In each panel, Dyer is framed by a doorway, and set against a flat, anonymous foreground coloured with black and brown hues. In the left frame, he is seated on a toilet with his head crouched between his knees as if in pain.[20] Although his arched back, thighs and legs are according to the Irish critic Colm Tóibín, "lovingly painted", Dyer is by now clearly a broken man. This central panel shows Dyer sitting on the toilet bowl in a more contemplative pose, his head and upper body writhing beneath a hanging lightbulb which throws a large bat-like shadow formed in the shape of a demon or Eumenide. The art critic Sally Yard has noted that in the portrayal of Dyer's flesh, "life seems to visibly drain ... into the substantial character of the shadow beneath him".[21] Dyer's posture suggests he is seated on a lavatory bowl, though the object is not described.[1] Schmied has proposed that in this frame the blackness of the background has enveloped the subject, and it "seems to be advancing forward over the threshold, threatening the viewer like a flood or a giant bat with flapping wings and extended claws."[20]
In the right panel, Dyer is shown with his eyes shut, vomiting into a hand basin. In the two outer frames his figure is shadowed by arrows, pictorial devices that Bacon often used to place a sense of energy into his paintings. In this work, the arrows point to a man about to die, and according to Tóibín they scream "Here!", "Him!".[1] The arrow of the right panel, according to Tóibín, points to a "dead figure on the lavatory bowl, as though telling the Furies where to find him".[1] The triptych is centralised by the lightbulb, and by the fact that Dyer faces inwards in the two outer canvasses. The triptych's composition and setting are poised to suggest instability, and the doors in each side panel are splayed outwards as if to look into the darkness of the foreground.[22]
Triptych, May–June 1973 has been said to achieve its tension by locating voluptuously described figures in an austere, cage-like space. The foreground of each panel is bounded by a wall, which runs parallel to a framing door. Each door admits a stark black into its frame, while the walls establish a link between each of the three Black Triptychs.[23] In 1975, the curator Hugh M. Davis noted that while Bacon's earlier triptychs had been set in public spaces "open to all kinds of visitor", the Black Triptychs are set in a "deeply private realm, to which only the individual—accompanied, perhaps, by one or two of his closest friends—has access".[24] In 1999, Yard wrote that the sense of foreboding and ill-omen conjured by the Eumenides of Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) reappears in the triptych as a "batlike void that snared the figure of George Dyer as he subsides into the supple curves of death".[25] John Russell observed that the painting's background describes an area which is half studio, half condemned cell. A reviewer of the 1975 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition found a resemblance between the concept of the central panel and Albrecht Dürer's engravingMelencolia I (1514)—in the figure's pose, the bat form, and the panel's radiance—suggesting that Bacon's late triptychs evoke "memorable figural formulations" of classic Western culture.[26]
Bacon later stated that "painting has nothing to do with colouring surfaces", and in general he was not preoccupied with detailing his backgrounds: "When I feel that I have to some extent formed the image, I put the background in to see how it's going to work and then I go with the image itself." He told David Sylvester that he intended his "hard, flat, bright ground" to juxtapose with the complexity of the central images, and noted that "for this work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself". Bacon usually applied paint to the background quickly, and with "great energy"; however, he thought of it as a secondary element. He used its colour to establish tone, but in his mind the real work began when he came to paint the figures.
Critics have argued whether the triptych should be read sequentially from left to right.[27] Davies believes the work is a narrative, panoramic view of Dyer's suicide, and that the triptych's format implies a temporal continuity between each frame. Ernst van Alphen has argued that, notwithstanding spatial inconsistencies—the light bulb featured in the central panel is missing from the two outer canvasses, while the doorway view is reversed in the center panel—the triptych is a "plain representation of a story".[28]
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