Royal Academy, London
The painter’s preoccupation with our animal urges is laid bare in this magnificent collection of nightmarish brutes and lovers in torment
The first hint of what is to come is a large bared canine tooth, in Head 1 (1948). The painting featured in Francis Bacon’s debut London exhibition the year after it was made, and it greets you now in an opening room of its own at the Royal Academy. The human form in the painting, which emerges out of a black background within a sketchy geometry of a cage, has been reduced to a contorted mouth arising out of a body that suggests a side of lamb or a pork belly. It is that enlarged fang that holds your attention, though, gesturing not so much at the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde, but the sure evidence that the rough beast never went away.
More than his earlier flayed carcass of a crucifixion, that first Head reveals the preoccupation in Bacon’s art that persisted right up to his death; the question that this often magnificent and properly disturbing retrospective nags at on every wall: just how animal are we?
