Lucien de Guise on the tale of two paintings, by Craigie Aitchison and Salvador Dalí.
Scotland is not the first place that comes to mind for depictions of the Crucifixion. A more likely image is of John Knox excoriating Mary, Queen of Scots, and others for their attachment to Catholic idolatry.
The revenge of Scottish would-be idolators has been happening for a while. Voted most popular painting in Scotland on a few occasions is Salvador Dalí’s Christ of St John of the Cross. It returned recently to the Craigie Aitchisonand Museums in Glasgow after a short but triumphant appearance just south of the border in County Durham. At the same time, a Crucifixion scene by an artist from Edinburgh very nearly made a huge impression at Christie’s in London.
In the end, Craigie Aitchison’s painting Crucifixion 8 failed to meet its reserve. This was not for lack of effort from Christie’s. The publicity was discreetly persuasive, and the hanging space impeccable. The inner sanctum of King Street had the hush of a cathedral dominated by a seven-foot-plus canvas in a frame fit for Velazquez. It was like an altarpiece, with sumptuous flower arrangements nearby. Some spring-time sunshine dappled the canvas without quite touching the hi-vis nimbus painted around Christ’s head.
The only missing ingredient was a buyer prepared to match the £100-150,000 estimate. If anyone had, it could have sent a message of being safe to go back into the waters of Christian devotional art. Sadly, it seems that collectors are unprepared to wade too far into what has been unfashionable for more than a century. Most surprising is that a record non- auction price of £250,000 was paid for the same painting in 2019. Enough att-ention ensued to encourage Salisbury Cathedral to include it in an 800th-anniversary exhibition in 2020.
What went wrong with Crucifixion 8? How did it apparently lose half its value within four years? At the same Christie’s sale a much smaller painting titled Crucifixion VII – with the subtle distinction of Roman numerals – doubled its lower estimate by fetching £18,900.
Crucifixion scenes are rare at auction, especially in the modern and contemporary category. When they appear at Old Master sales, the excitement is more usually caused by the artist’s name than the subject matter. Aitchison’s oeuvre was as much about the Crucifixion as Dalí’s was not. The Spaniard hardly ever attempted it but had two results that helped to immortalise him. His Surrealist friends distanced themselves as soon as he got close to Franco and the Catholic Church. He created his two memorable interpretations some time later: Christ of St John of the Cross (1951) and Corpus Hypercubus (1954). While the former is notable for its unsettling perspective, the slightly later work is all-round disturbing. This was Dalí at his most bizarre, at the height of his belief in “nuclear mysticism”. Corpus Hypercubus, renamed Crucifixion by the Met, also has a following. Bought by the Metropolitan Museum, it became the favourite painting of Ayn Rand. The atheist writer and philosopher was bewitched, reporting that she would spend hours at a time in front of the canvas. The Kelvingrove work has had a similarly mesmerising effect over the years, attracting at least two psychotic attackers.
Dalí’s Scottish work can be more affecting than expected. As I had never made the pilgrimage to Kelvingrove, it was a revelation to see this work hov- ering above me at the Royal Acad-emy’s 2017 exhibition Dalí/Duchamp. In an ocean of kitsch detritus, this is one painting that seemed more over-powering than any of the gloriously backlit versions I had encountered on the internet. There’s a photo from 2021 of the then Prince Charles visiting the Kelvingrove and also giving this Crucifixion more than a second glance.
Spanish artists have gone beyond the call of duty in bringing Christ’s last moments to life. When Dalí’s painting made its recent excursion to Bishop Auckland, it was teamed up with one other painting to make an eyecatching double bill. El Greco’s version of the Crucifixion takes the opposite viewpoint to Dalí’s. We look upwards like burrowing beasts. The older Spanish master, who was an inspiration for Dalí, makes Christ look pallid and fragile, while his successor used a bodybuilding Hollywood stuntman as a model.
As for Craigie Aitchison, his unsold work has none of that Spanish intensity. Instead of nuclear mysticism, the Scotsman’s paintings have pets. At the foot of Christ’s cross there is usually a Bedlington terrier. It’s more like a Nativity play than the last gasp of a dying God. Drama comes from the luminosity of his palette and the sense of Christ the solitary sufferer, abandoned by humanity. Maybe it’s the lack of passion that keeps his religious scenes from that all-out assault on the senses which Catholic art can attain. Aitchison’s eyes were opened by the simmering colours of Italy and pre-Renaissance religious paintings. What’s missing is the explosive quality that has helped Artemisia Gentileschi become an artist of the moment. It’s not just because she was a woman; she was also a rape victim working off her rage on canvas.
Aitchison was neither pious nor tested to the extreme. He was the opposite of the showman Dalí, who alternated between atheism and religious fervour. Aitchison wasn’t even a nominal Catholic despite enjoying Mass and candles. He was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. I did spot a crucifix on the wall of his studio in an old photo. It was not a statement piece, and absolutely nothing like Dalí’s unclothed stuntman, paid to hang in the Spaniard’s studio for hours on end to simulate the muscular stresses of crucifixion.
Quietly moving though Aitchison’s work is, he couldn’t be called the UK’s king of Crucifixion paintings except in terms of quantity. It’s a field in which few British artists have prevailed. Aitchison’s output doesn’t quite match what the ultimate subject matter really deserves. Wistful loneliness is not the quality that most viewers want from a Crucifixion. It’s the opposite of the impression created by another modern Spanish artist who is also nothing like Dalí. Picasso painted hardly any Crucifixions, and when he did they weren’t much to do with Christ. His inspiration was another painting: the harrowing Grünewald Altarpiece in Isenheim. For Aitchison it was at least partly about another painting, much closer to home. He claimed that it was seeing Dalí’s Christ of St John of the Cross at Kelvingrove which set him on the path to mass production of Calvaries.
Aitchison’s vision, or perhaps his dog, was refined throughout his life and gained him several church commissions. All of these were Anglican, including Liverpool and Truro Cathedrals plus the delightful church in the middle of The Boltons in the least deprived corner of Kensington. A template for one of these commissions was by coincidence sold for a modest £6,000 by Sotheby’s at the same time as the two Crucifixion scenes at Christie’s. Perhaps the reason for the failure of Crucifixion 8 was the absence of dogs.
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