Metropolitan Museum of Art, after early state of the centre panel of 'Triptych 1974-77' (Sabatier 11), 1975

Circle Arts International, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Bruno Sabatier, "Francis Bacon: The Graphic Work", Paris, 2012, catalogue no. 11

This colour lithograph is based on the middle panel of a triptych Francis Bacon painted for a 1974 retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, a distorted figure is poised for action, crouching on a sandy beach as if preparing to leave a violent arena. The beaten fighter’s musculature strongly evokes Michelangelo’s powerful sculptures of human figures and Eadweard Muybridge’s late 1870s photographic studies of wrestling men. However, this vast open space is a mere illusion, since the figure appears stranded while facing a pitch-black canvas in the background. The figure can be identified in the right-hand panel of the original triptych as George Dyer, who met the artist in 1963. He became his muse and lover until he tragically passed away two days before the opening of the artist’s most extensive retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon would obsessively represent Dyer in numerous portraits both during his life and after his untimely death. In this stirring work, the defeated, striped-bare fighter pays tribute to Dyer, inching ever closer to a dark abyss with no possibility of return.