Fragment of a Crucifixion
Encyclopedia
Fragment of a Crucifixion is a 1950 painting by Irish-born artist Francis Bacon
(1909–1992) and one of his many works based on iconography of the Crucifixion of Jesus
. Its two distressed figures are at the end of a bloody struggle, with one positioned at the point of kill
. The dying animal's scream forms the centerpiece of the work. Although the painting's title contains religious connotations, Bacon was a devout atheist, and there is no hope divinity in the work. Instead, it is intended to represent what he saw as the hopelessness of the human condition.
A muscular male dog stoops on a horizontal beam that forms part of a T-shaped structure intended to both signify Christ's cross and indicate a beam hanging over a door. An apparently female chimera
is trapped within this frame, and is powerless in the course of being mutilated by the dog. Blood pours from the canine's mouth onto the head and body of his prey, who is rendered as owl-like but with human facial characteristics.
Characteristic of Bacon's work, the painting draws its influence from a wide variety of sources, including the scream of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein
's 1925 silent film "The Battleship Potemkin
", photographs of Adolf Eichmann
, and many depictions of the biblical crucifixion and lowering from the Cross.
A horizontal angular geometrical shape is sketched in white and grey in the mid-ground, and represents an early form of a spatial device Bacon was to develop and perfect over the course of the 1950s, when it effectively became a cage used to frame the anguished figures portrayed in Bacon's foregrounds.
The body of the fleshy part-bird chimera is rendered with light paint, and from it hangs narrow red drips of paint, indicating the drips and spatter of blood. Pentimenti is used to convey the blood of the death throes the figures have brought to each other. The link with the biblical Crucifixion is made through the raised arms of the lower creature and the T shaped cross. While the upper creature is obviously modelled on a dog, it seems likely that the chimera is based on pictures of bats Bacon kept in his private collection of images. The lower figure's human aspect is seen most notably in the details of its mouth and genitalia.
In the mid-ground, the artist has sketched a street scene, which features a number of walking figures and cars. The pedestrians appear unaffected and uninterested in the slaughter before them.
Fragment is one of a number of treatments Bacon created to examine the biblical crucifixion scene. Here again, he incorporates Greek legend into his treatment of the crucifixion, notably the tale of Aeschylus
and the Eumenides
—or Furies—found in The Oresteia
, which is referenced by the broad wings of the chimera.
Bacon's imagery became less extreme as he got older, and from the early 1950s onwards, few of his canvases contained the sensational imagery that had made him famous in the mid-1940s. He said, "When I was younger, I needed extreme subject-matter. Now I don't." According to the art critic John Russell
, Bacon found it more powerful to reflect violence in his brush strokes and colourisation, not literally, and not "in the thing portrayed". Bacon was his own harshest critic, and often both destroyed or disowned certain works that yet were held in high regard by critics and buyers. Fragment of a Crucifixion is one he came to dislike, he viewed it as too explicit, in the words of Russell, "too near the conventions of narrative-painting."
, while the T-shaped Crux Commissa
is intended to indicate the cross of Saint Anthony
. Crucifixion scenes can be found in Bacon's earliest works, and the imagery of the crucifixion weights heavily throughout his career. The critic John Russell wrote that the crucifixion in Bacon's work is a "generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch".
In 1933, the artist's patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject. These early paintings were influenced by such old masters as Matthias Grünewald
, Diego Velázquez
and Rembrandt, but also by Picasso
's late 1920s and early 1930s biomorphs
and the early work of the Surrealists. Bacon admitted that he saw the scene as "a magnificent armature
on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation". He believed that the imagery of the crucifixion allowed him to examine "certain areas of human behaviour" in a unique way, as the armature of the theme had been accumulated by so many old masters. In Fragment, Bacon refers to the theme of the descent of the cross
, and links have been made to both Matthias Grünewald
and Peter Paul Rubens's works on this subject.
According to the art critic Hugh Davies, "The open mouth of the terrified victim, the T-Shape of the cross, and the figure leaning over the crossbar link Bacon's painting with Rubens' Descent of the Cross in London. But the mouth loosely opened in seventeenth century painting is taut in Bacon's image. The legs folded out of view and the left arm passively by Rubens are transposed by Bacon into violent motion, flopping wildly up and down."
and Alberto Giacometti
. Giacometti had employed the devise in his The Nose (1947) and The Cage (1950), while Moore had used the frame in his 1952 Maquette for King and Queen.
Bacon's use of these frames has brought to mind imprisonment with many critics, and Adolf Eichmann
's glass cage during his 1961 is a common reference. Writing on their use in Fragment, the art critic Armin Zweite wrote that the diagonal lines, on the one hand point inwards towards the idyll, in a promise of happiness, on the other they transform the cross into a guillotine and suggest misfortune. The situation is double-edged, a Damocles. If you want to reach the "good world" you have to pass through the "bad world", and you run the risk of being killed in the process.
and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa
Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein
's 1925 silent
The Battleship Potemkin
. Bacon first saw the film in 1935 and viewed it frequently thereafter. He kept a photographic still of the scene in his studio, which showed a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez
spectacles hanging from her blood stained face. He referred to the image in paintings throughout his career.
By the early 1950s, it had become an obsessive motif, to the point, according to art critic and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt
, that "it would be no exaggeration to say that, if one could really explain the origins and implications of this scream, one would be far closer to understanding the whole art of Francis Bacon." In this work the scream of the owl-like figure trapped in the chimera jaws reiterates the motif.
Francis Bacon (painter)
Francis Bacon , was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...
(1909–1992) and one of his many works based on iconography of the Crucifixion of Jesus
Crucifixion of Jesus
The crucifixion of Jesus and his ensuing death is an event that occurred during the 1st century AD. Jesus, who Christians believe is the Son of God as well as the Messiah, was arrested, tried, and sentenced by Pontius Pilate to be scourged, and finally executed on a cross...
. Its two distressed figures are at the end of a bloody struggle, with one positioned at the point of kill
Predation
In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator feeds on its prey . Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of its prey and the eventual absorption of the prey's tissue through consumption...
. The dying animal's scream forms the centerpiece of the work. Although the painting's title contains religious connotations, Bacon was a devout atheist, and there is no hope divinity in the work. Instead, it is intended to represent what he saw as the hopelessness of the human condition.
A muscular male dog stoops on a horizontal beam that forms part of a T-shaped structure intended to both signify Christ's cross and indicate a beam hanging over a door. An apparently female chimera
Chimera (mythology)
The Chimera or Chimaera was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing female creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lioness with a tail that ended in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her...
is trapped within this frame, and is powerless in the course of being mutilated by the dog. Blood pours from the canine's mouth onto the head and body of his prey, who is rendered as owl-like but with human facial characteristics.
Characteristic of Bacon's work, the painting draws its influence from a wide variety of sources, including the scream of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
's 1925 silent film "The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin , sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm...
", photographs of Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
, and many depictions of the biblical crucifixion and lowering from the Cross.
Description
The two figures are positioned in the center foreground of the canvas. Although both are mutilated and covered in blood, their physical discomfort is contrasted against a tranquil and flat, warm background typical of Bacon's work from this period. The figures many elements typical of Bacon's early work, most noticeably the expressive broad strokes, which are set in contrast against the tightness of the flat, unmemorable, background. The painting contains the same white angular rails Bacon had inserted into the mid-ground of his 1949 Head II and Head IV, as well as the Study for Portrait of the same year. In Fragment..., the rails are positioned just below the area where the horizontal and vertical bars of the cross intersect. The rail begins with a diagonal line which intersects the owl at what appears to be the creature's shoulder.A horizontal angular geometrical shape is sketched in white and grey in the mid-ground, and represents an early form of a spatial device Bacon was to develop and perfect over the course of the 1950s, when it effectively became a cage used to frame the anguished figures portrayed in Bacon's foregrounds.
The body of the fleshy part-bird chimera is rendered with light paint, and from it hangs narrow red drips of paint, indicating the drips and spatter of blood. Pentimenti is used to convey the blood of the death throes the figures have brought to each other. The link with the biblical Crucifixion is made through the raised arms of the lower creature and the T shaped cross. While the upper creature is obviously modelled on a dog, it seems likely that the chimera is based on pictures of bats Bacon kept in his private collection of images. The lower figure's human aspect is seen most notably in the details of its mouth and genitalia.
In the mid-ground, the artist has sketched a street scene, which features a number of walking figures and cars. The pedestrians appear unaffected and uninterested in the slaughter before them.
Relationship with Bacon's other paintings
The painting has been linked both thematically and its formal construction to 1956 work Owls and to a number of preparatory sketches only brought to the art market in the late 1990s. Zweite traces the origin of the lower figure to a photograph of an owl Bacon found in a book on birds in motion. However, bacon has replaced the bird's beak with a wide open human mouth.Aeschylus
Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often described as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos , meaning "shame"...
and the Eumenides
Erinyes
In Greek mythology the Erinyes from Greek ἐρίνειν " pursue, persecute"--sometimes referred to as "infernal goddesses" -- were female chthonic deities of vengeance. A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as "those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath"...
—or Furies—found in The Oresteia
The Oresteia
The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus which concerns the end of the curse on the House of Atreus. When originally performed it was accompanied by Proteus, a satyr play that would have been performed following the trilogy; it has not survived...
, which is referenced by the broad wings of the chimera.
John Russell (art critic)
John Russell CBE was a British American art critic.-Life and career:John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford....
, Bacon found it more powerful to reflect violence in his brush strokes and colourisation, not literally, and not "in the thing portrayed". Bacon was his own harshest critic, and often both destroyed or disowned certain works that yet were held in high regard by critics and buyers. Fragment of a Crucifixion is one he came to dislike, he viewed it as too explicit, in the words of Russell, "too near the conventions of narrative-painting."
The Crucifixion
The title of Fragment of a Crucifixion directly refers to Christian iconographyIconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
, while the T-shaped Crux Commissa
Christian cross
The Christian cross, seen as a representation of the instrument of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, is the best-known religious symbol of Christianity...
is intended to indicate the cross of Saint Anthony
Anthony the Great
Anthony the Great or Antony the Great , , also known as Saint Anthony, Anthony the Abbot, Anthony of Egypt, Anthony of the Desert, Anthony the Anchorite, Abba Antonius , and Father of All Monks, was a Christian saint from Egypt, a prominent leader among the Desert Fathers...
. Crucifixion scenes can be found in Bacon's earliest works, and the imagery of the crucifixion weights heavily throughout his career. The critic John Russell wrote that the crucifixion in Bacon's work is a "generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch".
In 1933, the artist's patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject. These early paintings were influenced by such old masters as Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was a German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.Only ten paintings—several consisting...
, Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
and Rembrandt, but also by Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
's late 1920s and early 1930s biomorphs
Biomorphism
Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century. It patterns artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices, often with mixed results.-History:The...
and the early work of the Surrealists. Bacon admitted that he saw the scene as "a magnificent armature
Armature (sculpture)
In sculpture, an armature is a framework around which the sculpture is built. This framework provides structure and stability, especially when a plastic material such as wax or clay is being used as the medium...
on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation". He believed that the imagery of the crucifixion allowed him to examine "certain areas of human behaviour" in a unique way, as the armature of the theme had been accumulated by so many old masters. In Fragment, Bacon refers to the theme of the descent of the cross
Descent from the Cross
The Descent from the Cross , or Deposition of Christ, is the scene, as depicted in art, from the Gospels' accounts of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Christ down from the cross after his crucifixion . In Byzantine art the topic became popular in the 9th century, and in the West from the...
, and links have been made to both Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was a German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.Only ten paintings—several consisting...
and Peter Paul Rubens's works on this subject.
According to the art critic Hugh Davies, "The open mouth of the terrified victim, the T-Shape of the cross, and the figure leaning over the crossbar link Bacon's painting with Rubens' Descent of the Cross in London. But the mouth loosely opened in seventeenth century painting is taut in Bacon's image. The legs folded out of view and the left arm passively by Rubens are transposed by Bacon into violent motion, flopping wildly up and down."
Horizontal lines
These horizontal frames were to become a major motif of his works in the later 1950s, and in the Fragment of a Crucifixion he hints at their later form as triangles in works such as the 1970 Three Studies of the Male Back. These frames were at the time being incorporated into other contemporary paintings, having been developed by sculptors such as Henry MooreHenry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
and Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
. Giacometti had employed the devise in his The Nose (1947) and The Cage (1950), while Moore had used the frame in his 1952 Maquette for King and Queen.
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
's glass cage during his 1961 is a common reference. Writing on their use in Fragment, the art critic Armin Zweite wrote that the diagonal lines, on the one hand point inwards towards the idyll, in a promise of happiness, on the other they transform the cross into a guillotine and suggest misfortune. The situation is double-edged, a Damocles. If you want to reach the "good world" you have to pass through the "bad world", and you run the risk of being killed in the process.
The open mouth
The inspiration for the recurring motif of the screaming mouths in many Bacon's work from of the late 1940s and early 1950s was drawn from a number of sources, including medical text books, the works of Matthias GrünewaldMatthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was a German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.Only ten paintings—several consisting...
and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
's 1925 silent
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin , sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm...
. Bacon first saw the film in 1935 and viewed it frequently thereafter. He kept a photographic still of the scene in his studio, which showed a close-up of the nurse's head screaming in panic and terror and with broken pince-nez
Pince-nez
Pince-nez are a style of spectacles, popular in the 19th century, which are supported without earpieces, by pinching the bridge of the nose. The name comes from French pincer, to pinch, and nez, nose....
spectacles hanging from her blood stained face. He referred to the image in paintings throughout his career.
By the early 1950s, it had become an obsessive motif, to the point, according to art critic and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt
Michael Peppiatt
Michael Peppiatt is an art critic, author and art historian.Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge University in 1964, and joined The Observer as art critic. He then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at Réalités magazine, where he remained until 1969, when he was appointed arts editor at Le Monde...
, that "it would be no exaggeration to say that, if one could really explain the origins and implications of this scream, one would be far closer to understanding the whole art of Francis Bacon." In this work the scream of the owl-like figure trapped in the chimera jaws reiterates the motif.
Sources
- Adams, James Luther & Yates, Wilson & Warren, Robert. The grotesque in art and literature . Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B Eerdmans Publishing, 1997. ISBN 0-8028-4267-4
- Alley, Ronald & Alley, John. Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 1964. ASIN B001AG7U1K
- Davis, Stephen T.The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
- Murray, GilbertGilbert MurrayGeorge Gilbert Aimé Murray, OM was an Australian born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century...
. Agamemnon in Complete Plays of Aeschylus. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952. 86 - Peppiatt, MichaelMichael PeppiattMichael Peppiatt is an art critic, author and art historian.Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge University in 1964, and joined The Observer as art critic. He then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at Réalités magazine, where he remained until 1969, when he was appointed arts editor at Le Monde...
. Francis Bacon in the 1950s. Yale: Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-3001-2192-X - Russell, JohnJohn Russell (art critic)John Russell CBE was a British American art critic.-Life and career:John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford....
. Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 19. ISBN 0-5002-0271-0 - Schmied, Wieland. Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict. Munich: Prestel, 1996. ISBN 3-7913-1664-8
- Sylvester, DavidDavid SylvesterAnthony David Bernard Sylvester CBE, was a British art critic and curator. Although he received no formal education in the arts, during his long career he was influential in promoting modern artists, in particular the work of Joan Miró, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.Born into a well connected...
. Looking back at Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. ISBN 0-5000-1994-0 - van Alphen, Ernst. Francis Bacon and the loss of self. Chicago: Reaktion Books, 1992. ISBN 0-9484-6234-5
- Zweite, Armin. The Violence of the Real. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. ISBN 0-5000-9335-0
