in common with the other two works in the series, internally the sequencing of individual panels defy narrative interpretation; they cannot be read from left to right, and any depiction is as desperate as an other. Description The portraits on the wing panels are based on photographs of Dyer taken by John Deakin in the mid-1960s. They are faithful to the photographs, except that the black background replaces the studio wall. They panels show Dyer in his underwear posing on a chair in the artist's studio. He is depicted as muscular and strong, but restless, ill at ease, and the two panels are filled with senses of movement and tension. Dyer is presented as literally a man falling apart. His body is mutilated; the black border dissolves into his body in both, leaving a void in place of large parts of his torso. In contrast he seems to be melting, leaving blobs of flesh on the ground beneath him. Bacon described this effect as portraying "the life flowing out of him". The center painting shows two men having sex; presumably Bacon is remembering his encounters with his lost lover. The depiction is based on Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs of wrestlers –a series he often referred to– but takes the idea much further, directly linking the act of love with acts of violence. Yet the panel is quite chaste; the upper man is without genitals. Art historian Denis Farr sees their embrace as without affection, and that they are more embraced in "mortal combat". The outer wings are formed from a pair of long isosceles triangles, which contrast against the low isosceles triangle of the central image. In the outer wings, the back rectangles are flanked by inwards facing off white triangles. This compositional structure may have been influenced by Matisse's Bathers by a River, which also uses geometric forms to separate three figures and create wide bands. As in all of the Black Triptych's, doorways predominate, and form a menacing and foreboding presence, symbolic of death and the void the subject is about to pass through. As with the third triptych in the series, Triptych, May–June 1973, each panel shows a wall with a large open door behind Dyer. It is this doorway that emits the darkness, represented by black paint, that overwhelms and literally consumes the representations of Dyer, removing large parts of his flesh. In this work,