Craigie Aitchison

Crucifixion with Angels is a darkly glimmering evocation of a biblical subject. The colouring is warm and low-key. The darkness of the scene reflects the sobriety of the subject, yet within the lowered key local areas of dim colour tell as bright and resonant flashes: the haloes and garb of the angels and Christ’s pink loin cloth jump forwards within the composition. A thinly scrubbed blue-black ground is overlaid with umber. The underlayer fills the sky, brightening to a misty area in the upper reaches of the canvas which suggests a parting in the clouds. At the centre of the painting, the rippling edge of umber coincides with the crossbar of the crucifix and indicates the horizon.

The subject content is restricted to localised details, shrouded in the atmospheric landscape of umber and blue-black paint. The figure of Christ is cursory, the spindly arms and legs disappearing into the ether. Three angels in the foreground expostulate in gestures of lamentation: two put their hands to their eyes as if weeping, while the third raises a hand in exclamation. Bunches of blue, pink and white wild flowers punctuate the landscape and perhaps invoke Aitchison’s home in rural Scotland, Tulliallan, where he was living when he made Crucifixion with Angels. An extended line of green paint meanders diagonally across the scene, cutting through the central area of the composition. The whole surface shows signs of extensive scraping off and reworking, reflecting Aitchison’s usual practice of painstaking revision along the road to representational accuracy.

Crucifixion with Angels is closely related to another crucifixion made the previous year (fig. 1), which uses the same pictorial idea of swirling angels. Alongside still lifes and landscapes, religious subjects formed a significant part of Aitchison’s output at this time. In his Beaux Arts Gallery solo exhibition of 1960, in which Crucifixion with Angels was included, many other paintings treated religious themes: Crucifixion (no. 1), Madonna and Child (no. 2), Saint Sebastian (no. 3), Nativity (no. 7), The three Crosses (no. 11), Crucified (no. 15), Christ on the Cross (no. 22), Nativity and Angels (no. 29), and Loggia, from Annunciation by Domenico Veneziano (no. 30). Such a range of Christian subjects suggests not a casual interest but rather a sustained, meditative response to the artist’s chosen themes.

Aitchison once said, ‘The Crucifixion is the most horrific story I’ve ever heard, they were all ganging up against one person. As long as the world exists one should attempt to record that.’ Later in life, Aitchison would tell a story about how a teacher at the Slade, William Townsend, had discouraged him from painting the crucifixion. Townsend rudely suggested that it was too serious for him. This unfair treatment spurred him to defy his critics and make his first paintings of the subject. Aitchison’s sense of justice is the common theme between these two stories, tying together Gospel truth with his experience of being belittled at art school. Although the injustice and horror of the subject may have captivated Aitchison, however, his treatment of the crucifixion typically suppressed any sense of pain or suffering. The overtly beautiful, balanced colour harmonies in Crucifixion with Angels ameliorates the austere overtones.

As with the crucifix-related paintings of Francis Bacon, Aitchison’s crucifixions are purged of formal morality. (Having trained at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1952 and 1954, Aitchison like his friend Michael Andrews was probably aware of Bacon, who occasionally tutored there and made use of the Slade Professor’s painting studio.) Unlike Bacon, however, an outspoken atheist, Aitchison’s personal beliefs were less clear. When asked by Cate Haste if he was religious, he responded: ‘I don’t know what it means. I think if you think you’re religious, it’s a bit conceited.’ In a monograph about the artist, Andrew Gibbon Williams wrote that Aitchison ‘is certainly no church-goer, but then again ‘the manse’ is in his blood, and as children he and his brother were regularly taken to churches of various, often opposed, denominations’. Crucifixion with Angels well summarises these ambiguities in Aitchison’s spiritual life, at once communicating his mixed beliefs and a refined sensibility for colour.

Between 1959 and 1964, Aitchison held three exhibitions with Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Crucifixion with Angels was exhibited there in 1960. Lessore was Aitchison’s earliest and most ardent supporter, marketing his work at an early stage in his career and proving to be one of his most eloquent critical interpreters. She wrote an insightful essay on his work that was published in 1975. After Lessore’s gallery closed in 1965, Crucifixion with Angels passed to her descendants. It has not been offered for sale since the Beaux Arts Gallery’s closure but has been exhibited in two of Aitchison’s most significant retrospectives, those held by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1981 and the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003. Crucifixion with Angels is a rare masterpiece of Aitchison’s early career and a canonical work in his oeuvre as a whole, rich in painterly refinement and poignant atmosphere.