"Paintings of slaughterhouses and meat have always touched me," Bacon said in an interview in 1962. He treats meat with the same affection as he treats human beings.

Bacon in his studio in 1962 Photograph by Irving Penn / Condé Nast

There seems to be an almost pleasurable or satisfying feeling in Bacon's paintings when he depicts flesh, desire and decay. For him, people are meat, they decay, they feel pain and they scream. In his animal works, the frame and canvas, and even the paint itself, seem like cages from which the animal can escape at the slightest carelessness.

Study of a Bull, 1991.
Oil, aerosol paint and dust on canvas. 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

This exhibition will focus on Bacon's fascination with animals: how they shaped and distorted his understanding of the human body; at the most extreme moments of his life, the figures in his work were barely recognisable as human or animal. The work also explores how Bacon became obsessed with observing animals during his travels in South Africa. His studio was littered with wildlife books and he constantly referenced Eadweard Muybridge's 19th century photographs of people and animals in motion.

Whether it was chimpanzees, bulls, dogs or raptors, Bacon believed that by observing the unbridled behaviour of animals he could come closer to understanding the true nature of man.

Man with Dog, 1953.
Oil on canvas. 152 x 117 cm. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1955. K1955:3 The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

The son of a horse feeder, Bacon was expelled from his father's home at the age of 16. After that, he moved around Berlin and Paris, before establishing himself in London. In these paintings, the line between human and animal continues to blur, reminding us that our primal instincts lie just beneath the surface.

Some of the most important works from Bacon's 50-year career include some of his early works and his final legacy, as well as three paintings of bullfighting that will be exhibited together for the first time. Viewed together, these primal expressions of anxiety and instinct, both animal and human, are deeply relevant to today.

Figure Study II, 1945-46.
Oil on canvas. 145 x 129 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Huddersfield Art Gallery, Kirklees Council (Presented by the Contemporary Art Society to Bagshaw Museum, Batley) The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

In many of Bacon's images, the animal nature of man is disguised, clothed, or suppressed. In Bacon's Figure Study II of 1945-46, for example, or in Three Figures and Portrait of 1975, the animal sense in the figures is both exposed and concealed. This work, like Kafka's inspiration, looms between the clothed man and the snarling one.

Three studies of the Human Head 1953

Bacon's Study of the Human Head of 1953 and his portrait of a man in George Dyer's Portrait of a Reclining Man of 1966 also show this. Bacon liked the simple idea that 'meat is meat', but simplicity was never enough for him. He painted his figures as if they had been born to hunt and forage for food.

Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, 1966.
Oil on canvas. 198 x 147 cm. Private collection The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

They seek not just food and blood, but something unnamable and unobtainable. Bacon's task is not to give them symbolic value or to present them as metaphors on the canvas; rather they must be real and unique, they must be entirely themselves. In the work Bacon is not trying to represent, but to find the hidden energy in his process of distorting, twisting and smearing the images.

Chimpanzee, 1955.
Oil on canvas. 152.5 x 117.2 cm. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, transfer of the Ministry of Science and Culture Baden-Württemberg 1964 The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

As the French philosopher Gil Deleuze wrote of Bacon's work, Bacon "took the face off". In dealing with the animal figure, Bacon was "not interested in the animal as a form, but in the animal as a feature."

Head VI, 1949.
Oil on canvas. 91.4 x 76.2 cm. Arts Council Collection, London The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Bacon began to include monkeys in his paintings from 1949 when he painted Head No. 4, a sombre image of a man and monkey seemingly strangely fused together. This also occurred with Reclining Nude and Figure around 1951 and Study of a Nude from 1952 to 1953. In Man and Monkey, 1951, the man who feeds the caged monkey could almost be described as a pleader. Behind the criss-crossing wires, the monkey controls the picture.

Owls, 1956.
61 x 51 cm. Private collection The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Bacon's animals are imbued with the full range of their animal nature.

It is not the idea of fear that excites Bacon, but the visual possibilities of fear. His genius lies in using the concept of man and animal to create images that are not only disturbing, but also visually compelling and unclear in meaning.

Oresteia of Aeschylus 40 x 94.7cm Printed in 1981

Some critics have argued that Bacon's work is both figurative and abstract, and that it is from the tension between the two that his artistic power derives. Bacon sometimes partially shared this view, but he insisted that however distorted his figures might be, he was not an abstractionist painter.

Study for Chimpanzee, 1957.
Oil and pastel on canvas. 152.4 x 117 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Photo David Heald (NYC) The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2021.

The influential critic John Berger wrote that although Bacon was a brilliant painter, he ultimately did not 'matter' because he was too self-centred. In Bacon's paintings, man and animal are never far apart. The fact that man is essentially an animal is at the heart of his imagination.

Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988.
Oil and acrylic on 3 canvases. 198 x 147.5 cm (each). Tate: Presented by the artist 1991 The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

From the animal forms in his early work to the distorted nudes that defined the second half of his career, Bacon always believed that underneath the veneer of civilisation, humans were just like any other animal. Throughout his life, the artist was fascinated by the behaviour of animals, tracking them on trips to South Africa and collecting a large collection of wildlife books. By observing the uninhibited behaviour of animals, Bacon believed he could get closer to the heart of humanity.

Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. Oil and cotton wool on canvas, 140 x 108.5 cm. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Hugo Maertens; All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021

Bacon had travelled to South Africa twice and was fascinated by the dry, vast plains there, and excited when he saw the animals traversing the long grass. At the same time, he was consulting a series of books on wildlife photography. Bacon was fascinated by observing animals - both in the wild and in captivity. This inspired how he viewed the human body: stripped of the trappings of civilisation, the human body had become as fragile as an animal.

Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969.
Oil on canvas. 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

The painting about bullfighting is one of the most direct dialogues between man and animal in Bacon's work. The subject of bullfighting is more than a literal confrontation; for Bacon it raises the ambivalence of people towards animals: he speaks of those who condemn bullfighting but eat meat in their furs. The exhibition will end with Bacon's last work, Study of a Bull, which was not discovered until 2016.

Just as most people don't understand exactly what Bacon's work is trying to say, the painter sometimes doesn't know where he will go when he picks up his brush. "As far as I'm concerned, all paintings ...... are an accident. I can foresee it, but I rarely paint it as I foresee it, and the work gets there through the actual painting process."

Article source: 99Art.com

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