After Second Version of the Triptych (1944) by Francis Bacon returns to the image that announced him to the world — three figures so far outside the conventions of figurative painting that when the original was first exhibited in London in 1945, viewers walked out. Bacon was thirty-five years old, largely unknown, and had just made one of the most disturbing works in the history of British art.

The figures derive from the Furies of Greek tragedy — the Erinyes, those ancient female spirits of vengeance who pursued Orestes through the Oresteia for the murder of his mother, driven not by law but by something older and more implacable, the demand that blood answer for blood. Bacon encountered them through Aeschylus, whose tragedies he had read with the same obsessive attention he gave to the Old Masters, and what drew him was their nature as forces that are not external to the human but erupt from within it — guilt, violence, and retribution given bodily form, creatures that are simultaneously animal and human, ancient and present, mythological and viscerally real.

The 1944 original was made during the London Blitz. Bacon had spent the war years in the city, working as a fire warden, surrounded by destruction and mass death on a scale that made the traditional languages of figurative painting feel inadequate to the point of dishonesty. The three figures — each occupying its own panel, each a hybrid of human and animal, each screaming or waiting to scream in a shallow, undefined space — were his response to a world that had demonstrated, conclusively, what human beings were capable of doing to each other. They were not illustrations of war. They were images of what war had revealed about human nature — the Furies as a metaphor for the violence that had always been there, beneath the surface of civilisation, waiting.

Bacon returned to the image in 1988, forty-four years later, when he was seventy-eight years old and had long since established himself as the most significant figurative painter of the postwar period. The second version is not a reproduction but a reckoning — the older man revisiting the image that had launched everything, testing whether it still held, whether the figures still carried the force they had in 1944. They do. The screaming heads, the bandaged eye, the necks that extend beyond any human anatomy, the bodies that refuse to resolve into either animal or human — all of it remains as unsettling in 1988 as it was in 1945, which may be the most disturbing thing about the image. Nothing had changed. The Furies were still there.

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