![]() Mary the mother of Christ, as ashen as the corpse of her son, reaches up to embrace him, her eye also a mere smudge of black. But, in Sutherland’s painting, she is almost dehumanised by her grief. Much of this is, again, traditional – she appears in a very similar position, for example, in an early fourteenth-century panel in the Fitzwilliam by the Master of Verucchio, right. Blood from the wounds in Christ’s feet stains her hands. The influence of Picasso is also felt in the figures of the women, particularly Mary Magdalene, who clings to the bottom of the cross, breast bared, head thrown back. Sutherland – who prior to 1946 had rarely painted the human figure – drew inspiration from the cubist heads of Pablo Picasso, like that from the Fitzwilliam collection. The traditional motif is treated here, however, in an entirely modern way. We see it, for example, in Cosimo Tura’s fifteenth-century panel in the Fitzwilliam. On the ground at the right of the cross here is a stylised representation of the skull of Adam, a feature found in paintings of the Crucifixion since the ninth century. It is the symbol of the precarious balanced moment, the hair’s-breadth between black and white. ![]() it is the most tragic of all themes, and yet inherent in it is the promise of salvation. The Crucifixion idea interested me because. The artist, who had become a Roman Catholic in 1926 so that he could marry his wife Kathleen, explained in 1952: The biblical characters in this painting – Christ, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea – are presented as malnourished victims, their flesh lifeless, their faces skeletal, like the Jews who emerged in April 1945 from the Belsen concentration camp.īut while the horrified British soldier quoted above saw the inmates of Belsen as ‘too far gone now to be bought back to life', Sutherland, by placing them in the context of Christ’s Crucifixion, suggests that even in the bleakest moments of suffering, there is hope. One of the inspirations behind Graham Sutherland’s harrowing image of Christ’s descent from the cross was a booklet of photographs which showed victims of the Nazi Holocaust. They must die and nothing can save them – their end is inescapable, they are too far gone now to be brought back to life.Ī British soldier witnessing the liberation of Belsen, April 1945 ![]() The state of their minds is plainly written on their faces, as starvation has reduced their bodies to skeletons. The conditions in which these people live are appalling. ![]()
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