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I know for religious people, for Christians, the crucifixion has a totally different significance. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the crucifixion. We don’t know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they’re so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. There’ve been extraordinary photographs, which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered and the smell of death. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion.
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The triptych format has long been associated with religious images, but Bacon saw it as a profound expression of human suffering, rather than a symbol of the Christian belief in redemption after death: Influenced by the nightmarish distortions of Picasso’s Surrealist-inspired works of the 1930s, Bacon’s other sources include images from a book on diseases of the mouth and the famous screaming mother from Eisenstein’s epic film Battleship Potemkin.
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Their straining necks and gaping mouths are bestial in appearance, but their expression of unbearable physical pain and psychological anguish is undeniably human. It depicts three monstrous figures, part human and part animal, based upon the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth.
#THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION SERIES#
1944Ĭompleted in 1944 (one of the grimmest years of World War II), Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was the first in a series of works on the theme of the crucifixion. Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c. The microphones looming in the foreground allude to the magnification of power made possible by modern communications technologies. The familiar trappings of the state portrait have been transformed into a house of horrors: an umbrella shields him like a baldachin, while a splayed carcass hangs behind him like a state flag carcasses of beef are skewered on the railings enclosing the rostrum, and in the background window shades are drawn closed. The hideous tyrant seated at a rostrum was based on news photographs of Hitler and Mussolini. Originally titled “Man with a Microphone,” this early work remains Bacon’s most pointed commentary on the brutality of world political leaders. Now, of course, man can only attempt to make something very, very positive by trying to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves, by prolonging possibly his life by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors.”įrancis Bacon, Interview with David Sylvester Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946 I think that, even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a peculiar way, they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out for him. “Also, I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. Recurring themes in Bacon’s work include violently distorted faces, flayed carcasses of flesh, scenes of brutal sexuality and violence, and man reduced to his most animal behavior.Įchoing existentialist beliefs, Bacon’s ideas reflect a profound loss of faith in religion or any sense of metaphysical explanation of human existence: He relied heavily on distortion as a means to achieve a deeper truth - “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of appearance” – but he also often used source imagery (photographs, famous paintings, film stills, and illustrations from books) rather than direct observation to intensify his inner vision. Like Giacometti, Bacon’s figurative art was not a straightforward depiction of observed reality. The leading figure in postwar Britain was the Irish-born painter Francis Bacon.