Francis Bacon - The Black Triptychs

'In Memory of George Dyer' - 1971

'Triptych - August 1972'

'Triptych - May/June 1973'

"The Black Triptychs are a series of three triptychs painted by the Irish-born English artist Francis Bacon between 1972 and 1974. Bacon admitted that they were created as an exorcism of his sense of loss following the 1972 suicide of his former lover and principal model, George Dyer. Two days before the opening of Bacon's triumphant and career-making retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer, then 37, alcoholic, deeply insecure and suffering severe and long-term depression, killed himself with an overdose of drink and barbiturates in a room at the Paris hotel Bacon had allowed him to share during a brief period of reconciliation following years of bitter recrimination".