Jerwood Gallery

Craigie Aitchison, R.A., C.B.E. (b. 1926), Crucifixion, 1994.  Purchased in 1994 as part of the first Jerwood Painting Prize.

Image © the artist.

Craigie Aitchison was the winner of the first Jerwood Painting Prize in 1994. Sir Peter Wakefield (former Director of the National Art Collections Fund) chaired the distinguished panel made up by Judith Collins (Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery), Anna Ford (Broadcaster), Lord Gowrie (Chairman of the Arts Council), Hilton Kramer (Editor of the New York-based magazine New Criterion) and John McEwen (The Sunday Telegraph’s art critic) and the prize exhibition was shown at London’s Royal Academy and Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Other prize winners include Patrick Caulfield and Maggi Hambling (joint winners 1995) and Prunella Clough (1999). The Jerwood Painting Prize has since been replaced by Jerwood Contemporary Painters, run as part of the Jerwood Visual Arts exciting programme of prizes which will be shown at the Jerwood Art Gallery in Hastings.

Born in Scotland, the son of a lawyer, politician and judge, Craigie Aitchison studied Law at Edinburgh University from 1944 to 1946 and London’s Middle Temple in 1948, before changing career and attending the Slade School in London from 1952 to 1954. In 1955 Aitchison was awarded the British Council Italian Government Scholarship for painting and travelled to Italy, where he was profoundly influenced by the clear light and natural ‘Biblical’ landscapes. Elected Royal Academician in 1988 (ARA 1978) he held a major exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy in 2003. He was awarded a CBE in 1999 and lives and works in London.

With its characteristically spare composition, intense colours and poetic and mysterious atmosphere, Crucifixion, 1994 tackles a theme that the artist has painted since 1958 after his return from Italy. He traces his original interest in the subject to the furore over Glasgow City Art Gallery’s purchase of a Dali crucifixion in 1952, and a crushing comment by one of his Slade teachers on finding him copying a Rouault crucifixion that it was far too serious a subject for him to tackle. ‘I was so provoked’ he remembers, ‘I went back home and started to do Crucifixions’. The Crucifixion series, he says, ‘will go on forever, because every time I start one I never know what’s going to go into it’.