Fragment of a Crucifixion

A snarling, baring-toothed animal crouches atop a cross-like armature in a flat red space, a smaller carcass or prey below, the scene raw, unfinished, and unsettling. Francis Bacon used the form of the crucifixion not for religious meaning but as an armature for images of slaughter, suffering, and the body as meat. Now in the Van Abbemuseum, Fragment of a Crucifixion is one of his early treatments of the theme - violence stripped of redemption, a creature mid-scream fixed on its scaffold, the sacred subject hollowed out into a stark, modern image of predation and pain.