The Royal Academy has posted trigger warnings of – deep breath – ‘adult content’ on paintings in its new Francis Bacon show.
But just how ‘adult’ are they? They are anything but. Instead, Bacon depicts sophisticated but infantile images of bad dreams and worse memories. They’re decked out on modish furniture – which, in an earlier career as an interior decorator, he designed – and they’re imprisoned by linear structures to impart a Giacometti-ish, hard-edged modernism.
The sheer grotesqueness of Bacon’s images spin-off – the very thing, these days; the stuff of a five-year-old’s yearnings.
