Meat Beat Manifesto:Francis Bacon @ the RA.

"We are meat. We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it is surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal" - Francis Bacon

Henrietta Moraes (1966)

Francis Bacon's view of humanity may be pessimistic, nihilistic even, but it's not wrong. Not completely. The Royal Academy's fantastic Francis Bacon:Man and Beast show has a long hard look at how Bacon blurred, not just the imagery in his paintings, but the line between man and beast. How Bacon celebrated, while at the same time being somewhat horrified by, the primal instincts and base desires that lie beneath the polite facades we present to the world.

As a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal for most of his adult life (he lived in London, Berlin, and Paris and England, Germany, and France didn't decriminalise homosexuality until 1967, 1968, and 1971 - when Bacon was in his late sixties/early seventies. Ireland, the country of his birth, did not decriminalise until a year after his death in 1992) and as a person who lived through two world wars, it's perhaps understandable why Bacon should be so interested in what a person is permitted to do with their body (kill) and what is forbidden (love).

But that, of course, is pure speculation on my part. With Bacon, a lot is speculation. His paintings offer meaning but that meaning is never, or rarely, explicit. They're absolutely fascinating, the large crowds at the RA are testament to this, but they don't offer easy interpretation.

Bacon believed close observation of animals and their behaviour could teach us about the true nature of mankind. As a boy on a stud farm in Ireland he learned how animals fought, how they mated, and how they died and, quite clearly, he didn't think it was too different to the way humans experience these events. Humans being animals after all.

Crucifixion (1933)

Figure Study II (1945-46)

In 1949, Bacon told Time magazine that he wished to paint "like Velazquez but with the texture of hippopotamus skin" but long before that he was making work that was critical, yet fascinated, by the way humans treat each other. Crucifixions dominated his early work yet Bacon held no religious beliefs. The crucifixion, he observed, was "just an act of man's behaviour".

The body of Jesus, like the body of all men, was just meat, just a carcass. After World War II, inspired by Picasso, Bacon started making paintings of curious hybrid creatures at, seemingly, the point of them becoming hybrid. Bacon called them "organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it". They look in some way primordial, even horrific, yet all too human props like hats or, in Figure Study II (above), an umbrella seemed to suggest they belong to what we laughably refer to as the civilised world.

Bacon was fascinated with human anatomy and with transgressive behaviour and as such he collected a wide array of research materials that ranged from photographs of Hitler, books on forensic pathology, and records of seances. The figure study below is inspired by the latter. A book, The Phenomena of Materialisation, which boasted of showing, as was popular at the time of publishing - 1913, of 'ectoplasm' emerging from the body of a medium.

Study for a Figure (c.1945)

Head IV (Man with a Monkey) (1949)

You can see why it appealed to Bacon. But the world of spiritualists and ectoplasm was, of course, completely fraudulent and Bacon was more interested in what was real and, by the late 1940s, animals had come to dominate his work. Dogs, chimpanzees, and, perhaps bizarrely, owls especially. Very few horses. As a child in County Kildare, horses triggered Bacon's asthma.

Interestingly, the monkey in Head IV is the one looking out at us while the man looks away. The monkey is almost more human than the man. Certainly, more interesting to Bacon. Probably because the monkey is being in itself. The man, in a suit, is playing a role. As we all must do.

Alongside a library of wildlife books, Bacon would travel to southern Africa (where his mother and sisters had moved following the death of his father in 1940) and find himself mesmerised by the wild animals and how they moved through the savanna. Soon enough, Bacon's human sitters found themselves portrayed as if those animals. They became the animals, they became the hunted, and they became the prey. Quite often the sexual quarry.

Study for Chimpanzee (1957)

Man Kneeling in Grass (1952)

Figures in a Landscape (1956-57)

Two Figures in the Grass (1954)

Figures in a Landscape suggest the 'hunter' has caught up with his game and is now enjoying the spoils, and Two Figures in the Grass, when displayed at the ICA, caused two visitors to report Bacon to the police. So depraved did they find it back in the mid-fifties.

We're not morally shocked by these images now, except for a vanishingly thin number of fundamentalists, but they are still quite startling in how brutally they recreate one of the most natural of human acts. Not for Bacon, the refined nudity of a Titian or the masturbatory fantasies of Degas. Bacon painted sex as a child exposed to it may see it. Like one person attacking an another!

Dog (1952)

Man with Dog (1953)

More than any other animal, except man, Bacon painted dogs. The Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge had taken a series of shots of a mastiff walking and these became blueprints of Bacon's canine portraits. The dog in Dog from 1952 is believed to be 'posing' in some manicured gardens in Monte Carlo (where Bacon had lived previously). It looks knackered.

Too tired to bark at, or even register, the traffic speeding by in the background. In some ways, the dog seems too caught up in itself to really care about anything else. That's not the case in many of Bacon's human portraits. Not least his series of popes. Inspired, again, by Diego Velazquez and his 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon's pontiffs appear utterly horrified by life.

They scream out in pain, they rage against the dying of the light, and, in some instances, they're trapped in cages. They don't look people who have been set free by religion. They look like people who are trapped, and haunted, by religion. Not just religion. But the universal pain and suffering of the human experience. All animals bodies fail them eventually but it seems we are the only ones who are expected to live with the exquisite agony of knowing this.

Pope and Chimpanzee (c.1960)

Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1965)

Head VI (1969)

Study of the Human Head (1953)

Though Bacon, to me, is at his best when he shows the discomfort we have with our own bodies, and thoughts, he soon moved on and began to create larger paintings, many of them triptychs, which show how awkward and uncomfortable people are with each other. How power dynamics, both in society and in sexual scenarios, are played out by the human ape.

Bacon was uninterested in creating narrative or telling stories. He wanted to show humans in flux, at war with their surroundings, and trying to resolve their dual desires to be both animalistic and to be accepted by society.  Trying to make sense of it all.

Three Figures and Portrait (1975)

Two Studies from the Human Body (1974-75)

Study for the Nurse in the Film Battleship Potemkin (1957)

Painting (1950)

He continued, magpie like, pillaging from ever more unlikely sources. A cormorant, a painting of a swing by Francois Boucher - an artist less like Bacon it would be hard to find, and even the image of a woman screaming as a pram takes flight down the Odesa steps in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin.

It's even suggested that this nurse's scream was the template for all screams that featured in Bacon's art. It's a rare aesthetic admission by the artist who, during his career, found himself at odds with the prevailing trends of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism while not being a completely figurative painter.

Bacon was too singular for any movement. He wanted for his work "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently". Gender was rendered more ambiguous than would have been traditionally done so, bodies were never idealised, and often they're contorted or in some form of pain or anguish.

Triptych - Studies of the Human Body (1970)

Portrait of George Dyer Crouching (1966)

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch (1965)

He was interested in the "interminable nature of carnal appetite" and chose to show humans as "maelstroms of flesh". Potentially logical and rational creatures undone by a lust and a violence they can never fully escape. Often these violent desires were enacted on each other or even themselves. Other times, they were played out on the animals we share the planet with, the animals we hunt, the animals we eat, the animals whose skins we wear as if our own, and the animals we force into fatal bloodsports.

Which, of course, Bacon loved. "Bullfighting is like boxing", he once said - most likely intentionally provocatively - before, warming to his theme, adding " - a marvellous aperitif to sex". The bullfights, and even more so the quote, had it all. Everything Bacon obsessed over. Violence, eroticism, and voyeurism. It's even noted by the curators that the splash of white paint that has been thrown at the canvas of the bullfighting study below is fully intended to represent ejaculate.

Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1 (1969)

Lucian Freud described Bacon's approach to painting as "calculated recklessness" and there's something in that. In making these images, Bacon was echoing his subjects, both man and beast, by trying to harness and control his wilder desires and create art from them.

A line from Aeschylus, "the reek of human blood smiles out at me", is said to have obsessed Bacon and it seems as if Bacon, like all artists and surely all people, was fascinated by the fact that one day he would die. That all his impulses and desires would stop. That they would die with him.

Three Figures in a Room (1964)

Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988)

As he aged, life's futility and its endless routines, began to haunt and frustrate him but the fire in his eyes never truly diminished until, in 1992, he finally passed way, aged 83, on holiday in Madrid.

Ten years before that John Cougar Mellencamp sang, in Jack and Diane, that "life goes on long after the thrill of living has gone" and Bacon's later paintings, of which there are a few here, show the world from an elder, more tired, man's perspective. Perhaps from a man whose desire, for both life and for sex, is fading.

A triptych from 1988 shows the aftermath of a bullfight instead of the fight itself. The wounds of the matador, the bowed and bloodied horns of the bull, and the shame that accompanies the spectacle of what Ernest Hemingway called 'Death in the Afternoon'. Like life itself, what, in the end, had it all been for?

Three years after that triptych, and in the year before his death, Bacon made his final painting and it's important that the RA end the exhibition with it. It's a study of a bull. But this time with no matador to violently assault it. 

The bull is proudly rendered as if Bacon wishes to apologise to it. It is spectral, perhaps representing that - like Bacon - it will soon die and die at the hands of a fellow animal. The painting also incorporates the use of dust in its making and, with this, surely Bacon is making one final statement. 

For no matter how fiercely we live our lives, no matter how deep we interrogate our souls, no matter how much we want to cling on, we will, each and every one us, like the bull, return to the dust from whence we came. We are meat. We are potential carcasses.

Study of a Bull (1991)