On October 24, 1971, exactly thirty-six hours before two thousand guests gathered beneath the glass vaults of the Grand Palais in Paris to celebrate Francis Bacon’s historic solo retrospective, George Dyer died alone in Room 7 of the Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Dyer, thirty-seven years old and long Bacon’s primary lover, model, and muse, was found slumped on the toilet after swallowing a lethal combination of alcohol and barbiturates. Bacon was thirty-two years older, arriving in Paris at the absolute pinnacle of his international career as only the second living artist after Pablo Picasso to receive a solo retrospective at the Grand Palais. Rather than cancelling the exhibition or announcing the tragedy to the press, Bacon spent the morning identifying Dyer's body at the police station, put on his dark suit, and greeted museum directors, French officials, and art collectors at the opening gala without uttering a word about what had happened across town.
The public triumph masking private devastation produced what art historians now call the Black Triptychs, created between 1971 and 1973. The final and most harrowing of these canvases is Triptych, May-June 1973, a monumental work spanning three oil-on-canvas panels that each measure 198 by 147.5 centimetres, creating a total width of 442.5 centimetres across the three frames in a massive horizontal wall art format. While Bacon had spent his entire career fiercely rejecting narrative painting and insisting that contemporary art should operate directly on the human nervous system without telling a sequential story, he acknowledged to art critic David Sylvester that this specific work broke his own long-held rule.
Speaking to David Sylvester in his studio, Bacon stated: "He was found on a toilet bowl like this one and he had vomited into the sink. If my paintings can be considered to be illustrative then this one is the closest to a narrative form." The left panel depicts Dyer doubled over on a porcelain toilet bowl, his body contorted in agony inside a dark, framed doorway. The right panel shows Dyer leaning over a pedestal sink in the same monochromatic bathroom, vomiting into the basin beneath a solitary unshaded light bulb hanging overhead.
The central panel holds the spatial centerpiece of the tragedy, depicting a dark doorway where a shadowy, bat-like figure or double projection of Dyer's silhouette spills across the threshold onto the floor. A sharp white arrow painted in dry transfer lettering points directly toward the dark opening of the bathroom doorway, marking the threshold between physical life and non-existence. This literal graphic indicator stands out against the muted lilac and grey field, emphasizing the precise geometry of a hotel room where an isolated human life ended while a champagne reception was being prepped three kilometers away.
Bacon’s intense grief turned into profound isolation during the years immediately following Dyer’s death. Reflecting on his changing subject matter during the 1970s, Bacon famously remarked to Sylvester: "I've done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I've had nobody else to paint but myself." He also expressed persistent remorse over leaving Dyer alone in the hotel during the chaotic final preparations for the Grand Palais show, noting to friends that if he had stayed with him at the hotel rather than managing the exhibition details, Dyer might still be alive.
In May 1989, sixteen years after its creation, Triptych, May-June 1973 appeared at auction at Sotheby’s in New York, selling for $6,270,000 to Swiss businesswoman and art collector Esther Grether. At the time of the sale on May 3, 1989, the $6.3 million price set a world record for a painting by Francis Bacon at auction. Today, the three panels remain in the private Esther Grether Family Collection in Basel, serving as a permanent visual testimony to the thirty-six hours in Paris when international acclaim and personal loss collided.
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