Francis Bacon interviewed by David Sylvester:

In the complicated stage in which painting is now, the moment there are several figures -[…] on the same canvas – the story begins to be elaborated. And the moment the story has been elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint. This is because we are actually in very primitive times once again, and we haven’t been able to cancel out the story-telling between one image and another.

A little later, he says almost exactly the same thing:

… so many of the greatest paintings have been done with a number of figures on a canvas, and of course every painter longs to do that. But, as the thing’s in such a terribly complicated stage now, the story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own.

I wonder what Bacon means by claiming things are more complicated now than before? On another occasion, Bacon notes he doesn’t so much want to avoid telling a story

but I want very, very much to do the thing that Valery said – to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.

Bacon explains how he seeks to ‘concentrate the image down’ ‘to see it better’ by drawing in rectangles and cutting down the scale of the canvas. Heads and figures painted within a space-frame are not supposed to evoke figures trapped in a glass box – Eichmann at his trial, for example. There is never any illustrative intention in his work. Asked about the breaks between the canvasses of his triptychs, he notes, ‘They isolate one from the other. And they cut off the story between one and the other. It helps avoid story-telling if the figures are painted on three different canvasses’. This is the case even with his Crucifixion triptych – there is no explanation of the relationship between the figures, Bacon insists.

This is why Bacon so deeply regrets painting a swastika on an armband on one figure, and a hypodermic needle piercing the arm of another: each time it was the image that was important, not the illustration it was supposed to present, or the narrative it was supposed to unfold.

… I wanted to put an armband to break the continuity of this red round the arm. You may say it was a stupid thing to do, but it was done entirely as part of trying to make the figure work – not work on the level of interpretation of its being a Nazi, but on the level of its working formally.

Likewise for the titles of his paintings – his ‘Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes’ was entitled thus by his gallery, who had asked him what he had in mind when he painted it, for identificatory purposes only.