spaces within which he put his liquid...
...when he died in 1992 - Bacon was almost too fluent in his own idioms of despair. There are cluttered, over-determined pictures in the last galleries, where you watch him trying to find a way to make it new. But there are also great ones, like the 1991 Triptych. In all three panels, a large black square is placed like a window within a flat, beige background. In the center, a figure barely recognizable as human flows over the lower edge of the black square. On each side panel, Bacon appears as a painted photograph of his own head pinned...
...Gauguin's, contrast strikingly with the simplified shapes and subtle lighting in William Scott's kitchen-implement still lifes. The collection also features powerful observations of Irish rural life by Jack B. Yeats, brother of the poet, haunting society portraits by John Lavery and a specially commissioned Dublin triptych by Martin Mooney. For definitive insight into the works, a tour with Olive Knox, a curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, can be arranged...