Fragment of a Crucifixion
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. Bacon later dismissed the painting, considering it too literal and explicit.
About Fragment of a Crucifixion in brief
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. The painting is drawn from a wide variety of sources, including the screaming mouth of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. The link with the biblical Cruc crucifixion is made through the raised arms of the lower creature, and the T-shaped cross. The work seems to represent a nihilistic and hopeless view of the human condition. Bacon later dismissed the painting, considering it too literal and explicit. He abandoned the theme of the crucifixion for the following 12 years, not returning to it until the more loosely based, but equally bleak, triptych Three Studies for a CruCifixion. It is housed in the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
The painting has been linked both in its formal construction to Bacon’s 1956 work Owls, and to his formal construction of the book Owls and Owls in the late 1990s. The art critic Armin Zweak has replaced the bird in the lower figure with a photograph of an owl that Bacon found in a book of birds in motion. He has also replaced the owl with a picture of a bird in motion that Bacon’s friend and art critic Michael Peppiattiatt said he found to be a scrap of religious belief. Bacon’s later works focusing on the motif of an open mouth are almost a faith in and of itself, he has said. He later said he could no longer believe in religious belief, when he found he was ‘extremely furious, and anybody with anybody with them would go for them for them’ The painting contains thinly sketched passer-by figures, who appear as if oblivious to the central drama. Over half of the work is unpainted, essentially bare canvas.
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This page is based on the article Fragment of a Crucifixion published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
