The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francis Bacon · a triptych: three separate panels of oil on board, each 94 by 73.7 cm, hung side by side, glazed and framed · one grey figure on each against a flat orange ground: a hunched body on a table, a long-necked figure on a plinth with its eyes bound, a creature with an open mouth on a patch of grass · painted in 1944 in Bacon’s studio in South Kensington, first shown at the Lefevre Gallery, London, in April 1945 · Tate, London · the unit scored is the three panels as one work, as they hang and as Bacon left them; the crucifixion they were to stand beneath was never painted, and the Second Version of 1988 is a separate work
Mode
The altarpiece without its victim: the religious triptych made secular, and the figure painted as a body under pressure
Mythos
The mourners at the foot of the cross become the Furies who pursue blood-guilt; a crucifixion with no one on the cross
Phase
Painted in 1944, in the last year of the war; first shown in London in April 1945
Presentation
Three panels of oil on board, each 94 by 73.7 cm, glazed and framed; one grey figure on each against a flat orange ground
Register
Dread at one temperature, three times over: a body turned away, a blind head facing out, a mouth open on its teeth
Scale
Three creatures, three props, one ground, about two square metres
Governing Proposition
Three panels hang side by side, each a little under a metre high, each with one grey creature on a flat orange ground: at the left a hunched body on a table, turned away; in the centre a long-necked figure on a plinth, its eyes bound; at the right a creature whose neck stretches out of the field, its mouth open on its teeth. The title puts them at the base of a crucifixion, where painting had always put the mourners, and the cross is not there. The wager of the triptych is that the altarpiece can be kept and its victim taken away, so that what waits at the foot of the cross is not grief but appetite and retribution, painted as bodies of neck, mouth and nerve in a field that gives them nowhere to be.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Three panels hang side by side, each 94 by 73.7 centimetres, oil on board, glazed and framed. Francis Bacon painted them in 1944 in his studio in South Kensington, and they hang in the Tate, London. Each is a little taller than it is wide, and together they cover just over two square metres. Each holds one grey figure against a flat, saturated orange, the same orange in all three, with no horizon and no cast shadow. The panels stand as Bacon left them.
At the left a hunched grey body rests on a table-like support, its torso swollen, its head lowered and turned away under a fall of what reads as hair or cloth. In the centre a long-necked figure stands on a plinth, its head bound across the eyes, a mouth beneath, facing out. At the right a creature set on a patch of grass-like ground stretches its neck out to the left of the panel, toward the viewer, its mouth wide open on its teeth. One creature to a panel, one prop to a creature, one ground for all three.
The title calls them studies and names the place they were meant for: the base of a large Crucifixion, which Bacon never painted. He destroyed most of what he had painted before, so this triptych stands at the head of his accepted work, and the triptych became his form. In 1988 he restated it as Second Version of Triptych 1944, now also in the Tate, at about twice the height on a deep red ground. That is a separate work, and context here. The work is the three panels of 1944, as one, as they hang.
Movement II
The foot of the cross is the mourners’ place. In altarpiece after altarpiece the Virgin, the Evangelist and the Magdalen stand there, and the triptych is the altarpiece’s own form. The title puts these three figures in that place, and the cross is not there. Nor is the centre panel its place: the bound figure on its plinth does not stand in for the crucified. The absence is the structure. There is no one on the cross to give the suffering at its foot a meaning, and what remains there is not grief.
Bacon later related the figures to the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the Furies who hunt down blood-guilt. With that, the Christian scene of redemption and the Greek scene of retribution lie on one another, and the mourners become pursuers. The account is his and comes after the fact; nothing in the panels names the Furies, and a viewer could not read them there. What the panels carry by themselves is the older pattern the title and the form give: three at the foot of a cross, with the cross withheld. The Furies are three as well.
What waits at the foot of the cross is appetite and retribution. The figures are bodies of neck, mouth and nerve, between beast and human, and none has a face to answer for itself. Painted in the last year of the war, the triptych says that the human figure can be rendered so, and the saying holds. But much of what it gives is a state, shock and dread at full strength, and Bacon refused to say what the figures meant. The refusal is part of how they work, and it leaves the condition shown rather than stated.
Movement III
Three panels, not one. Each figure is alone in its own field and cannot see the others: the triptych is a set of isolations, where one canvas would make the same three creatures into a scene. The orange is flat, with no horizon and no cast shadow, so the figures are nowhere, neither in a room nor in a landscape, and cannot recede. The panels are under a metre high, and the creatures are met face to face. The glass, which Bacon wanted, lays the viewer’s own reflection over them.
The right panel is the height: the mouth thrust out of the field on a neck stretched to its limit, teeth bared, a scream with no throat to come from, against a ground that allows it no shadow. The centre is a colder height, a bound head on a plinth, blind, facing out in the posture of a cult image. The left is the lowest, a body turned away in what could be grief or digestion. The centre is the hinge between the one who turns away and the one who screams. One law holds all three: a grey body, modelled, alone on its support, against flat orange, its form given by its pain.
The grey flesh is modelled soft and dry against a ground laid flat and saturated, so the figures seem to sit in front of the orange rather than in it. The open mouth is drawn exactly, teeth and gums placed so that the scream reads across a room and at hand; the bound head is given volume with very little. Elsewhere the hand is still learning. The supports are crudely stated, the spaces around the figures are barely built, and the left figure is muddier and less resolved than the other two. Bacon was self-taught, and this is the start of his command.
Movement IV
The inheritance is plain. The religious triptych, and the Crucifixion as Cimabue and Grünewald painted it, which Bacon named among the pictures he returned to. Picasso’s biomorphic bathers and figures of the late 1920s, from which these bodies descend. And the British painting of the war years, the neo-romantic landscape and the rooted, organic forms of Sutherland and Moore. The departure is as plain: a crucifixion without the crucified, an altarpiece made secular and claimed for one painter’s private terror, and Picasso’s forms taken off the beach and set on plinths in a field of colour with no space.
In April 1945 the triptych was shown at the Lefevre Gallery, London, in a mixed exhibition with Sutherland and Moore among others. Bacon was in his mid-thirties, with almost no surviving work, and had stopped painting for years. Its first viewers found it monstrous. It broke the wartime consensus in one showing and put the human figure back at the centre of serious painting as a body under pressure; by common account, postwar British painting begins with it. It was shown in the month the camps were opened to the press. The coincidence is real, but the picture was painted before the photographs, and its pressure does not depend on them.
What followed was first Bacon’s own: the triptych as his defining form for four decades, and the screaming heads of the 1950s. Then the figurative painting later grouped as the School of London, which defined itself against abstraction partly in his wake, and a long afterlife in images of the body in pain. Much of that reach belongs to the later work rather than to this picture. The international field of 1945 to 1960 went mostly to abstraction, and no school took up the method.
Movement V
In 1988 Bacon painted the three figures again, at about twice the height, on a deep red ground, smaller in their fields and set in a more articulated space. The second version shows that the composition could be held at another scale and in another colour without losing itself. It also shows what only the first has: in the later picture the shock has grown into a manner. The triptych of 1944 has outlived its first shock and its own second version.
It is 82 years old. The image is whole, three figures and their grounds as painted, and it has been in public view and in the literature since 1945, and in the Tate, among the pictures there that are most recognised. The support is its one weakness: oil on board is not built for centuries as a sound canvas is, and the panels are shown under glass for their protection. Nothing on the surface is fixed to 1944, no uniform, no ruin, no topical sign. Its war is in its pressure, not its furniture.
The questions have stayed open: what the figures are, mourners, Furies or animals; why the cross is absent, and whether the picture is religious, anti-religious or neither; how it stands to the war; how far it is Surrealist, which Bacon denied. David Sylvester’s interviews, the monographs of Russell and Peppiatt and Deleuze’s book on Bacon have returned to it, though more often to the painter and his method than to this picture, and its central formal reading was settled early. Every later triptych reads it backward. The three still wait at the foot of a cross that is not there.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the panels one by one and as a set. Remove a panel and the triad goes: the mourners at the foot of a cross are three by tradition, the Furies are three, and the triptych is the form that carries both. Remove the orange and the figures lose the one element common to all three, the airless field that isolates and binds them. Remove the table, the plinth and the grass and the figures float; the panels stop being stages. Within each panel nothing ornamental remains. What holds the axis is substitution: the left figure’s drapery and the supports read as found rather than compelled, the title’s own word, studies, admits the configuration was provisional, and the restatement of 1988 held the composition at another scale and colour.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What can be stated, and holds. The base of the cross is shown with the cross taken away, and what remains there is not grief but appetite and retribution: the mourners have become the creatures that pursue guilt, and no one on the cross gives their suffering a meaning. Painted in the last year of the war, the triptych states that the human figure can be rendered as a body of mouth, neck and nerve, with no face to answer for it. That is a claim about a condition, not a mood. What holds the axis below the gate is that much of what the panels give is a state, shock and dread at full strength, and Bacon’s refusal to give them a meaning is part of how they work. A state ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, three times in about two square metres. The right panel is the summit: the mouth thrust out of the field on a neck stretched to its limit, teeth bared, a scream with no throat to come from. The centre is a second, colder height: a bound head on a plinth, blind and facing out, in the posture of a cult image. The left is the lowest register, a body turned away in what could be grief or digestion. The orange carries the elevation throughout, a colour of heat and alarm with no shadow, so the figures cannot recede. What holds it: one temperature, terror, with no relief or turn; panels under a metre high, so grandeur of size is not available; and a left panel weaker than the other two.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built into the structure, which is why the axis clears the gate. The triptych is the altarpiece’s own form, and the title puts the three figures where painting had always put the mourners at the foot of the cross. The cross is withheld, and the centre panel is not its place: the absence is the structure, a crucifixion with no victim. Over it Bacon set the Eumenides, the Furies of Aeschylus, so that the Christian scene of redemption and the Greek scene of blood-guilt lie on one another and the mourners become pursuers. What holds it lower: that doubling is Bacon’s account after the fact, carried by nothing a viewer could read in the panels; and the figures are creatures rather than persons, so the archetype is reached partly by giving up the particular.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance: the religious triptych and the Crucifixion of Cimabue and Grünewald, which Bacon named among the pictures he returned to; Picasso’s biomorphic bathers and figures of the late 1920s, from which the bodies plainly descend; and the wartime British painting it hung beside, the neo-romantic landscape and the rooted, organic forms of Sutherland and Moore. The departure: a crucifixion without the crucified; an altarpiece made secular and claimed for one painter’s private terror; Picasso’s forms taken off the beach and set on plinths in a field of colour with no space. The stake was his standing: a painter in his mid-thirties with almost no surviving work, who had stopped painting for years, showing a picture its first viewers found monstrous. Held below the top because the debt to Picasso is large and visible.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. Three panels, not one: each figure is alone in its own field and cannot see the others, so the triptych is a set of isolations, where one canvas would make the same three creatures a scene. The orange is the second instrument: a flat ground with no horizon and no cast shadow puts the figures nowhere, neither a room nor a landscape, and that nowhere is the knowledge. The scale is the third: under a metre high, the creatures are met face to face. The glass, which Bacon wanted, lays the viewer’s own reflection over them. Held below the top because the form is first stated here rather than mastered: the supports are perfunctory, and the version of 1988 found a more articulated space.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: 82 years of return, and the questions stay open. What the figures are: mourners, Furies, animals, or images without a story, as Bacon said he wanted. Why the cross is absent, and whether the picture is religious, anti-religious or neither. How it stands to the war and the camps, which it preceded as a picture and met as an exhibit. How far it is Surrealist, which Bacon denied. What the later triptychs do to it, since each reads it backward. It has its place in David Sylvester’s interviews, in the monographs of Russell and Peppiatt and in Deleuze’s book on Bacon. Held a step below because much of that literature is about the painter, the method and the life, and the central formal reading, isolated figure and flat field, was settled early.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The field is British and European figurative painting of the 1940s. The intrinsic force: the picture broke the wartime neo-romantic consensus in a single showing and put the human figure back at the centre of serious painting as a body under pressure; by common account, postwar British painting begins with it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bacon’s own work, the triptych his defining form for four decades and the screaming heads of the 1950s; the figurative painting later grouped as the School of London, which defined itself against abstraction partly in his wake; and a long afterlife in images of the body in pain. The discount: much of the reach belongs to the later work, the international field of 1945 to 1960 went mostly to abstraction, and no school followed the method.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, three figures and their grounds as painted. Presence: in public view and in the literature since 1945 and in the Tate’s collection, among its most recognised pictures; wide in Britain and in the international literature of the figure, not the widest, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric is the charge: oil on board is not built for centuries as a sound canvas is, and the panels are shown under glass for their protection; no damage is charged. The surface carries nothing fixed to 1944, no uniform, no ruin, no topical sign: its war is in its pressure, not its furniture. It has outlived its first shock and its own second version. Held at the foot of the usual figure for its age, for the support.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Craft read to the same anchors as every medium: command of oil on board at a small scale. Where it commands, it is load-bearing. The grey flesh is modelled soft and dry against a ground laid flat and saturated, so the figures seem to sit in front of the orange rather than in it; the open mouth at the right is drawn exactly, teeth and gums placed so the scream reads at a distance and at hand; the bound head in the centre is given volume with very little. The three are held in one key. The costs are real: the supports are crudely stated, the spaces around the figures barely constructed, and the left figure is muddier and less resolved than the other two. This is a self-taught painter at the start of his command.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the left figure, hunched and turned inward, its head hidden, and the right creature, thrust outward, its mouth open on the viewer. They obey one law: a grey body, modelled, alone on a support, against a flat orange with no shadow and no depth, its form given by its pain. The centre figure is the hinge, frontal and blind, between the one who turns away and the one who screams. Nothing obeys a second physics: no figure is lit otherwise, no panel opens a real space, no element is painted in another manner. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: three creatures, one ground, one register, about two square metres. The law governs it completely, and the figure is held for the size of what it governs.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the body, as the work’s whole matter, flesh, neck and mouth; pain, consciousness reduced to its edge; the sacred, present as an absence, the cross withheld; myth, the Greek order of blood-guilt laid on the Christian one; the animal, since the figures stand between beast and human; and history, the war, present only as the pressure of the date and in no sign. They are integrated: one structure, the altarpiece without its victim, places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no natural order, no person who can be named, no world beyond the three fields. A small triptych holds few orders by its form, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.8. An image whole after 82 years and in public view since its first showing, its only charge a board support kept under glass; an altarpiece emptied of its victim and claimed for a private terror, against the wartime painting it hung beside; a dreadful height reached three times in two square metres; and a form of three isolated fields, a flat orange that gives the figures nowhere to be, and glass that lays the viewer over them.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: the body, pain, the sacred by its absence, myth, the animal and the war by its date are held in one structure; family, labour, the state, the natural order and any named person are not there, and three small fields cannot hold them. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.4: much of what the panels give is a state of dread rather than a stated meaning, and the painter refused the meaning. The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.5 follow: a literature drawn more to the painter than to the picture, and supports, spaces and a left figure the hand had not yet mastered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. The twelve sum to 102.4, an average of 8.53 that displays 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the three panels as they hang in the Tate, London, in 2026, of the catalogue record and of the critical literature on the work and on Bacon. The surface is known from reproduction rather than from long looking at the panels, and where a judgment turns on it, the making above all, it is held more loosely. The work scored is the triptych: three separate panels of oil on board, each 94 by 73.7 cm in the Tate’s record, glazed and framed as they hang, scored as one work, with no panel scored apart. The panels stand as Bacon left them. The large Crucifixion the title names was never painted, and nothing stands in its place. Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988, Tate), Bacon’s earlier work, most of which he destroyed, and the later triptychs are context and evidence of reach, and are not scored. No words are quoted: Bacon’s later relating of the figures to the Eumenides of Aeschylus is given in paraphrase. The first showing, at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945, is given as a date; its coincidence with the opening of the camps to the press is not credited to the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the kind of board and whether pastel was used with the oil, how and when the panels entered the Tate, the dimensions of the version of 1988, the exact construction of the figures’ supports and the state of the surface under glass.