Exhibition Francis Bacon in London – Culture

In 1949, Francis Bacon gave that Time Magazine an interview in which he revealed that he wanted to “paint like Velázquez, but with the texture of hippopotamus skin”. Standing in front of his painting “Head I” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he painted a year earlier, it becomes clear with what brilliance he was able to create this texture.

Was hippopotamus skin used here instead of canvas?

Up close, one initially thinks that Bacon actually used hippopotamus skin instead of canvas, so organically, even jaggedly, the shades of white and gray stand out from the background. One thinks of the comment made by Picasso biographer Robert Melville, who asked, “How did this man manage to evoke skin of such disturbing texture?” He “cannot distinguish the fact from what forms it,” Melville admitted. Here the plump neck seems to spread endlessly downwards, the head ends in nothing at the top, remains noseless and eyeless. The sharp teeth are rotated 90 degrees in the gaping mouth. “Head I” is a prototype of the equally menacing and tormented creatures that are the work of the Dublin-born in 1909 Francis Bacon should determine.

Bacon adopted the teeth from a photograph of a snarling chimpanzee. This animal will be shown during the exhibition “Francis Bacon – Man and Beast” in the London Royal Academy of Arts reappear several times, including as a caged monster, and in the form of a comparatively lively study, crouching on a box against a fuchsia background. The show focuses on a rather neglected aspect of the work of the enfant terrible of post-war art: the depiction of animals and their influence on his depiction of people.

Bacon firmly believed that he could better understand humans and their nature by analyzing animal behavior. Raised on a stud farm near Dublin, dealing with animals and hunting had been part of his everyday life from an early age. He collected photos and movement studies of animals all his life, and the impartiality of animal behavior shaped his view of human behavior.

In the final years of World War II, Bacon began painting his so-called “Biomorphs”. Later horror designs such as HR Giger’s “Xenomorph” from the Alien films would be unthinkable without these strange hybrid creatures, with body parts often missing and others appearing grotesquely enlarged and deformed. “Fury” (1944) with its gaping jaws, long neck and fangs seems almost like a prototype of such monsters. The early version can be seen in London, as well as the second, much smoother designed one from 1988. The distance between the dates of composition of these two versions shows how obsessive and oeuvre-defining his preoccupation with such speculative monsters was.

The sheer carnality and creatureliness of the paintings assembled in this superbly curated show reflects Bacon’s remark that we are “all flesh, all potential cadavers”. A number of the numerous works based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X are among the most famous of such cadaveric figures on display at the Royal Academy. “Study for a Human Head” and “Study for a Portrait”, both from 1953, are snarling zombies.

Open detailed view

But among the most intriguing motifs are those that actually represent animals. For example, in “Man with Dog”, which was created in the same year as the zombie studies, the master can only be seen dimly in the background. The dog he is leading on a leash is a sinewy, muscular something, powerful and ready to pounce, a Staffordshire terrier perhaps, the blurred essence of potential vigor. The photographic movement study of a trotting dog from Eadweard Muybridge’s “Human and Animal Locomotion” was the template, one of Bacon’s main sources of inspiration.

The naked man looks as vulnerable as a steppe animal

From Muybridge he also took the form of a “paralyzed child” walking on all fours. Perhaps for once, the viewer’s uneasiness at this animalization of a body seen as damaged and patently inferior was not one of Bacon’s typical provocations. Rather, it goes hand in hand with the change in perspective on the hierarchization and stigmatization of bodies, which was standard up until the 20th century.

The situation is different with “Man kneeling in the grass” (1952), on loan from the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Bacon had just made a trip to South Africa. He was fascinated by the dry, barren grassy areas and enthusiastic about the animals that moved on them. The naked man in the grass, devoid of any protection from civilization, is reduced to the vulnerability and openness of an animal. Claims of superior human sophistication over other creatures now seem unconvincing.

Open detailed view

The curators of the London exhibition have brought together works from all of Bacon’s creative phases. The latest work, Bacon died in 1992, relates to a particular and particularly brutal form of human interaction with animals, bullfighting. In typically aphoristic, erotomaniac style, Bacon explained that a corrida is “like boxing – a wonderful aperitif to sex”. In fact, he came relatively late to this subject, which his great idol Pablo Picasso had painted over and over again. The three bullfighting pictures from 1969, shown together for the first time at the Royal Academy, represent one of the most direct encounters between man and beast in Bacon’s work. The kinetic vortex of these representations, their chromatic brightness make these paintings some of the most astonishing that Bacon ever created. In addition to the obvious basic questions that the corrida repeatedly raised, those about violence and eroticism, life and death, Bacon was also interested in the hypocrisy of those who condemned bullfighting as brutal but had no problem wearing furs and eating meat .

Bacon’s last completed work also closes the show: “Study of a Bull” (1991). Three-quarters of the canvas is covered in dust that Bacon collected from his notoriously dingy London studio. The morbidity of dust symbolism was important to the artist, who was fond of saying that only dust is everlasting, after all we all crumble back to dust at some point. He himself died a year later on a trip to Madrid. The picture shows the cattle in a completely different way than in the bullfighting scenes a good 20 years earlier. It is utterly static, almost minimalistic reduced to horns and blackness. The bull study shows the reduced mastery of late Bacon. Here the animal finds itself, so to speak: no more physical horror, just pure, self-contained existence.

Francis Bacon: Man and Beast at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until April 17. royalacademy.org.uk, catalog £19.99.