"Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-celinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was bandaged. The left-hand figure had the hairstyle of a female jail-bird. At shoulder-level it had what might have been mutilated wing-stumps. An inch or two below these there was drawn tight what might have been either a shower curtain or a pair of outsized pajama trousers. Set down on what looked like a metal stool, the figure was trashing round as if to savage whatever came within biting distance. The central figure, anatomically somewhat like a dis-feathered ostrich, had a human mouth, heavily bandaged, set at the end of its long, thick tubular neck.
What that neck might have looked like without the bandage was indicated by the right-handed figure. It had big ears at the corner of its mouth, and was able to open that mouth to an angle of about ninety degrees. It's one visible leg was as much a sofa-leg as an animal leg, and the patch of grass on which it stood was nearer to a bed of nails than to the shaven lawns of Oxford and Cambridge.
Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was if as cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level."
John Russell, 1971
What that neck might have looked like without the bandage was indicated by the right-handed figure. It had big ears at the corner of its mouth, and was able to open that mouth to an angle of about ninety degrees. It's one visible leg was as much a sofa-leg as an animal leg, and the patch of grass on which it stood was nearer to a bed of nails than to the shaven lawns of Oxford and Cambridge.
Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was if as cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level."
John Russell, 1971
Il corpo al centro, a testa in giù, suggerisce una crocifissione invertita di Cimabue, che Bacon immaginava come un verme che strisciava e ondulava alla base della croce.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944
Oil and pastel on hardboard each panel 145x128 cm. The Tate Gallery, London
Oil and pastel on hardboard each panel 145x128 cm. The Tate Gallery, London
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