the assassination of the crow, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
We look at the body on the blue divan from the feet; the knees push forward and swell into two large lumps, the body foreshortened backward, the head a dark patch so far off it nearly vanishes. Shortening a reclining body like this and pressing its feet to the viewer's nose is a move that comes from Mantegna's panel of the dead Christ, but the foreshortening here strives not for measure but for swelling; as the face darkens, the knee brightens. The arms are open to either side, palms turned out, the body overflowing the narrow divan at its edges. The border between the red wall and the pink ground is hard and horizontal, though both are the same red diluted to different degrees; most of the surface is on a single colour, opening out in fits and starts without a middle tone. The cold is carried alone by the cobalt blue of the divan, directly opposite the red, its edges like a knife.
The body spread on the table together with the open arms brings to mind the arrangement of the crucifixion, but there is no vertical, everything is horizontal; the horizontal cross draws near to a deposition scene or a dissection table. Both readings require someone around the table, and that someone crouches on the right, a large figure carrying a beak on its head. When the title declares the crow not the perpetrator but the victim, the roles change places; whether it is the one on the table who is the crow, or the beaked one on the ground awaiting its turn, is unclear. The same scene reads also as an institutional bench: once the body is laid on the institution's bench it becomes a case; the case that does not fit the bench overflows. The face is darkened, the identity erased; one does not speak with the person given a number, one processes them.
The figure on the right is not looking at the one lying down, it has turned its head away, its hands pressed to the ground. To some a witness trying not to see, to others an official looking at its fourteenth case that day; the broad pink gap between the two figures leaves the uncloseable distance just as it is. Every opening in the room refuses to make a promise. The door on the left is pitch black, opening to nowhere; within the window on the right there are abstract signs instead of a view; the two frames on the wall are footnotes that should interpret the scene below, but their writing is erased. A 2019 work, one of the few canvases where the space still stands. The purple contours are drawn in a single stroke with a loaded brush, thickening at the shoulder and thinning toward the wrist; beneath the arm of the figure on the right, from a palm's worth of ground the paint never visited, the red ground strikes upward, and the inside of the body looks as though it has been pierced.
Form and Composition
The vertical void in the centre sets up the axis like a corridor separating the horizontal mass on the left from the vertical mass on the right. The figure on the left is drawn in foreshortening; the small head and the huge knees create a one-to-four scale difference, while the thick dark contours separate both masses clearly from the ground.
Two large masses settle in, leaving a cleft in the centre. The left one is horizontal, the right one vertical. The gap between them is the painting's lightest-value strip and works like a narrow corridor descending from top to bottom. The width of the corridor narrows at the bottom edge and opens out at the top. This void is the axis of the composition; if there is any symmetry at all, the axis is not exactly in the centre but stands about three fifths of the way in from the left.
The horizontal division is sharp. The line where the wall ends and the ground begins passes from left to right at a third of the way up from the top and makes a step upward on the right side. This single line carries the whole depth structure of the painting. Below, the ground is broad and almost empty; above, the wall is darker and has units hanging on it. Three separate rectangles can be counted on the wall: on the left edge a narrow, dark vertical panel, at the upper mid-line a framed board, in the upper right corner a larger opening. The top edge of both the board and the opening is cut off by the crop, both left unfinished. Between them a small square, with a fan-shaped unit inside it.
The figure on the left is drawn in foreshortening. The head is small at the top, the knees huge at the bottom. The two knees are the painting's largest single roundness and, filling the lower central region, they leave the head above crushed. The scale difference is about one to four. The arms open to either side and fall onto the edges of the table, the wrists spilling outward. The legs descend after the knees, and the feet stop a hand's width short of the bottom edge. The blue plane beneath the reclining figure goes upward, narrowing into a trapezoid, its edges dead straight. The contrast between the soft body and this straight-edged plane is the hardest place in the composition.
The figure on the right stands heaped up. The mass widens from top to bottom, with a pointed cap at the peak, and below it shoulder and arm make a huge curve and fall forward. The tip of the arm descends almost to touch the bottom edge, the fingers of the hand spreading onto the ground. A second hand stretches out horizontally in the lower right, and the crop cuts it at the right edge. This figure leaves no gap at all at the right edge, its back adjoining the frame.
The contour is pronounced here. The outer line of both figures is drawn with a thick dark line and their relation to the ground is clear. The distinction disappears only on the back of the figure on the right, in the region near the right edge; there the dark mass blends into the dark wall. In the middle of the left edge a small oval patch stands alone on the ground, touching no mass. The order of scale works as follows: the largest unit is the heap on the right, then immediately the pair of knees of the figure on the left, then the plane of the table, then the boards on the wall, and last the oval on the ground. Between the smallest and the largest there is about a fifteenfold difference, and both stand in the same horizontal band, on the ground. Horizontal and vertical forces are balanced on the wall, while on the ground the horizontal dominates alone; the only vertical dividing the ground is the leg of the figure on the right.
Colour and Light
Most of the surface is on a single red hue, descending in abrupt breaks from tomato red to bubble-gum pink without any intermediate tone. Because the purple figures stand like a mixture of the red of the wall and the blue of the bed they do not break away from their grounds, and between this opposed pair only the gold ear of grain in the centre remains as a third colour.
The boundary between the red wall and the pink ground is horizontal and hard, but the two colours are really of the same family. The wall begins at the top with a light tomato red, descends to the right into maroon, and from there into a bloody morello. The ground is the same red lightened with white, close to bubble-gum pink. That is, perhaps sixty per cent of the surface is on a single hue, only thinned to different degrees. That so broad a field of red is not boring comes from no intermediate tone being used in passing from its dark to its light; the colour changes not step by step but in abrupt breaks.
The cool is carried by blue alone. The cobalt in the bed and the lighter sky blue around the window on the right. This blue stands directly opposite the red and there is no softening between them; the edges are like a knife, the two paints have not smeared into one another. The blue of the bed is saturated and opaque, letting none of the red beneath seep through. The blue of the window is icier, with white got into it. The little gold-coloured ear of grain in the centre does far more work than its size warrants. A mustard yellow and orangish ochre laid over a blue rectangle; the only third colour left between the red and the blue. The same tone repeats inside the two frames above, there as a paler melon flesh. Outside these three points there is no yellow.
The figures are purple. But purple here is not like an independent colour, it stands like the mixed state of the red of the wall and the blue of the bed; and so they do not break away from their grounds. The two domes on the hips of the left figure are lightened all the way to white, and that is the brightest place on the surface. The figure on the right is warmer, cinnamon and leather colour mixed into the purple, its edges bordered with a dark aubergine. This difference between the colours of the two figures makes them look as though in two separate rooms. The source of the light is not clear but it has been treated as if it came from somewhere. The vertical white field between the bed and the figure on the right stands like the place where the light pours down, and yet there is no lamp there, nor any opening in the wall. There is almost no cast shadow; the maroon darkening behind the figure on the right is the closest thing to a shadow. The black rectangle at the upper left is the depth of the whole painting, and it is bounded by a purple edge.
The laying-on of the paint is as plain-spoken as the colour. In the red of the wall the brush marks have stayed vertical, they do not overlap, and the cloth beneath shows through here and there. The pink of the ground is thinner, spread almost like a stain, and as it thins at the foot of the figures it turns to red. This is a cleanly laid palette; the colours came mixed on the palette, they were not mixed into one another on the canvas. At the lower left, on top of the pink, there stands a small aubergine-coloured patch. There is neither a line nor a shadow around it, it has been set straight onto the ground.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The open-armed body spread on the table calls up a horizontal cross, the deposition scene and the dissection arrangement all at once. When the title declares the crow not the perpetrator but the victim of an assassination, the roles change places, and it becomes uncertain whether the beaked figure is the victim on the table or the one next in line.
On the left there is a body laid out on a blue table. The arms are opened to either side, the palms turned outward, the legs hang down over the edge of the table, and the knees jut forward as two large rounds. The head is a dark mass, the face cannot be made out. On the right, a large figure crouches with its body curled forward, carrying a pointed beak on its head; one hand presses on the ground, and hand-prints stand on the ground before it.
When the body spread on the table and the open arms come together, the first thing that comes to mind is the arrangement of the cross; but here there is no vertical, everything is horizontal. A cross turned horizontal approaches the scene of the deposition. The moment the dead body is laid on the stone and mourners gather around it. And there is a second tradition: the dissection table. The arrangement in which the body is opened and viewed for knowledge. Both readings require someone to be around the table, and that someone is the beaked creature on the right. In both arrangements it is essential that the body be naked and horizontal; the dead are not painted standing.
In the tales the crow appears as an ill-omened messenger, a carrion-eater, a clever thief. In some tales it knows death in advance, in some it takes the eye of the dead. The title, for its part, declares it not the perpetrator but the victim; the crow subjected to assassination. Then the roles in the scene change places. Is the body on the table the crow, or is the beaked figure on the ground waiting its turn? The fact that the beaked one's body is hidden beneath a beak calls to mind the motif of disguise; the human in animal guise, or the animal that has left its transformation into a human half-finished. In disguise narratives, which side the animal is on is usually understood only at the very end.
The two frames on the wall say that this room is not an ordinary room. Both carry figures inside them, both are blurred. In murder paintings the picture on the back wall most often carries the explanation of the event, serving as a kind of subtitle. The ones here give no explanation, they only recall the existence of other scenes. On the blue plaque between them there is a gold-coloured branch or flame; it stands like a sign placed before an altar. In holy places such plaques announce that the space is not an ordinary room. The blue of the plaque is the only cold surface in the room.
The chosen moment is neither the killing nor the burial. The killing is over, the removal has not begun. The hand-prints on the ground say that the beaked figure moved a moment ago; it is approaching the table or moving away from it. The dark rectangle on the left edge stands like a doorway and is completely black. It is possible to think that whoever entered the room came in there, and whoever leaves will go out there. The small purple patch on the ground, right beside the table, has been left like a dropped object. What it is cannot be made out; it could be a fallen bird or a broken vessel.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
While the head of the body spread on the bed is darkened and left without identity, the lit knees point to the uncovered opening between the legs. The second figure crouching on the right has turned its head away, standing like a witness who has seen and is now trying not to see; the frames on the wall have turned into eyes watching the room from within.
On a bed a body lies with its legs open. The arms are stretched to either side, the hands gripping the edges of the bed. The head is a dark patch, the face indistinct. The legs hang down and reach the floor, the feet on the ground. This posture resembles surrender more than sleep; or an examination. We do not know who the lying figure is, and the painting seems not to want us to know, because the head has been emptied, darkened, left without identity. The blue surface of the bed stands as a rectangle beneath the body. The body has not fitted into that rectangle, it has spilled over the edges.
The whole weight of the body has gathered in the knees. Two large, pale, swollen knees stand in the middle of the scene. While the face darkens, the knees are lit. Wherever a body is lit, I think, something wants to be said from there. Here what wants to be said seems to concern the opening between the legs. A gap left open, unclosed, uncovered. The arms do not close this opening either, on the contrary they spread the body wider still. Before us is a body that cannot cover itself.
On the right a second figure has crouched. A long neck, a head hanging forward, two hands pressing on the ground. The fold on its back resembles a cape or a wing. It does not look at the lying figure, it has turned its head away, bent down towards the ground. This second body may be the witness of the scene. It has seen and is now trying not to see. A scene heard or half seen in childhood stays in the mind like this; the inside of the room clear, the bodies clear, the event itself blurred. The broad pink ground between the two figures has never been filled in. That emptiness shows how uncloseable the distance between them is. The crouching figure's hands are spread on the ground, its fingers opened; it has left all its weight to those two hands.
On the wall hang two frames, and within one of them another lying body can be made out. On the right there is a window, the outside is not visible, only marks. These small surfaces placed inside the room work like eyes within the painting. The scene takes place in a closed room, but despite being closed it is watched. On the left stands a dark vertical gap, it may be a door, left open. There is nothing that fully closes the interior. The boundary between wall and ground is separated by a hard line; no soft transition has been left in the room.
To the left of the bed stands a small dark object, like something dropped. I cannot make out what it is. It could be a bird's carcass, it could be a shoe. With the rest of the scene standing so clear, it is strange that the one unreadable thing should wait there, at the edge. The death named in the title has perhaps been left there, outside the scene. Beside it there is a small shadow, like the trace it left as it fell.
Society, Power and Technology
The body laid on a narrow table and overflowing it shows the moment the person entering the institution's bench turns into a case; the room, with its frame and plant pot, tries to look innocent. Being given a number is thought a courteous procedure, whereas the real procedure is completed right there, and the coldness becomes a property not of persons but of the workings.
A body laid out on a table, its arms open to either side, its legs dangling. The feet do not touch the floor. The table is narrow, the body overflows the table and no one has seen any need to correct this. Anyone who has seen such a scene in a hospital corridor, outside the forensic office, in an examination room knows it; once a human body is laid on the institution's bench it stops being a body and turns into a case. If the case's length does not fit the bench, the bench does not change, the case overflows.
Two frames hang on the wall. One above the door, one beside the window. What is in them cannot quite be made out, something has been scrawled. So there is someone who arranged the room; a frame has been hung, a plant pot set out, so that the person coming in should feel at ease. This is the most maddening side of institutions, to my mind, that they decorate the very room in which the bad thing is done. They put a coffee table in the waiting room, leave a magazine on it, hang a landscape on the wall. When your turn comes the landscape is of no use whatever, but the room goes on presenting itself as innocent.
The figure on the right is bent double, its hands touching the floor. It looks as though it has no strength left to stand. It does not look at the person lying down, it may as well have turned its back. The distance between these two is the coldest place in the picture. They are in the same room, a few steps apart, no contact. This is just how a person is in the corridor when something has happened to a loved one; he cannot enter the room, cannot leave and go, he stays leaning against the wall. And the official doing his job there passes him by, because for him it is the fourteenth case that day.
The lying figure's face has been left dark, there is only a mass where the head should be. His name, his occupation, what he did have been erased. A person's identity beginning to matter less begins the moment he enters the room where he is decided upon. A file number is given, a queue number is given, a bed number is given. Being given a number looks like a courteous procedure, whereas the real procedure is completed right there. You are now the next in line. One does not converse with the next in line, the next in line is processed. It is not easy, in truth, to blame the official who does this; if the man has to close a hundred files a day, no luxury is left of seeing each file as a human being. The coldness is a property not of persons but of the workings themselves.
The room itself says something too. The door is on the left, closed. The window is on the right, the outside cannot be seen. Nothing that happens inside leaks out, and no one looks in from outside. The number of procedures carried out behind a closed door is always greater than those carried out in an open hall. The ground stretches unbroken from beneath the lying body all the way to the hands of the figure on the right; one is stretched out, one has collapsed, both stand on the same plane.
Art History and Comparison
Whereas in Mantegna's dead Christ foreshortening is an instrument of cruelty, here the same foreshortening works not towards measure but towards swelling, so that the knees should be bigger than the torso. In Munch's sickroom the furniture carries mourning; the door, window and frames of this room carry no mourning at all, and the window opens onto another abstract painting.
We look at the figure on a blue divan from the foot-end. The knees jut forward, the hips have swollen into two large lumps, the torso has foreshortened backward, and the head has stayed so far off it will almost disappear. To depict a reclining body foreshortened like this, its feet pressed to the viewer's nose, is a move that entered the textbooks in Italian painting with Mantegna's dead Christ panel. There the foreshortening is an instrument of cruelty; the sacred body is measured like an ordinary corpse. The foreshortening here, however, works not towards measure but towards swelling. It has been done not so that the anatomy should be correct, but so that the knees should be bigger than the torso.
On the right stands a large thing with a crouched, beak-headed form, its hands pressing on the ground, its back hunched. We may suppose this to be the crow of the title, but which of them is the one being killed is uncertain; the reclining figure may have died, or the bird may be about to die. To set a death scene within a room was the business of late-nineteenth-century northern painting. In Munch's sickroom scenes the room's furniture, its door, its curtain are the bearers of mourning. In this room too there is a door, a window, two frames on the wall, but none of them carries mourning. No one is weeping, no one is looking at the reclining person.
The two frames on the wall are, moreover, a reference to a tradition in their own right. In seventeenth-century Dutch interior painting the picture hung on the wall is a footnote that interprets the scene below; a seascape points to the storm of love, a scene of the Last Judgement to the morality of the household. Here the insides of the frames cannot be read. One is made up of jumbled orange patches, the other of blue marks; that they are hung is clear, what they are is not. The interpreting footnote stands in its place, but its writing has been erased.
Within the series' calendar this canvas dated 2019 is one of the few works in which space is still standing. Wall is wall, ground is ground, furniture is furniture; a room has been set up and the figures placed inside that room. In the following years this order dissolves; in the 2020 works the figures are no longer in a room but float on a boundless surface. In the second generation of German Expressionism, especially in Beckmann's cramped rooms, there is a similar crowding; there the room crushes the figures, the ceiling lowers, the wall comes down on top of them. In this room there is no pressure, on the contrary there is a strange indifference between the figures and the objects. The black rectangle at the upper left, probably a door, opens onto nowhere.
The window at the upper right, too, works against its own tradition. Since the Renaissance the window has been a means of making a promise within the painting; there is an outside, the view is there, the room is joined to the world. Inside this window, in place of a view, there are blue and orange marks, short bars cutting across one another. It opens not onto the outside but onto another painting. It speaks the same language as the frames on the wall, that is, all the openings of the room give onto an abstract surface. The small purple patch on the floor, meanwhile, has been left there like a fallen object, and no one comes to pick it up. The bird's claw, too, touches not the reclining figure but only the ground.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The purple contour, in a single move, thickens at the shoulder and lightens at the elbow, changing pressure, and coming to the toes the paint has run out and the line is cut off bone dry. The white highlights on the kneecaps are dragged while the purple is still wet, and this transition, caught before the acrylic begins to draw back, shows how quickly the hand moved.
The purple contour lines are drawn with a round-tipped, loaded brush and change pressure from start to finish. Follow the arm of the figure on the right: at the shoulder the line is nearly a centimetre thick, at the elbow the brush lightened and thinned, coming to the wrist it was pressed again. These were done in a single move, because the thickening and thinning flow without interruption, and nowhere is there that little lump where a second line would begin. Coming to the toes the paint ran out; the lines there are broken, they caught the crests of the canvas weave and skipped its hollows. The brush was not dipped in the paint again to continue, it was left in that dry state.
The white highlights on the kneecaps are placed with a dragging movement. The brush was roamed there back and forth, turning and turning; while the purple beneath was still wet. I make this out from the soiling at the edges of the white, it is not a clean white, there is a ring shading off to grey towards its surroundings. In the middle of the two knees the white is thickest, thinning towards the edge and vanishing. To catch this kind of transition with acrylic you have to be quick with your hand. The moment the paint begins to draw back, dragging leaves mud instead of a transition.
The red wall and pink ground are laid on thin. In both the weave of the canvas reads from top to bottom, the paint clinging to the crests of the cloth, not fully entering the gaps between the loops. In these regions there look to be two rounds; the lower round is a little different, and as the upper passed it scraped off the one beneath in some places. The border where the red turns to pink is not a straight line but the place the brush ran out. Towards the lower left corner the ground darkens, and there perhaps a shadow was intended, but the laying is again at the same speed, the same width.
The yellow plant is one of the few places laid on thick. The paint there is not thinned, made with short strokes overlaid on one another and swelling from the surface. The blue quadrilateral beside it, meanwhile, is laid on flat, two brush-widths wide. The black rectangle at the upper left is the same, covered in a single coat and its edges left rough. The insides of the two frames at the top were filled with a different tool; the orange and navy marks there are much finer, flung perhaps with a half-centimetre brush, from the tip of the wrist. Three separate brush sizes move about on the same surface and none of them has taken on another's work.
A surface ninety centimetres wide, sixty-five centimetres high, laid on its side. Looked at from a metre and a half the room is set up, the distance between the two figures reads. Come down to half a metre and that room falls apart, and what is left in hand is flat colour areas covering one another and the lines that pass over them. A work of this size does not hold a person in one place; to read it you have to go back and forth, and two different pictures come out at the two distances. On the body of the figure on the right, in the region beneath the arm, there is a palm-sized place the paint never reached; the red ground strikes up from there and the inside of the figure looks pierced through.
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