Bacon, Francis - Three Studies for Figures at Base of Crucifixion - art postcard

^{Please ask if you need any other information and I will do the best I can to answer.}

^{Image may be low res for illustrative purposes - if you need a higher definition image then please contact me and I may be able to send one. No cards have been trimmed (unless stated).}

^{------------------------------------------------}

^{Postage & Packing:}

^{Postage and packing charge should be showing for your location (contact if not sure).}

^{No additional charges for more than one postcard. You can buy as many postcards from me as you like and you will just pay the fee above once. Please wait for combined invoice. (If buying postcards with other things such as books, please contact or wait for invoice before paying).}

^{Payment Methods:}

^{UK - PayPal, Cheque (from UK bank) or postal order}

^{Outside UK: PayPal ONLY (unless otherwise stated) please.   NO non-UK currency checks or money orders (sorry).}

^{NOTE: All postcards are sent in brand new stiffened envelopes which I have bought for the task. These are specially made to protect postcards and you may be able to re-use them. In addition there are other costs to sending so the above charge is not just for the stamp!}

^{I will give a full refund if you are not fully satisfied with the postcard.}

^{----------------------------------------------}

^{Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :}

^{*************}

^{Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych painted by the Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon. The canvasses are based on the Eumenides—or Furies—of Aeschylus's Oresteia, and depict three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background. It was executed in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board and completed within two weeks. The triptych summarises themes explored in Bacon's previous work, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs and his interpretations of the Crucifixion and the Greek Furies. Bacon did not[1] realise his original intention to paint a large crucifixion scene and place the figures at the foot of the cross.[2]}

^{The Three Studies are generally considered Bacon's first mature piece;[3] he regarded his works before the triptych as irrelevant, and throughout his life tried to suppress their appearance on the art market. When the painting was first exhibited in 1945 it caused a sensation and established him as one of the foremost post-war painters. Remarking on the cultural significance of Three Studies, the critic John Russell observed in 1971 that "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two".[4]}

^{Background
As an artist, Francis Bacon was a late starter. He painted sporadically and without commitment during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he worked as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. He later admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent so long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest.[5] He began to paint images based on the Crucifixion in 1933, when his then-patron Eric Hall commissioned a series of three paintings based on the subject.[6] These abstract figurations contain formal elements typical of their time, including diaphanous forms, flat backgrounds,[7] and surrealist props such as flowers and umbrellas. The art critic Wieland Schmied noted that while the early works are "aesthetically pleasing", they lack "a sense of urgency or inner necessity; they are beautiful, but lifeless".[8] The sentiment is echoed by Hugh Davies, who wrote that Bacon's 1933 paintings "suggest an artist concentrating more on formal than on expressive concerns".[6] Bacon admitted that his early works were not successful; they were merely decorative and lacking in substance. He was often harshly self-critical during this period, and would abandon or destroy canvasses before they were completed. He abandoned the Crucifixion theme, then largely withdrew from painting in frustration,[8] instead immersing himself in love affairs, drinking and gambling.[9]}

^{When he returned to the topic of the Crucifixion eleven years later, he retained some of the stylistic elements he had developed earlier, such as the elongated and dislocated organic forms that he now based on Oresteia.[10] He continued to incorporate the spatial device he was to use many times throughout his career—three lines radiating from this central figure, which was first seen in Crucifixion, 1933.[6] Three Studies was painted over the course of two weeks in 1944, when, Bacon recalled, "I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer."[11] The painting was executed in a ground-floor flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington in London. A large back room in the building had been converted into a billiard room by its previous occupant, artist John Everett Millais. It was Bacon's studio by day; at night, abetted by Eric Hall and Bacon's childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot, it functioned as an illicit casino.[12]}

^{Although he had been painting for almost twenty years, Bacon steadfastly insisted that Three Studies was the fons et origo of his career. He destroyed many of his earlier canvasses, and tried to suppress those that had left his studio. Bacon was emphatic that no pre-1944 images be admitted into his canon, and most of the early art critics agreed with this position. The early publications of John Russell and David Sylvester open with the 1944 triptych, and Bacon insisted to his death that no retrospective should feature paintings pre-dating 1944.[13]}

^{The triptych
The panels of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion are painted on light Sundeala boards, a material Bacon was using at the time as an inexpensive alternative to canvas.[14] Each bears a single taut sculptural form pitched against a harsh orange background. The orange hue displays inconsistently across the canvasses, due in part to the low level of oil in the paint, which resulted in varying rates of absorption into the board.[7] The pallid flesh tones of the figures were achieved by overlaying grey and white brushstrokes, while the figures' props were coloured using a variety of yellow, green, white, and purple tones.[7]}

^{The blindfolded Christ in Matthias Grünewald's Mocking of Christ, c. 1503, was an influence on the presentation of the central figure in Bacon's Three Studies.[15]
The art critic Hugh Davies has suggested that of the three figures, that on the left most closely resembles a human form, and that it might represent a mourner at the cross.[16] Seated on a table-like structure, this limbless creature has an elongated neck, heavily rounded shoulders, and a thick mop of dark hair.[7] Like its affiliate objects, the left-hand figure is portrayed with layers of white and grey paint.[7]}

^{The central figure's mouth is positioned directly on its neck, rather than on a distinct face.[17] It bares its teeth as if in a snarl, and is blindfolded by a drooping cloth bandage—a device likely drawn from Matthias Grünewald's Mocking of Christ.[18] This creature faces the viewer directly and is centralised by a series of converging lines radiating from the base of the pedestal.}

^{Situated on an isolated patch of grass, the right-hand figure's toothed mouth is stretched open as if screaming, although David Sylvester has suggested that it may be yawning. Its mouth is open to a degree impossible for a human skull.[17] The orange background of this panel is brighter than the hues rendered in the other frames,[7] and the figure's neck opens up into a row of teeth, while a protruding ear juts out from behind its lower jaw. This panel closely resembles an earlier painting by Bacon, Untitled, c. 1943, which was thought destroyed until it re-emerged in 1997.[7]}

^{Inspection under infrared has revealed that the panels were heavily reworked during a number of revisions.[19] The legs of the central figure are surrounded by small magenta horseshoe shapes, which infrared shows to have been first drafted as flowers. The area below the head is thickly coated with white and orange paint, while the inspection exposes a series of underlying curved brushstrokes used to compose a landscape, and a small distant reclining figure. When the canvas is unframed, a number of measuring marks are visible on the outer margin of board, indicating that the composition was carefully conceived.[7]}

^{Bacon said in a 1959 letter that the figures in Three Studies were "intended to [be] use[d] at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may still do".[20] By this, Bacon implied that the figures were conceived as a predella to a larger altarpiece.[13] The biographer Michael Peppiatt has suggested that the panels may have emerged as single works, and that the idea of combining them as a triptych came later.[18] There is little in the themes or styles of the three panels to suggest that they were originally conceived as a whole. Though they share the same orange background, Bacon had already used this colour in two prior pieces; moreover, his oeuvre can be characterized by periods that are dominated by a single background colour. From the beginning of his career, Bacon preferred to work in series and found that his imagination was stimulated by sequences; as he put it, "images breed other images in me."[18]}

^{The Crucifixion itself is conspicuously absent, and there is no trace or shadow of its presence in the panels. Writing in 1996, Wieland Schmied noted that the three Furies have replaced Christ and the two thieves crucified on either side of him.[21] The form of the Furies is borrowed directly from Picasso's late 1920s and mid-1930s pictures of biomorphs on beaches, in particular from the Spanish artist's The Bathers (1937).[22] However, the eroticism and comedy of Picasso's figures have been replaced by a sense of menace and terror derived in part from Matthias Grünewald's Mocking of Christ.[20]}

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures.[1] Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact."[1] He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.[2]

Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,[3] typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including the 1930s Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s "screaming popes," the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the early 1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late 1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler, more technical 1980s paintings.

Bacon did not begin to paint until his late twenties, having drifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler.[4] He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s, he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single, diptych or triptych panels. Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (memorialised in his Black Triptychs, and a number of posthumous portraits), his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of his later period is marked by the masterpieces Study for Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.

Despite his existentialist and bleak outlook, Bacon was charismatic, articulate and well-read. A bon vivant, he spent his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London's Soho with like-minded friends including Lucian Freud (although they fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker and Jeffrey Bernard. After Dyer's suicide, he largely distanced himself from this circle, and while still socially active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

Since his death, Bacon's reputation has grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after on the art market. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed,[5] including early 1950s pope paintings and 1960s portraits, re-emerged to set record prices at auction.