Featured Article Summary #90

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a triptych painted in 1944 by Francis Bacon, an Irish-born British artist. It draws on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, specifically the Eumenides, or Furies, and shows three twisted human-like figures against a flat burnt orange background. Bacon made the work using oil paint and pastel on fibre board and finished it in just two weeks. Although he explored ideas from earlier paintings—such as Picasso’s biomorphs and his own views of the crucifixion and the Greek Furies—he never completed the larger crucifixion scene he originally planned. The triptych is widely seen as Bacon’s first mature work, and when it was exhibited in 1945 it made a major impact and helped establish him as a leading post-war painter. In 1971, critic John Russell said that this painting marked a clear turning point for English painting. Francis Bacon began painting late and, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, worked in design and furniture making while struggling to find subjects that held his interest. His Crucifixion-based paintings started in 1933 but were criticized as attractive yet lifeless, and Bacon was so dissatisfied that he often destroyed unfinished works, eventually abandoning the theme for years and withdrawing from painting. He returned to the Crucifixion in the early 1940s, keeping some earlier style elements, and painted Three Studies in 1944 in his studio at 7 Cromwell Place. Even though he had painted for about twenty years by then, Bacon insisted that this 1944 work was the true start of his career, destroying earlier canvases and trying to prevent pre-1944 paintings from being included in his official canon. The work consists of three pale, tense figures painted on inexpensive light Sundeala boards against an orange background. Each figure is built up with layered greys and whites, while the bodies and props use varied yellows, greens, purples, and whites; the orange shifts between panels because the paint absorbed differently into the board. Critics have linked the figures to ideas from artists such as Grünewald and Picasso, and technical infrared study shows that at least the central panel was heavily revised, including earlier drafts of different shapes and even an underlying landscape scene. Although Bacon described these figures as meant for use at the base of a large Crucifixion, Christ and the thieves are absent, replaced instead by Furies, making the original religious scene feel displaced by menace and terror. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion strongly shaped Bacon’s later work, especially through its triptych form, glassy gilded framing, distorted bodies and faces, and the violent, foreboding mood of crucifixion imagery. Although the painting draws on sources like Greek tragedies (particularly the Furies and the theme of obsessive guilt), Bacon did not aim to illustrate the stories; instead, he focused on the emotional effects of violence and guilt, captured vividly through details such as the central figure’s open mouth. He also treated the Crucifixion in a secular, human way—less as Christian doctrine and more as “human behaviour”—a shift that helped him use the subject to explore private feelings and anxieties, sometimes read as connected to the wartime atmosphere. Three Studies was first shown in London in April 1945 at the Lefevre Gallery, just as World War II was ending, when many people were hopeful and looking for reassurance. Instead, audiences and critics were deeply disturbed by Bacon’s unsettling, half-human, half-animal figures, which quickly made him highly controversial. Later writers still described the triptych as intensely shocking and emotionally powerful, and it has since remained in the Tate’s permanent collection after being donated in 1953.