The ring master
IN THE PRO-BULLFIGHTING LITERATURE, appealing to the authority of cultured aficionados from past and present (Federico García Lorca, Ernest Hemingway, Mario Vargas Llosa) is a fast track to respectability. Francis Bacon is mentioned occasionally, but his British passport and understated presence in bullrings go some way to explaining why his name doesn’t come up more.
As his most quoted aphorism on the subject — “Bullfighting is like boxing, a marvellous aperitif to sex” — intimates, neither his work nor his life invites respectability by association. He gave short shrift to anti-bullfighting sentiment:
When you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life — of one thing living off another. It’s like all those stupid things that are said about bullfighting. Because people will eat meat and then complain about bullfighting; they will go in and complain about bullfighting covered with furs and with birds in their hair.
The Royal Academy’s postponed “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” exhibition will hopefully draw greater attention to the role of animals in his oeuvre. With the publication of a fine new biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (reviewed by Christopher Bray in last month), and Max Porter’s fictional diary of Bacon’s final days in Madrid, the time is ripe to flesh out the importance of the corrida for
