Louisiana Modernist “The Crucifixion”, Large Mixed Media Painting, Sarah Albritton

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There is something compelling about Sarah Albritton’s The Crucifixion. Executed in a deliberately naïve, almost primitive modernist style, the painting … Read more There is something compelling about Sarah Albritton’s The Crucifixion. Executed in a deliberately naïve, almost primitive modernist style, the painting manages to evoke the dread, drama and spiritual intensity of one of the most familiar subjects in Western art while looking almost nothing like the traditional Crucifixions of the Old Masters.

The imagery recalls the Gospel accounts of darkness descending during the Crucifixion and the extraordinary events accompanying Christ's death, but Albritton translates those ancient images into an intensely personal visual language. Rather than attempting historical realism, she reduces people, architecture and landscape to expressive marks of paint. The result has something of the immediacy of folk or outsider art while remaining consciously modern in its handling of space, color and form.

Perhaps the most affecting aspect of the painting is its scale. The Crucifixion itself does not dominate the composition. Christ appears almost lost within an enormous, turbulent landscape, while the little figures below continue their journeys through the darkness. This gives the scene an unusual psychological power: a monumental event is represented through tiny human figures surrounded by a world that seems to be coming apart around them.

For a subject that has been painted for nearly two thousand years, Albritton's interpretation feels remarkably unconventional. It is at once somber, eccentric, colorful and strangely beautiful—a highly individual treatment of Christian imagery by a Louisiana artist.

Sarah Albritton (American/Louisiana, 1936–2020)
The Crucifixion, 1996 Mixed media on Arches paper

Signed twice and dated lower right; titled en verso.

Presented matted and framed.

Framed dimensions: 33 7/8 in. H × 42 in. W × 2 1/4 in. D (86 × 106.7 × 5.7 cm.)

Artwork dimensions: 22 3/8 in. H × 30 in. W (56.8 × 76.2 cm.) See less