What is the name of the person who found the theme of obsessive guilt in The Oresteia to be highly resonant?
Bacon did not seek to illustrate the narrative of the tale, however. He told the French art critic Michel Leiris, "I could not paint Agamemnon, Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting ... Therefore I tried to create an image of the effect it produced inside me." Aeschylus' phrase "the reek of human blood smiles out at me" in particular haunted Bacon, and his treatments of the mouth in the triptych and many subsequent paintings were attempts to visualise the sentiment. In 1985, he observed that Aeschylus' phrase brought up in him "the most exciting images, and I often read it ... the violence of it brings up the images in me, 'the reek of human blood smiles out at me', well what could be more amazing than that."Bacon was introduced to Aeschylus through T. S. Eliot's 1939 play The Family Reunion, in which the protagonist Harry is haunted by "the sleepless hunters / that will not let me sleep". In Eliot's play, the Furies serve as embodiments of the remorse and guilt felt by Harry, who harbours a dark family secret, shared only with his sister. Bacon was captivated by Aeschylus' play, and keen to learn more about Greek tragedy, although he said many times that he regretted being unable to read the original in Greek. In 1942, he read the Irish scholar William Bedell Stanford's Aeschylus in his Style, and found the theme of obsessive guilt in The Oresteia to be highly resonant. In 1984, Bacon told Sylvester that although his painting's subject matter did not have a direct relationship with the poet's work, for him Eliot's work "opened the valves of sensation".The mouth of the triptych's central figure was also inspired by the nurse's scream in film director Sergei Eisenstein's Odessa Steps massacre sequence in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). In 1984, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg confronted Bacon with a reproduction of the centre panel during the filming of a South Bank Show documentary, and observed that in his earlier career the artist seemed preoccupied with the physicality of the human mouth. Bacon replied, "I had always thought that I would be able to make the mouth with all the beauty of a Monet landscape though I never succeeded in doing so." When Bragg asked why he thought he had failed, Bacon admitted, "It should be all much more colour, should have got more of the interior of the mouth, with all the colours of the interior of the mouth, but I didn't happen to get it."Other than in Picasso's exploration of the theme, the Crucifixion did not figure prominently in twentieth-century painting. The Surrealists exploited its shock value, and it was used as a vehicle for blasphemy in isolated instances. Bacon often expressed his admiration for the manner in which old masters such as Cimabue treated the Crucifixion; however, as with Picasso, he was more interested in tackling the subject from a secular, humanist point of view. For Three Studies, Bacon did not approach the Crucifixion as a Christian image per se, but rather found that the scene reflected a particular view of humanity he held. As he told David Sylvester: "it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another."The Passion of Christ became a central concern during the early development of Bacon's work, and he returned to the subject throughout his career. When asked by critic Jean Clair why his Crucifixion scenes tended to comprise mainly "slaughter, butchery, mutilated meat and flesh", Bacon replied, "that's all the Crucifixion was, isn't it? ... Actually, you can't think of anything more barbaric than the Crucifixion, and that particular way of killing somebody." While Three Studies may have begun as an attempt to directly represent the Crucifixion scene, his explorations led him towards "something completely different". Bacon came to regard the scene as an armature for exploring new ways of representing human behaviours and emotions. For him it amounted to a kind of self-portraiture; a vehicle for working on "all sorts of very private feelings about behaviour and about the way life is".Coming in 1944, the triptych was often thought to be informed by the Second World War. Art critic Ziva Amishai-Maisseles observes that the canvas reflects Bacon's own confusion and ambivalence "towards manifestations of violence and power, both of which attracted and repulsed him simultaneously."
Bacon