Francis Bacon - written by Max Presneill
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944
oil and pastel on Sundeala fibre board
triptych, each panel 37 x 29 inches
Tate Britain, London, UK
Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) was an Irish-born, British figurative painter.
He came late to art and dropped in and out of the art scene until Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), which made his reputation.
A lifelong drinker and gambler, a gay man when it was illegal to be so for much of his life, with a difficult family background, his work reflects a bleak image of humanity back at us.
PAINTING 1946
1946
Oil and pastel on canvas
77 ⅞ x 52 in. (198 x 132 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
After the suicide of his long term lover, gangster George Dyer (the subject of many of his portraits), in 1971, Bacon increasingly reflected upon his own mortality, via self-portraits and more sombre settings, with darkened doorways becoming a motif, saying, “people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint.”
Bacon’s central concern, placed front and center, was for the figure. Mostly taken from friends photographs, they reveal the transient impermanence of the flesh. Naked, base, animalistic, shorn of dignity or hope, carcass-like or deformed, they seem repulsive but captivating. Distorted, mutated, as seen through a drug haze or time warp, they are identifiable, but shift-phasing from one place/time into another with some parts disappearing, others congealing.
STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ'S PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X
1953
Oil on canvas
60 ¼ x 46 ½ in. (153 x 118 cm)
Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines
Powerful, unyielding paintings, not for the faint of heart, they unflinchingly focussed on the figure and portraiture. Indebted to Picasso’s cubist experiments with the figure and portraiture, Bacon found his groove with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, first shown at London’s Lefevre Gallery in April 1945. The 3 biomorphic chimeric Furies, limbless and trapped on presenting structures, in blind horror scream, mewl and cry, half-mad mutant spirits of vengeance, representing the Eumenides from Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy the Oresteia. From 1949, Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion, a photographic series of humans and animals in motion became an important source for his painting.
Bacon would return to his central themes of existential angst via Greek myths, religious iconography and animals throughout his career. Populated mostly by the nude figure, or close-up portraits, images taken from film and photography, working from photographs of friends and famous artworks by other artists, rather than real life, he begat an oeuvre that challenged ‘good taste’ and signaled a move within British art away from the pre-war years stylistically and made him the Godfather of British contemporary art.
LYING FIGURE
1969
Oil on canvas
78 x 58 in. (198 x 147.5 cm)
Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Collection, Riehen / Basel
They loiter in circus arenas, claustrophobic rooms, cages or in darkened doorways, foreboding, threatening or threatened. The linear structure he employed to create these indeterminate sites (which he called ‘space frames’), can be read as a psychological/philosophical space for existentialist uncertainty and the location of death or nightmare. Bold, flattened background color heightens the presence of the figures while emphasizing the constructed and abstracted space they exist within, claustrophobic and constraining, with chairs, chaise longues and beds are used to situate the denizens of his subterranean entourage.
His death in 1991 left us an astounding body of work, remarkable in its power and focus.
Three Studies for a Crucifixion
1962
triptych, each 78 x 57 inches
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York