Craigie Aitchison - Pink Crucifixion

Matthew 27: 35–36

This seemingly simple image is in fact a very sophisticated construct of space and colour. The unflinching identification of Christ’s pain does not wholly negate the image’s immediate playfulness. The artist referred to the crucifixion as ‘the most horrific story I have ever heard’ and so there was no need to highlight the suffering: any depiction was enough to recall all its mystery, terror and wonder. A Bedlington terrier dog was originally shown at the foot of the cross. A printer trying to help finish the work added a tiny detail to the dog’s head but, on seeing it, the artist erased the dog completely. However, its ghostly outline is still visible to the bottom left hand side of the cross.

Commentary based on A Guide to the Methodist Art Collection.

Born: Edinburgh, UK, 1926

Died:  London, UK, 2009

Early life

John Ronald Craigie Aitchison was the son of a prominent Scottish lawyer who was the Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland. His grandfather, James Aitchison, was a minister in the United Free Church in Falkirk.

Education

Aitchison initially followed in his father’s footsteps and studied Law at the University of Edinburgh and the Middle Temple, London. In 1952, he began part-time studies at the Slade School of Art but moved to full-time study from 1953 to 1955, abandoning the study of law. While at the Slade, Victor Pasmore and John Piper advised Aitchison to give up, while Robert Medley, Sir William Coldstream and LS Lowry (a visiting tutor to whose work Aitchison’s bears a resemblance) encouraged him to continue.

Life and career

An Italian government scholarship in 1955 allowed Aitchison to travel to Italy where he was influenced by the “stillness, innocent simplicity of emotion, and brilliant colour” of early Italian painting (Duncan Macmillan, 2013). His first significant exhibition was as a student, in Six Young Contemporaries at the Gimpel Fils gallery, London, in 1954.

Aitchison’s work is characterised by colour in simple blocks, and soft outlines, though with clear boundaries.  Duncan Macmillan describes the effect of his work as a “hazy, but luminous atmosphere.” His darker works contain echoes of Mark Rothko, while much of his work has affinities with Matisse.

In the 1960s Aitchison began a series of paintings of Black men and women, in particular the Nigerian boxer and art school model ‘Gorgeous’ George Macaulay. These use saturated colour but convey a sense of space.

In his still-life paintings and in his landscapes, individual objects seem small in comparison to the whole composition. In his landscapes he often depicted a small, stylized hill, inspired by features of the Isle of Arran and often included in his paintings of the crucifixion. It is his crucifixion scenes for which he is probably best-known, including commissions for Truro and Liverpool Cathedrals (1996 and 1997). Aitchison was not a regular churchgoer, and he seems to have been drawn to the crucifixion as a human rather than religious subject.  In these paintings, Christ appears as a small figure on a stylized cross. He is often accompanied by a tree, star or moon, and sometimes attended by angels but more often by one of Aitchison’s beloved Bedlington terriers.

Aitchison earned respect and popularity, winning the John Moores painting prize in 1974, the inaugural Jerwood prize in 1994 and the Nordstern Art Prize in 2000. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1988 and appointed a CBE in 1999. In 2012 a Craigie Aitchison memorial window, based on one of his crucifixion paintings, was unveiled at St Mary the Boltons, Chelsea.

Aitchison was regarded as a man of great charm and, in later years, of distinctive appearance with a sharp dress sense and a shock of white hair. He was openly bisexual and never married.

Notable exhibitions include the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1959, 1960 and 1964; the Scottish Arts Council in 1975; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1979; the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1981; a retrospective at Harewood House, Leeds in 1994; the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow in 1996; and a retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2003.

His work is held in the Tate Gallery, London; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; the National Galleries of Scotland; and King’s College, Cambridge among others.

David Buckman, Artists in Britain Since 1945: Volume 1 A to L. Vol. 1 of 2 volumes, (Bristol, Art Dictionaries Ltd, 2006), p. 17-18. The text is also available on the Art UK website: https://artuk.org/discover/artists/aitchison-craigie-ronald-john-19262009 (viewed 18 September 2024)

Tabitha Deadman, ‘Bi visibility: the importance of bisexual+ representation in art collections,’ 16 Sep 2021. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/bi-visibility-the-importance-of-bisexual-representation-in-art-collections (viewed 18 September 2024)

Richard Harries, The Image of Christ in Modern Art, (London and New York, Routledge, 2016), p.94-97

Duncan Macmillan, ’Aitchison, (John Ronald) Craigie (1926-2009),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). The text is also available at: www.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/101406 (viewed 18 September 2024)

Seeing the Spiritual: A Guide to the Methodist Modern Art Collection, (Oxford, Methodist Modern Art Collection, 2018), p. 18-19