Year 1950 Location Van Abbemuseum Media Cotton | Artist Francis Bacon Created 1950 | |
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Type Oil and cotton wool on canvas Dimensions 140 cm × 108.5 cm (55 in × 42.7 in) Similar Crucifixion, Head VI, Three Figures in a Room, Triptych - May–June 1973, Study for Crouching Nude | ||
Fragment of a Crucifixion is a 1950 painting by Irish-born, English artist Francis Bacon. Typical of his work, it is drawn from a wide variety of sources, including the scream of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin, and iconography from both the Crucifixion of Jesus and his descent from the cross. Although the title has religious connotations, Bacon's outlook was bleak; he was an atheist and did not believe in either divine intervention nor an afterlife. As such this work represents the hopelessness of the human condition.
Contents
The Crucifixion shows two animals at the end of a bloody struggle. A dog grips a chimera with its mouth, at the point of kill. The dog seems to be dying and 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. Blood pours from the dog's mouth onto the head and body of his prey, a being rendered as owl-like but with human facial characteristics. The chimera's despair forms the centerpiece of the work, and can be compared to Bacon's late screaming Popes series.
Figures
The 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 exhibit 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 this panel, 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. 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. The body of the hybrid bird or chimera is rendered with light paint, and from it hang narrow red drips of paint, indicating the drips and spatter of blood. Pentimenti is used to depict the animal's death throes. The link with the biblical Crucifixion is made through the raised arms of the lower creature and the T shaped cross. The lower figure's human aspect is seen most notably in the details of its mouth and genitalia. The upper creature is obviously modeled on a dog, it seems likely that the chimera is based on pictures of bats Bacon kept in his private collection of images.
Open mouth
The recurring motif of the screaming mouths appears in many Bacon's work from the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was drawn from a number of sources, including medical text books, the works of Matthias Grünewald and photographic stills of the nurse in the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film 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."
Crucifixion
The title of Fragment of a Crucifixion refers to Christian iconography, while the T-shaped Crux Commissa is perhaps intended to indicate the cross of Saint Anthony. Crucifixion scenes can be found in Bacon's earliest works, and weights heavily throughout his career. The critic John Russell wrote that, to Bacon, the crucifixion was 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, 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 descent of the cross, and links have been made to similar treatments by Matthias Grünewald and Peter Paul Rubens.
According to art critic Hugh Davies, the open mouth of the "terrified victim", and the predator leaning over the cross link the painting to Rubens' Descent of the Cross. 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."
Cage
Horizontal frames are often featured in his works of the 1950s and 1960s. In this painting he hints at their 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 Moore and Alberto Giacometti. Giacometti had employed the device 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 frames has brought to mind imprisonment to many commentators; Adolf Eichmann's glass cage during his 1961 trial 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.