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Lot Essay
Painted in 1963, Crucifixion noire et rouge is filled with anguish. This picture is filled with torment, with an existential scream of pain and despair. The sense of torture and of violence is heightened by the rare use in one of Saura's Crucifixions of red paint-- an innovation that featured in several of his 1963 treatments of the subject. The striated, dripped and spattered red paint speaks of blood, of wounds and welts, of pain searing through the body of the man. The theme of the crucifixion is one that had long been treated by Old Masters, being a religious touchstone. Saura has taken the theme and given it a new, jarring currency by filling it with torment, a sharp contrast to the dignified martyrdom depicted in the works that he had seen in churches and museums since his youth:
"Since early childhood, I had been very impressed by Velázquez's Christ on display in the Prado Museum, with its face concealed beneath the mop of tousled hair of a flamenco bailaora, its feet of a torero, its frozen marionette's flesh transformed into Adonis... The absolute black of Velázquez's background favours the serene appearance of the tortured body. The clenching of Grünewald's [Christ], on the other hand, evokes the scream and agony of a universe turned upside down" (Saura, quoted in G. Scarpetta, Crucifixions: the Viewpoint of the Torturer,' pp. 41-52, in R. Chiappini (ed.), Antonio Saura, exh. cat., Lugano 1994, p. 48).
Thus Saura has taken several elements the background and the twisting body and combined them, adding his own expressionistic brushwork, in order to create a picture that conveys his own anxieties. On one level, his concerns during the period were historical and political, as it was at this time that he began his involvement with anti-Franco political movements. But it also touches upon a far wider, far more universal and yet far more personal anguish:
"Perhaps, in the image of a victim of crucifixion I have reflected my situation as a man alone in a menacing universe which it is possible to confront with a scream, but also, in the back of the mirror, what interests me is simply the tragedy of a man a man, not a god nailed absurdly to a cross. An image which, like Goya's execution victim with raised hands and white shirt, or the mother in Picasso's Guernica, can still be a tragic symbol of our age" (Saura, quoted in ibid., p. 136).
"Since early childhood, I had been very impressed by Velázquez's Christ on display in the Prado Museum, with its face concealed beneath the mop of tousled hair of a flamenco bailaora, its feet of a torero, its frozen marionette's flesh transformed into Adonis... The absolute black of Velázquez's background favours the serene appearance of the tortured body. The clenching of Grünewald's [Christ], on the other hand, evokes the scream and agony of a universe turned upside down" (Saura, quoted in G. Scarpetta, Crucifixions: the Viewpoint of the Torturer,' pp. 41-52, in R. Chiappini (ed.), Antonio Saura, exh. cat., Lugano 1994, p. 48).
Thus Saura has taken several elements the background and the twisting body and combined them, adding his own expressionistic brushwork, in order to create a picture that conveys his own anxieties. On one level, his concerns during the period were historical and political, as it was at this time that he began his involvement with anti-Franco political movements. But it also touches upon a far wider, far more universal and yet far more personal anguish:
"Perhaps, in the image of a victim of crucifixion I have reflected my situation as a man alone in a menacing universe which it is possible to confront with a scream, but also, in the back of the mirror, what interests me is simply the tragedy of a man a man, not a god nailed absurdly to a cross. An image which, like Goya's execution victim with raised hands and white shirt, or the mother in Picasso's Guernica, can still be a tragic symbol of our age" (Saura, quoted in ibid., p. 136).