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?
After his sexual adventuring in Berlin and Paris and London before the war, and his dabbling with interior design, Bacon seemed transformed as an artist by the knowledge of carnage. Excused active service on account of his chronic asthma, he’d volunteered for a while as an ARP, pulling bodies from the wreckage of the blitz. By 1948, a full picture of the horror of the death camps had emerged. Bacon was gathering and devouring everything from Nazi speeches to pathology textbooks.
That bestial rage creeps into the stunning trio of early paintings in the next room, arranged as a triptych because of their common orange background. Figure Study I is a faceless form in a big herringbone coat, head down in a flowerbed. In the next, Figure Study II, a deformed body emerges from another overcoat, supporting the first of Bacon’s screaming mouths, cavernously black, turned to the viewer, vomiting bile. Finally in Fury (1944), a variation of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of the same year, Bacon conjures the first of many grotesque mythologies, where the human figure has become a mutation of body parts and a chapfallen, alas-poor-Yorick jaw, agape in horror.
Faced with this opening brutality, you wonder where the exhibition – co-curated by Michael Peppiatt, once a co-carouser with Bacon in Soho and the liveliest of his biographers – will take you next. One answer is among those that Bacon himself found, in the 1950s. It will take you on safari. A series of mostly nightmarish paintings of animals – chimpanzees in particular – reminds you that Bacon became an enthusiastic observer of big game on visits to Rhodesia, where his mother lived after the war, witnessing what he called “the whole horror of life, of one thing living off another”.
His painting, we see, in this context, started to put his lovers on display like animals in zoo cages, all flesh and torment. His nightly predatory hunt round Soho clubs fixed in 1952 on Peter Lacy, the former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, with whom he entered an obsessive sadomasochistic relationship. Lacy, he told Peppiatt, “wanted him chained to the wall, shitting and sleeping like an animal on a bed of straw”. He pictures Lacy in 1957, curled post-coitally on a sofa, all haunch and shoulder. Earlier, there are a pair of paintings of muscular outdoor couplings including 1954’s Two Figures in the Grass, in which the lovers are spied as if through field binoculars, and which solicited two complaints from outraged female visitors to the ICA in 1955.
Some of these carnal scenes take inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge’s freeze-framed motion pictures from the 19th century. The film pioneer’s chaste wrestling scenes become powerfully erotic in Bacon’s hands. They are juxtaposed with owls swooping low with human teeth and gutter hounds who keep their noses to the pavement.
Bacon once told his confidant David Sylvester that his ambition had always been “one day to make the best painting of the human cry”. You see here the different ways that ambition foundered for him. In place of anything like the wild sorrow he revered in the faces of Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents, he could summon variations of alienation and anguish. The four studies for howling popes that occupy one wall have never looked so savage; they see him experimenting with papal purple, livid as a baboon’s backside.
Bacon’s animal instincts rarely separated lust from violence. A room of bullfighting pictures from 1969 find him still in thrall to the carnal dance of muscle. He saw bullfighting as “like boxing – a marvellous aperitif for sex”, and traced canvases in which matadors merge satyr-like with their quarry with thick, ejaculated streaks of white paint.
The two triptychs of his doomed lover George Dyer that follow seem to put a stop to that idea of flesh as dramatic life. In the first group, the male figure is bluntly human, squatting on a lavatory, sprawled on a couch, rotating on a bar stool. In the second, made in 1972, some months after the alcoholic Dyer’s suicide on the eve of Bacon’s triumphant retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, his subject’s flesh melts and pools beside him, his animal body blackened out.
That emotion is brought closer to home in the final room here. A triptych of 1987 offers a sequel to the earlier bullfight pictures: gored flesh and bandages and bloodied horns. The shattering autobiographical trajectory of this show culminates with Bacon’s last painting, made in 1991, the year before his death, and discovered in a private collection in 2016. It depicts an almost transparent bull, half in and out of darkness, pawing at handfuls of dust that Bacon scattered on the canvas from his own chaotic studio floor.
• Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is at the Royal Academy, London, until 17 April
