This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(December 2023) |
Crucifixion (CR 33-01) is an early oil-on-canvas painting by Francis Bacon, made in 1933 when Bacon was aged 23 or 24. It was one of three paintings on the subject of the Crucifixion of Jesus that he made in 1933, the others being his Crucifixion with Skull (CR 33-03), commissioned by art collector Sir Michael Sadler, and Wound for a Crucifixion (later destroyed by Bacon). It is held in Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection.
The sombre work in tones of black, white and grey shows an abstracted white human figure with arms raised against a dark background. Space is marked out by lines denoting walls meeting a floor, and the horizontal bar of the cross. The subject, Jesus on the cross, is depicted like a stick man, with thin white arms looping up the crossbar, thin legs, and the head, hands and feet reduced to white blobs. The diaphanous body appears to be opening up like the folds of a ghostly cloak with the suggestion of ribs inside, resembling a grisaille reworking of an anatomical still life by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or Chaïm Soutine, or Rembrandt's 1638 painting The Slaughtered Ox . It measures 62 cm × 48.5 cm (24.4 in × 19.1 in).
Like another 1933 Bacon painting, After Picasso, "La Danse" (CR33-02), it may be based in part on Pablo Picasso's 1925 work The Three Dancers (Tate Gallery), which has a central naked stick-like figure standing on one leg with arms raised in a Y-shape. It may also have been influenced by Bacon's familiarity with Catholicism from his upbringing in Ireland, and more immediately by his attendance at the Oberammergau Passion Play in April 1930. There may also be echoes of the political violence in 1933 Germany, accompanying Adolf Hitler's rise to power. In turn, along with Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece , Bacon's Crucifixion influenced Graham Sutherland's 1946 crucifixion for St Matthew's Church, Northampton, and it has been cited as an inspiration for Jonathan Demme in his 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs .
It was Bacon's first work to attract public attention and the first to be reproduced in print when published in Herbert Read's book Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture (1933), opposite Picasso's 1929 work Baigneuse aux bras leves ("Female bather with raised arms") (Phoenix Art Museum). Bacon's painting was exhibited at the Mayor Gallery under the title Composition (1933) and bought by Sir Michael Sadler. Sadler also commissioned a new painting from Bacon: he sent Bacon an x-ray of his skull to be included in the painting, resulting in the 1933 work Crucifixion with Skull (sometimes known as Golgotha).
The sales enabled Bacon to hold his first solo exhibition in 1934, in the basement at Sunderland House, Curzon Street in London, but Bacon was downcast at a negative review published in The Times. He submitted works for the London International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but in a further blow they were rejected as not being "sufficiently surreal". Some of his works were included in an exhibition of "Young British Painters" at Thomas Agnew & Sons in 1937. Disappointed with his reception and progress, Bacon destroyed many of his early works (including his 1993 painting Wound for a Crucifixion , one of few he later regretted losing) and turned away from painting for several years. He later admitted that his early works were not successful: merely decorative and lacking in substance. After a dissolute period of drinking, gambling, and love affairs, he returned to painting and in 1944 to the theme of the Crucifixion, adding organic forms inspired by Aeschylus's Oresteia , in his breakthrough work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion , the second panel of which echoes the motif of three lines emerging from a central figure.
After Sadler died in 1943, Bacon's 1933 Crucifixion was acquired by Colin Anderson after it was exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in 1946. It is now held in Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
National Galleries Scotland: Modern is part of National Galleries Scotland, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Modern houses the collection of modern and contemporary art dating from about 1900 to the present in two buildings, Modern One and Modern Two, that face each other on Belford Road to the west of the city centre.
The Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are 18 gallery spaces – six in New York City, two in London, three in Paris, and one each in Basel, Gstaad, Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych painted by the Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon. The canvasses are based on the Eumenides—or Furies—of Aeschylus's Oresteia, and depict three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background. It was executed in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board and completed within two weeks. The triptych summarises themes explored in Bacon's previous work, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs and his interpretations of the Crucifixion and the Greek Furies. Bacon did not realise his original intention to paint a large crucifixion scene and place the figures at the foot of the cross.
Isabel Rawsthorne, also known at various times as Isabel Delmer and Isabel Lambert, was a British painter, scenery and costume designer, and occasional artists' model. During the Second World War she worked in black propaganda. She was part of an artistic bohemian society that included Jacob Epstein, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.
For the Love of God is a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond. The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London. The artwork is a memento mori, or reminder of the mortality of the viewer.
John Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, having opened in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is one of the largest museums in the country. The museum had 525,144 visitors in 2021, an increase of 34 percent from 2020 but still well below pre- COVID-19 pandemic levels. In 2021 it ranked 50th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.
Fragment of a Crucifixion is an unfinished 1950 painting by the Irish-born figurative painter Francis Bacon. It shows two animals engaged in an existential struggle; the upper figure, which may be a dog or a cat, crouches over a chimera and is at the point of kill. It stoops on the horizontal beam of a T-shaped structure, which may signify Christ's cross. The painting contains thinly sketched passer-by figures, who appear as if oblivious to the central drama.
The Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted 28 known triptychs between 1944 and 1986. He began to work in the format in the mid-1940s with a number of smaller scale formats before graduating in 1962 to large examples. He followed the larger style for 30 years, although he painted a number of smaller scale triptychs of friend's heads, and after the death of his former lover George Dyer in 1971, the three Black Triptychs.
Head VI is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish-born figurative artist Francis Bacon, the last of six panels making up his "1949 Head" series. It shows a bust view of a single figure, modeled on Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X. Bacon applies forceful, expressive brush strokes, and places the figure within a glass cage structure, behind curtain-like drapery. This gives the effect of a man trapped and suffocated by his surroundings, screaming into an airless void. But with an inverted pathos is derived from the ambiguity of the pope's horrifying expression—whose distorted face either screams of untethered hatred towards the viewer or pleads for help from the glass cage—the question of what he is screaming about is left to the audience.
The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) is an independent charity that champions the collecting of outstanding contemporary art and craft for UK museum collections. Since its founding in 1910 the organisation has donated over 10,000 works to museums across the UK. From the 1930s the Society also donated works to Commonwealth museums, but since 1989 the focus has remained exclusively on UK institutions.
The Newport Street Gallery is an art gallery in London, England, created by contemporary artist Damien Hirst for the display of works from his personal art collection, and as an venue to put on exhibitions of interest to him. The Grade II-listed building, formerly Hirst's studio, was awarded the RIBA Sterling Prize following its conversion in 2016 by Caruso St John Architects. Located on Newport Street in Vauxhall, admission to the public is free.
Three Studies for a Crucifixion is a 1962 triptych oil painting by Francis Bacon. It was completed in March 1962 and comprises three separate canvases, each measuring 198.1 by 144.8 centimetres. The work is held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Head III is an oil painting by Francis Bacon, one of series of works made in 1949 for his first one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, in London. As with the other six paintings in the series, it focuses on the disembodied head of male figure, who looks out with a penetrating gaze, but is fixed against an isolating, flat, nondescript background, while also enfolded by hazy horizontal foreground curtain-like folds which seems to function like a surrounding cage.
Blonde Bather is the name of two very similar paintings by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1881 and 1882. The model was Aline Charigot, later to become Renoir's wife. Influenced by Renaissance painting that Renoir saw in Italy in 1881, both paintings show a marked change of style from Renoir's previous work. Some commentators consider these are works of great beauty, others that they are vulgar. There has been criticism of the conservation work performed on the 1881 painting.
Two Figures (1953) is an oil painting by Francis Bacon, sometimes known as Two Figures on a Bed. It measures 152.5 cm × 116.5 cm, and is in a private collection.