弗朗西斯·培根 | 黑色三联画

Bacon, Triptych - August 1972 中文翻译：贝蒂 | 译文校对：yuko 翻译仅供参考 | 视频不得商用

英文稿：

STEVEN:We're in the Tate Modern,

and we're looking at a Francis Bacon,

actually, we're looking at three Francis Bacon's.

This is one work of art, but in three large, painted panels.

It's a triptych.In fact, that's the title.

BETH:Normally, when I think about a triptych,

I think about Renaissance or a Medieval altarpiece that's

in three panels that are connected,

and therefore something that is spiritual a religious scene.

But here we are in the 20th century using that format,

but there is something dark and spiritual about these images.

STEVEN:These were deeply personal paintings

and the subject couldn't be closer to home for the artist.

BETH:You can tell how personal they are.

On either side, these figures are very, very powerfully depicted.

That seems very psychological, and personal, and emotional,

and profound, from the way that he's treating the human body.

Tell me about what the personal aspect is.

STEVEN:So within these very spare renderings

we have a representation of George Dyer on the left.

This is Francis Bacon's lover, who had just recently committed suicide.

In fact, this painting is generally seen as one of the series of black paintings

that is in a way, a kind of chronicle of his response to this event.

You've got the artist himself, the self-portrait,

and then in the middle, you've got this composite creature.

You can just make out two bodies in a kind of violent love Making.

The reference that is usually drawn by our historians

is to the English photographer more bridge

who invented the strobe light and was the first person to use

photography to freeze animals and people in action.

He did a famous series of wrestlers, from which this is drawn.

But of course, that scientific context is completely transformed in this personal context.

BETH:In the image of Dyer,

there's an immediate sense of death.

There's an immediate sense of the flesh disintegrating,

with Bacon there's this feeling of the flesh melting and being eaten away.

In fact, in his torso, that blackness

that's that panel on the back seems to kind of move forward

and kind of take over the speaker's body.

And at the same time, there's something very transcendent about the phase.

The eyes are closed, the head tilts up slightly,

as though there's a way that the figure's somehow transcending

the body as the body is being consumed.

STEVEN:So interesting that you say melting.

We can see that shadow that he seems to cast, almost as a kind of pool of flesh

to the lower right in some terrible way.

BETH:The pool is pink and flesh-colored,

and the body itself is being taken over by this black

STEVEN:It's also that it has a kind of dementia.

It seems to be literally seeping out of him.

BETH:There's a real tension between surface

and an illusion of depth to the body.

STEVEN:The depicted space as opposed to the conceptual space,

that alternation becomes a beautiful metaphor.

The entire set of paintings places these figures

in a kind of isolation, in a very spare, very abstract space.

He's created this very uncomfortable, very tense, kind of relationship.

BETH:On the other hand,

both panels on either side, although they are flat,

they have some sense of dimension

by the diagonal line that's in front of either one and yet

in the central panel, which is the most abstract,

in terms of the space, because they

don't have that diagonal line.

We can't locate depth at all.

It's almost as though the middle space, where those two

figures are joined, perhaps where he's rejoined

with his lover in some space beyond the physical,

we had the most abstracted space.

Whereas in the two other panels, as you've said,

there's that conceptual, transcendent, flat space

that's in conflict, somehow with the organic three-dimensional

shapes of the figures.

STEVEN:BETH :

But I also read something else into that diagonal on the right and left panels.

Although these are hung on a flat wall,

these are hinged paintings, and they actually

come out at an angle towards us slightly, referencing that bottom angle.

The way that a traditional triptych would unfold.

STEVEN:BETH:Yes, exactly.

There was tremendous energy being expended in the brush strokes.

I see it in the composition, and I see it in the tension between the figures,

sexual or violent, or both.

BETH:Yeah, and you have

in fact, that big, broad white brush stroke.

STEVEN:Now that's interesting,

in another sense, because of course, Bacon, although he's

working in Britain is very much of the generation

of the Abstract Expressionist.

Bacon, quite distinctly, and very much unlike the Americans,

is maintaining the privacy of the figure.

BETH:These are very hard-edged abstract shapes,

yet one easily recalls Abstract Expressionism.

STEVEN:They're both responding to a similar kind of existential issues

that have to do with the isolation of the figure, the meaning of the figure.

BETH:These paintings are difficult to understand and to read.

They take time to sort of grapple with.

On the other hand, still having the presence

of something that one can recognize,

especially the human figure does give us a handle.

STEVEN:There's something really extraordinary about taking

the human figure, painting it so beautifully,

but then attacking it, cutting into it,

melting it away, making it so grotesque.

I think that's what makes these paintings so tough.

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