Francis Bacon (British) – war, violence

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  circa 1944


Francis Bacon made some early reputation as an interior designer and painter in London in the period 1929-34 but then, unable to find a direction, painted only sporadically through the next ten years. Finally, in 1944 he completed 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion', with which, he said later, 'I began'.

It was exhibited in April 1945 at the end of the World War 2 at the Lefevre Gallery in London and in his book on Bacon published in 1964 the critic John Russell recalled: 'Visitors ... were brought up short by images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut up with a snap at the sight of them ... They caused total consternation.'

The importance of the Crucifixion to Bacon is not as a Christian image particularly, but as a focus for a particular view of humanity. In one of a series of interviews with the critic David Sylvester, Bacon said: 'it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.'

In choosing the Crucifixion image and the triptych format as a vehicle for his vision of man Bacon is drawing on one of the central and most important traditions in Western painting of the portrayal of human suffering. But there are other touchstone expressions of suffering in Western culture and in a letter to the Tate Gallery Bacon said that these figures were 'sketches for the Eumenides'. The Eumenides or, more correctly, Erinyes, are the Greek Furies, the instruments of vengeance of the Greek gods, and Bacon's reference is to the trilogy of plays, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, one of the most unrelentingly blood-soaked and savage of the works of ancient Greek drama. The painting thus potently blends both classical and Christian frames of reference, as well as absolutely modern ones: Bacon has acknowledged the influence at this time of Picasso's paintings of the early 1930s of strange and savage pink and grey creatures on beaches. He is also already using here the photographic sources which were to become fundamental to his art. Bacon is particularly fascinated by high-speed photographs which capture human beings in attitudes invisible to the eye. One of his best-known sources, relevant to this work, is a still from the Russian Revolutionary film by Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925), showing in close-up the face of a screaming woman who has just been shot.


Text from: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=-1&workid=674&searchid=false&roomid=false&tabview=text&texttype=9