Second Version of Triptych 1944 [SEP] creator
Second Version of Triptych 1944
Second Version of Triptych 1944 is a 1988 triptych painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. It is a reworking of "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion", 1944, Bacon's most widely known triptych, and the one which established his reputation as one of England's foremost post-war painters.
Bacon often painted second versions of his major paintings, including "Painting (1946)", which he reworked in 1971 when the original became too fragile
on Bacon's tendency to revisit subject matter, Meades observed that "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. The backgrounds are now elaborated, defined and bereft of the garish, grating poison orange of 1944." The art critic James Demetrion found that despite these differences, the second version still achieves the