It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another." I had no intention to do this picture I never thought of it in that way. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I'd drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion rose the picture. "I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. "The one like a butcher's shop, it came to me as an accident," he once said of the picture. The strange, collage-like composition of this work reveals Bacon's method. In the foreground, a well-dressed man under an umbrella sits in a circular enclosure which might be decorated with more bones and another carcass. From the top, the outstretched wings of a bird skeleton seem to be perched upon a hanging carcass, the latter motif influenced, like Bacon's Crucifixion from 1933, by Rembrandt. The layered images of this enigmatic painting blend into each other, giving it a dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality. Oil on board - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom The piece profoundly influenced images of the body in post-war British art. Bacon may have been drawn to the play's themes of guilt and obsession. The figures are based upon the Furies, goddesses of revenge from Greek mythology that play an important role in the Oresteia, a three-part tragedy by Aeschylus. The perspective lines in the background create a shallow space, alluding to captivity and torture. The twisted bodies are all the more frightening for their vaguely familiar human-like forms, which appear to stretch out toward the viewer in pain and supplication. Bacon may have originally intended to incorporate the figures in a crucifixion, but his reference to the base of such a composition suggests that he imagined them as part of a predella, the scenes at the bottom of a traditional altarpiece. Three Studies launched Bacon's reputation in the mid 1940s and shows the importance of biomorphic Surrealism in forging his early style.
#Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion series#
The Old Masters were an important source of inspiration for him, particularly Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1650) which Bacon used as the basis for his own famous series of "screaming popes." At a time when many lost faith in painting, Bacon maintained his belief in the importance of the medium, saying of his own working that his own pictures "deserve either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between."ġ944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion Although Bacon's success rested on his striking approach to figuration, his attitudes toward painting were profoundly traditional.From these Bacon not only pioneered new ways to suggest movement in painting, but to bring painting and photography into a more coherent union. Bacon established his mature style in the late 1940s when he evolved his earlier Surrealism into an approach that borrowed from depictions of motion in film and photography, in particular the studies of figures in action produced by the early photographer Eadweard Muybridge.The work established many of the themes that would occupy the rest of his career, namely humanity's capacity for self-destruction and its fate in an age of global war. Surrealism, and in particular biomorphism, shaped the style of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the work that launched Bacon's reputation when it was exhibited in London in the final weeks of World War II.This ability to create such powerful statements were foundational for Bacon's unique achievement in painting. Bacon's canvases communicate powerful emotions - whole tableaux seem to scream, not just the people depicted on them.
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