Three Studies for a Crucifixion

Hell, as a child imagines it, looks like this: shades of red and black, blood oozing and splattering from wounds. Redemption arrives as torture. Sin is reaped as pain. Understanding comes only as fear. Creatures writhe across three panels, and to me the panels read as a transition.

In the first, two figures stare at the devoured legs. They watch the suffering, looking for a way out of the shut window. In the centre, the suffering itself: blood splashed everywhere, the body slithering, twisted, torn apart. In the third, the crucifixion, a body hung over a bed-like form and left to ooze downward. The first panel gives us two figures watching suffering. The last gives us a black dog watching the aftermath. That shift sets up a narrative of the afterlife, since black dogs are said to watch over souls as they cross into the next world.

We sit with death. Not before it, not after, but at the act itself. Everyone imagines death differently: a heart attack in sleep, a stroke on a summer afternoon, a warrior on a battlefield. Those deaths are the result. Bacon paints the dying, where pain varies physically and brings its own kind of retrospection. If I profited from stoking a war, the centre panel is the one I'd remember.
Bacon was staunchly atheist and anti-narrative, yet the halo of catastrophe around the crucifixion keeps pulling the mind toward Jesus and toward war, and that pull is hard to dismiss. He refused the story, but the painting invites it anyway.

He lived through the Blitz in London. Unfit for service because of his asthma, he never saw a battlefield, but the effect of war is plain in these panels. The sinuous arc from the desire for power to the price paid for it runs through all three. And that price was never paid only by those who chased power. People who wanted a simple life lived through the same anguish, though they never signed up for it. They had no say in the war, and like the figures in the first panel, they could only look for a way out of a shut window. The centre panel offers them no exit. It has no witness inside the frame. Only us. And by the third, we are left alone with the dog.