‘We are all animals’
ALTHOUGH the late Francis Bacon was a brilliant conversationalist, almost as gifted with words as he was with a paintbrush, he was deeply reluctant to expound on one point: what his own pictures were all about. His favourite explanation boiled down to… nothing, that they illustrated no story, symbolised no idea, encoded no deeper significance. Not surprisingly, platoons of art historians have endeavoured to discover the hidden meaning of Bacons. An important (postponed) exhibition at the Royal Academy (RA), ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’, will try a novel line: that the artist’s work was very much concerned with animals.
Although the fact has not often been noted, Bacon was a remarkable animal painter, what the French call an . There are extraordinary pictures by him of chimpanzees, baboons, owls and dogs, the(1953), in which the owner at the other end of the lead is reduced to amorphous, sinister shadow. It is hard to say which of the two is more threatening.
