Catalogue entry
T07372
Oil on white wove paper
340 x 270 (13 3/8 x 10 5/8)
Purchased from Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Art Collections Fund and a group of anonymous donors in memory of Mario Tazzoli, 1998
Provenance:
Acquired from the artist (by 1961)
Exhibited:
Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, Tate Gallery, London, February-April 1999 (22, reproduced in colour)
Literature:
Matthew Gale, ‘Points of Departure’, in Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999, p.25
Apparently showing a child or even, judging by the shape of the head, a monkey crawling on a bed, Figure Crawling was in fact based on a photograph in Bacon’s favoured ‘dictionary’[1] of human movement: Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion.[2] The conspicuous bandiness of the limbs recalls the disconcerting image Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge), 1961 (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague),[3] but this peculiarity is explained by their derivation from the straining body of the uppermost wrestler from ‘Some Phases in a Wrestling Match’… (read more)
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