Viewing Francis Bacon: Man and Beast

One of the most eagerly awaited shows of the year, Man and Beast explores how Francis Bacon’s fascination with animals influenced his work, notably his approach to the human body. Bacon was captivated by the movement of animals, sketching them on trips to South Africa and Regent’s Park zoo. His London studio was filled with wildlife books and Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of humans and animals in motion. A scrupulous observer of the human condition, Bacon believed that the closer he got to animals the better he could understand humanity.

Broadly chronological, this much-anticipated exhibition includes 45 works, from his earliest works of the 1930s and 40s through to the final painting he ever made in 1991. Other standout exhibits include a powerful trio of paintings of bullfights, all made in 1969, and a series of visceral portraits of Bacon’s lover and muse George Dyer.

Shown together, Bacon’s raw, distorted forms reveal the fine lines between the human and non-human, flesh and meat, violence and eroticism, and life and death. Uniquely disturbing, this show is not to be missed.