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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jonathan Jones

Monstrous war: Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944
No artist anywhere during the second world war revealed its destruction of lives and meanings as ruthlessly as Francis Bacon does here. A Europe of death camps has become a breeding ground for nauseating monsters in this brutal requiem for art and god. Bacon’s three creatures, grey-fleshed, unpleasantly phallic, are set in an airless theatre of reddish light. This is a seriously disturbing, horribly great work of art
Illustration: Currently on display at the National Galleries of Scotland
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