Guest editorial.

Cork, Richard

As his powerful retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain now confirms, Francis Bacon achieved his breakthrough with a triptych called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. By April 1945, when he displayed this vehement painting for the first time at a London gallery, most people in Britain knew that the Second World War was nearly over. The following month, the Nazi surrender was formally ratified in Berlin. But Bacons lacerating picture could not have stood in more stubborn contrast to the mood of imminent national rejoicing. He had finished painting it in 1944, after working on all three parts throughout the war, so the trauma of those years scarred itself deeply on the roughly worked surface of each panel.

The inconclusive trail of his 1930s works, many half-finished and some subsequently destroyed, proves that he saw the crucifixion as the most direct means of conveying the brutality of the society around him. Although no longer a Christian, Bacon still regarded the dying figure nailed to the cross in paintings by Cimabue and Grunewald as the most eloquent available images of human suffering. The advent of World War II must have confirmed all his darkest misgivings about the world, and his own experience working with dead and dying victims of the Blitz reinforced Bacons determination to develop an art expressive of the new horror.

In 1945 many of the gallery visitors who encountered his triptych were no longer certain about the role of Christianity in the contemporary world. The waste of war had only confirmed their doubts about religious faith, and they might well have understood why the crucifixion itself is missing from Bacons painting. These three figures' agitation is unalleviated by a saviour on a cross who reassures them with the promise of eternal life. The triptych format, which had been the vehicle for so many heartfelt affirmations of Christianity in western art, is used here with bitter irony to drive home the impossibility of painting a traditional crucifixion. Just as Bacon would later take a Velazquez painting of a Pope and transform it into a screaming grotesque, so he chose here the ultimate symbol of human salvation in order to expose its desolating absence. The forcefulness of the misery and rage hurled at us by these three Greek Furies, as Bacon once called them, proves the extent of his own loss of faith.

Despite their determination to survive the suffering, these bruised victims with their livid flesh may have seemed too excoriating in April 1945. But their repulsive malformations were, in fact, a portent of an historical event which bore out Bacons trepidation. In the early morning of 6 August, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It exterminated around 70,000 civilians. Some of the bodies were disfigured beyond recognition, as dehumanised in their way as the victims in Bacons picture. So this triptych warns us, with nightmarish conviction, of what we might become if the armoury devised for our godless conflicts since 1945 were ever unleashed. The prospect is almost too horrible to contemplate, but Bacons fiercely eloquent imagination insists that we ignore it at our peril.