By Edward Kettleborough
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast– Royal Academy, until 17 April 2022
Over the years I have seen numerous works by Francis Bacon in the flesh. They had undoubted painterly power and striking imagery, but in my memory blurred into one mass of distorted faces and twisted bodies, caged into cubes against monochrome backgrounds. The RA’s Bacon exhibition is enormous in scope, filling the magnificent 19th century Burlington House galleries, and I questioned whether Bacon’s work would emerge as monotonous and limited: instead, the show reveals the sheer variety of his paintings. Undoubtedly, Bacon obsessively studied the same themes and subjects, but his ability to play with composition, colour and texture and his inspired use of paint proves dazzling.
The RA’s theme examines the artist’s obsession with animals, born from his early connections with horses on his conservative family’s stud farm in rural Ireland. Francis Bacon would never paint a horse. His work was devoted to the dark side of the animal kingdom: howling baboons and chimpanzees, screeching owls, dogs biting their own tails, and the violence of the bullfight. As the RA exhibition makes clear, the most savage animal in Bacon’s world and art was man himself: this is painting trying to make sense of the horrors of the concentration camps and produced under the shadow of the Bomb. Personal demons are evident too: the artist was cast-out of the family home at 16, openly gay when to be so was illegal, involved in deeply damaged sadomasochistic relationships, and a lifelong alcoholic immersed in the underworld of Soho. Bacon was inspired to paint after a revelatory visit to a Picasso exhibition in 1930s Paris. His great hero would struggle to reflect the post-war world, and Picasso would never paint a Guernica for the post-1945 era. From out of Picasso’s shadow Bacon emerges as the essential artist of the second-half of the 20th century, shoulder-to-shoulder as London’s figurative answer to the Abstract Expressionists of New York.
The exhibition opens with a single painting in a blackened room: a head study, just about recognisable as human, merges with the head of an ape. It is in the second room, however, that the exhibition pulls off its first great coup. A trilogy of paintings from the 1940s are assembled. Against sunburnt orange backgrounds, figures are doubled over, faces distorted and pain-stricken, but with eerily familiar features of bourgeois life: green house plants form strange juxtapositions, one head merges with an umbrella, and the forms are draped in overcoats that are a bravura display of Bacon’s ability to create texture and form. The RA’s curation is masterful: the difficult themes of the artist’s private life are discussed with real tact and maturity, and the rooms of the exhibitions are painted to immerse the viewer in a Bacon background, the works stunningly lit to reveal all of the artist’s skill and brushwork. This is at its most effective in the second gallery, where the oranges burn against the grey tones of the walls.
Figure Study II, 1945-1946
An immense gallery dedicated to Bacon’s works of the 1950s is next, and features many of the strongest works of his career. One wall features a series of figures inspired by ancient statues of wrestling, but with clear homoerotic connotations. The figures are swamped by long stalks of textural grass, and human relations are levelled to those of wild beasts fighting in the bush. Nearby, a chimp rests on a wooden jetty, distorted body contrasting against the skilfully rendered planks and a bright pink background that creates a deeply surreal, disembodied image. The most disturbing and powerful image of all is a variation on the crucifixion on loan from Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum: from a cross-like form, a screaming white creature emerges, while in the background Bacon creates Lowry-like figures and cars with a few strokes of black. The creature is clearly based on a barn owl in flight, but any facial features are replaced by a disembodied human mouth. Throughout his career, Bacon had an uncanny ability to combine familiar elements from the human and animal worlds to create deeply disturbing imagery.
The next three galleries see Bacon refine and develop his style throughout the 1960s and 1970s: his handling of paint becomes smoother and less textural, his use of colour bolder and less muddied, with strange pastel tones contrasting against man and beast. This was the age of Bacon’s rise to global fame, and there can be little doubting his painterly skill: in a strikingly intimate small-scale work from Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre, the human form is captured with a few strokes of white paint on dark grey. Bacon never produced works that were purely figurative, but in the madness of his canvases the faces and features of lovers, friends and patrons are instantly recognisable. The paintings of his middle-years are masterful, especially the variations of Velazquez’ Pope Innocent X, but I question whether the refinement and fame diminished the power of Bacon’s art. The clear exception are the three pictures of bullfights from c.1969, united for the first time in the stunning setting of the RA’s central octagon gallery: in a bizarre concoction, a matador and bull are locked in combat in a circular space, while a screen depicting Nazi iconography and a massed crowd hems them in. Bacon declared bullfighting ‘a marvellous aperitif to sex’, and there can be little doubt what the huge impasto smears of white paint across the canvases represent: these works are explorations of violent male sexuality.
Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988
In a final flourish, Bacon’s paintings from the 1980s through to his death in 1992 recapture the full power of his 1950s works. Bacon revisits his first triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion created in 1944 (strangely not on loan from Tate), but the 1988 version is dramatically upscaled, and the orange background replaced by a dark, sanguine red. Fascinated by the violence and psychology of Aeschylus’ Oresteia,the later works often feature a deep fascination with the colour of blood. The 1988 triptych is made all the more disturbing by the figures: the central creature has a humanoid mouth in a terrifying grin, metal plates and screws holding its alien body together. Neither recognisably human or animal, disjointed pieces of anatomy are joined into forms straight from the darkest pits of Bacon’s imagination.
Study of a Bull, 1991
To close the show, the image of the bull returns. Bacon’s final painting dates from 1991, a year before his death, and had not been publicly seen – even in reproduction – until 2016. Gone is the blood and the violence. Instead, we are left with black-and-white quadrilaterals on the plain brown of the raw canvas, the image of the bull emerging from the shapes. Even at the end, Bacon could innovate: the bull’s form is enhanced with blasts of Basquiat-like spray paint and a handful of dust is scattered across the canvas. This demure but noble painting, the newspaper-coloured bull recalling Guernica, is a fitting elegy for Bacon. In typically existential fashion, Bacon offered a final statement: ‘Well, dust seems to be eternal – seems to be the one thing that lasts forever’.
This is essential art, brilliantly curated. See it if you can.
Art History Society 
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