three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion

#THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION MOVIE#
#THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION SERIES#

Bacon cited one of his major influences as Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film 'Battleship Potemkin,' particularly a closeup shot of a screaming nurse. He demanded that all his paintings be covered by glass and they often had ornate frames.

He frequently returned to the crucifixion theme, including another triptych done during the mid-1980s. 'Animal movement and human movement are certainly linked in my images,' he told an interviewer in the 1950s. He sometimes flanked the forms with depictions of raw meat or paint splashed on the canvas. The central figures increasingly became abstract during the 1950s and 1960s - sometimes merging human and animal forms.

#THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION SERIES#

In the 1940s, he concentrated more on the human form and male nudes, painting a series based on his friend Eric Hall as well as self-portraits. His first show, in 1945, featured the triptych 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion' - which showed carcass-like forms on crosses. His first major surviving painting, 'Crucifixion,' appeared in a British art journal in 1933. Bacon's art raised questions about the purpose of art: Is it to be pleasurably enjoyed or must it confront the viewer with stark reality? He said that he disliked his early work and destroyed much of it. He told a biographer that he was 'scarcely aware pictures existed' until he left Ireland. A completely self-taught artist, he often said he had virtually no education as a youth. He started to paint in 1930 after working as an interior decorator. He went on gambling sprees and spent nights in transvestite clubs. The future artist traveled to Berlin, where he threw himself into the life of a city renowned for its excesses in the 1920s and 1930s. His father banished him from home at the age of 16 after he was found having sexual relations with the grooms. Bacon, who was descended from the philosopher of the same name, was born in Dublin, the son of a former British Army officer and a race horse trainer. If the works were violent and shocking, and often based on a contemporary theme, they also featured a kind of epic grandeur of style, with what one critic called rich, sensuous handling of paint reminiscent of the 16th and early 17th century Venetian and Spanish painting. The picture is known as 'The Screaming Pope.' These included his portrait of Pope Innocent X, which was based on a famous portrait by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez - and shows the 17th century pontiff caged in plate glass and screaming.

Other of his works were based on old and classic works.

#THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION MOVIE#

He often used contemporary images as a starting point for his work, including news photos and movie stills. Sometimes his figures were surrounded by lines suggesting a cage or prison and a spirit locked in a private hell. Bacon was best known for his biomorphic abstractions and representations of the male human form, often twisted or distorted shapes in a stark setting such as a bare room or on a platform-like arena. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher outraged London's artistic community when she once described him as 'that man who paints those dreadful pictures.' He became the first living British painter to be given a one-man show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1988 received an exhibition in Moscow - a first-time honor for a living Westerner.īritish contemporary painter Howard Hodgkin called him 'the greatest English painter since Turner.' At least one other noted figure was not so kind. Bacon gave one of his major paintings, worth more than $5 million, to London's Tate Gallery. A Bacon triptych recently sold in New York for almost $7 million. He had been hailed as one of the most influential figure painters of the postwar period and as one of the world's greatest contemporary painters. Bacon, who had asthma, was stricken while on vacation. LONDON - Francis Bacon, 82, the British artist whose large paintings of misshapen or screaming figures explored human misery and isolation and gave the contemporary art world some of its most disturbing images, died April 28 at a hospital in Madrid after a heart attack.

Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion