Correspondent in London
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Walking among the works of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is not exactly a pleasant task: they are full of crudeness and disturbing scenes that some people have not even had in their worst nightmares. But it is impossible to observe him with indifference and in each stroke the history of a universal artist whose fascination with animals and the human figure is better represented than ever in the exhibition ‘Man and Beast’, which will open its doors to the public this Saturday in London after having done so before for the press and critics.
The latter has given him the approval through the pen of the experts of the main British newspapers, which
they say, for example, that this “is a parade that is often somber but infinitely fascinating through the galleries of the Royal Academy”, according to ‘The Guardian’, or that, according to ‘The Telegraph’, “there is much to admire, even enjoy, in this exhibition of around 45 paintings that span Bacon’s long career ». And it is that it is more than half a century of career that appears in this sample so bleak as disturbing, which will undoubtedly provoke intense emotions in those who go to see it before it ends, on April 17.
The curator, Michael Peppiatt, a writer and close friend of Bacon, assures that until now the obsession of the most important post-war painter in Great Britain with the bestialized human figures (or humanized beasts?) had been ‘barely explored’. Thus, the protagonists are dogs, owls, chimpanzees, bulls, human mouths and hands, pieces of meat, ears and melted heads on huge canvases with dark backgrounds framed in gold.
biomorphic creatures
“Since his death, the world has changed in ways that make his unnerving work ever more prescient,” say gallery sources, adding that “in Bacon’s paintings, man is never far from the beast» and that the fact that humans are fundamentally animals “was a truth that lay at the heart of their imagery.” “From the biomorphic creatures of his early work, to the distorted nudes that define the latter part of his career, Bacon remained convinced that, beneath the veneer of civilization, humans are animals like any other.
The exhibition begins with a group of paintings of biomorphic creatures made between 1944 and 1946 that suggest «a disintegration of civilized humanity» and halfway through «there is a powerful trio of bullfight paintings that present one of the most direct encounters» between human beings and beasts, in a representation full of «meat, violence, eroticism, life and death». The exhibition concludes with Bacon’s last painting, ‘Study of a Bull’, in 1991, which was discovered in 2016.