Howling, crouching, horrifying – why are Francis Bacon’s animals so nightmarish?
Man and Beast, as the Royal Academy’s winter blockbuster is subtitled, are the same thing when Francis Bacon is looking at them. They are both meat. The artist’s painted world is a butcher’s shop: slabs of beef hang vertically in his triptychs among umbrellas and swastikas, bisected beasts drained of blood, flattened into red and white fatty flesh. But the people in his paintings are just as beastly – and just as butchered. Bodies wrestle and kiss. Nudes are splayed on dirty mattresses. We are just biological stuff.
Bacon would surely have seen the irony that the Royal Academy’s survey of his art through the lens of his interest in animals has been delayed by a virus. For Bacon sees no hierarchy of organisms, no sacred specialness in the human species. When the exhibition finally opens at the end of January, it will unveil a truly Darwinian artist in whose eyes a pope and a chimpanzee are equally tragicomic.
Bacon painted screaming, solitary apes in cages in the same years he depicted isolated anguished papal figures in glass booths. In 1957’s Study for Chimpanzee, the animal looks like a sad prelate, sulking in the corner of a zoo enclosure. In the 1940s and 50s, when he defined his vision and established his fame, he also painted dogs, elephants and owls. To visit a zoo is to experience a Francis Bacon theme park. Apes, monkeys and birds of prey are isolated for observation behind bars, mesh or glass, provided with swings and dead branches just as Bacon’s people are given weird items of tubular-steel furniture in their claustrophobic orange or pink rooms.
Bacon grew up close to nature. His father bet on, and tried to breed, horses. Young Francis had early sexual encounters with the grooms in his father’s stables. There were also plenty of dogs in this minor-aristocratic country house milieu. Bacon had siblings who settled in colonial Africa, where he went on holiday. Big game fascinated him. He started collecting books on
African wildlife as a teenager and one of his most surprising paintings, Elephant Fording a River from 1952, is a tender portrayal of a big mammal dwarfed by a vast shadowy wilderness.
Yet Bacon is a ruthless student of the human condition, not a sentimental nature artist. His studies of animals are essentially fodder for his art of ideas. By approaching him through his menagerie of symbols, Man and Beast invites us to focus on Bacon’s grand, scary vision of life and death. After sitting next to JMW Turner at a dinner, John Constable praised his “wonderful range of mind”. Bacon, the most important British artist since Turner, shared that big bold mentality. And he used animals to build his personal mythology of the perverse.
The creatures who howl and crouch in his 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion are part chicken, part owl, part dog – and all human. We are no longer angels created in God’s image, Bacon tells the war generation. The Royal Academy show features his 1988 painting, Second Version of Triptych 1944, that rams the point home for a new age. It was painted in the year Damien Hirst staged the group show Freeze that launched the Young British Artists and a year before the Berlin Wall fell, as if to insist that his vision of brutish gargoyles is as pertinent as long as humans exist. We are not holy. We are base.
Monsters are what happen when humans and animals interbreed. Egyptian and Greek art created jackalheaded and horse-bodied beings that represent states between human distinctness and the impulses we share with our fellow animals. Bacon too, is an artist of myth. He set out to create a post-religious mythology of modern life, portraying people whose skin is like elephant hide, who crouch like apes and have sex like dogs. In Figure Study II, painted in 1945-6, a naked and partly formed man turns a face with no upper half towards us. From his comparisons of human and animal anatomy – including Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of animals and humans in motion – Bacon creates a new, mutant Frankensteinian nature.
Only the greatest artists can get away with such visions. The reason
Bacon’s art doesn’t collapse into melodramatic pretension is that he exactly observes details of life, and renders it in richly decadent, bravura paint that is as satisfying as it is disturbing. By the 1960s he was ready to take on the other great animal artist of the 20th century. He started painting bullfights even though the corrida “belonged” to Pablo Picasso. Bacon’s bullfight happens in a room, of course.
As 1991’s Study of a Bull reveals, Bacon could also look at animals alone, peaceful, existing for themselves. He never portrayed a person so tranquilly.
• Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is at Royal Academy, London, 29 January-17 April.