Exhilarated Despair and Optimism in Nothing: Francis Bacon and the Question of Representation

This article is a philosophical study of the late Francis Bacon’s “Triptych May-June 1973,” a painting that appears to depict the suicide of Bacon’s former lover George Dyer. The article attempts to complicate this assumption, arguing that, in certain ways, the painting is not at all representational, or, to the extent that it is, it attempts to represent the limits of representation.