User talk:Ceoil/3 Studies

"Bacon's auto-plagiarism in areas other than portraiture had less deleterious consequences. Nonetheless the 1988 version (or near copy) of the great 1944 Crucifixion Triptych is the lesser work: it is slicker, more polished and it evinces a greater ease with paint. But it lacks the terrible rawness of the original. The introduction of more space around each figure renders the composition centripetal. The backgrounds are now elaborated, defined and bereft of the garish, grating poison orange of 1944."

"The paintings have titles like Study from the Human Body, Study for Portrait, Study for Crouching Nude, Study of a Figure in a Landscape, Study after Velsquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. So there are studies from, studies for, studies of, studies after, as if to say that at least some of the works were preliminary sketches for more definitive statements. What is in fact being said is that the artist wishes all his works to be regarded as provisional."

"The primal scream is Bacon's essential concern and message. A gaping mouth bristling with feral teeth and sometimes planted in a hideous, alien skull is a frequent motif. Specific paintings refer to the Greek myths of Orestes being pursued by the Furies for murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, and of Oedipus murdering his father and marrying his mother. The visual references to these sources are obscure and distorted beyond recognition, but the agonized spirit of the paintings is consistent with them."

The scream

Still from the "Odessa Steps" sequence in 'Battleship Potemkin'

• Gloomily phallic
• Vagina dentata
• 'strong associations of impotence and castration' (sylvester)
• Battleship Potemkin - Study for the nurse - Odessa steps
• relationship with father - 'horsewhipped by grooms', mirror/make up

Images in series

"I see images in series. And I suppose I could go on long beyond the triptych and do five or six together, but I find the triptych is a more balanced unit".

He first developed an interest in the triptych as a format from viewing reproductions of the Isenheim alterpiece.

Originally titled Figures at the foot of the Cross

• "Bacon seems not to have been espically pleased with the the triptych format of the Tate painting; for nearly two decades after he elected to work almost exclusively with single images, which at the time were concieved in series."