Fragment of A Crucifixion - Relationship With Bacon's Other Paintings

Relationship With Bacon's Other Paintings

The painting has been linked both thematically and its formal construction to 1956 work Owls and to a number of preparatory sketches only brought to the art market in the late 1990s. Zweite traces the origin of the lower figure to a photograph of an owl Bacon found in a book on birds in motion. However, bacon has replaced the bird's beak with a wide open human mouth.

Fragment is one of a number of treatments Bacon created to examine the biblical crucifixion scene. Here again, he incorporates Greek legend into his treatment of the crucifixion, notably the tale of Aeschylus and the Eumenides—or Furies—found in The Oresteia, which is referenced by the broad wings of the chimera.

Bacon's imagery became less extreme as he got older, and from the early 1950s onwards, few of his canvases contained the sensational imagery that had made him famous in the mid-1940s. He said, "When I was younger, I needed extreme subject-matter. Now I don't." According to the art critic John Russell, Bacon found it more powerful to reflect violence in his brush strokes and colourisation, not literally, and not "in the thing portrayed". Bacon was his own harshest critic, and often both destroyed or disowned certain works that yet were held in high regard by critics and buyers. Fragment of a Crucifixion is one he came to dislike; he viewed it as too explicit, in the words of Russell, "too near the conventions of narrative-painting."