Francis Bacon: Man and Beast
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Francis Bacon hated people interpreting his work; he discouraged them, saying it “meant nothing”. But I suspect he would have been secretly pleased by the theme chosen by the curators of the Royal Academy’s exhibition “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” (until 17 April), the first to explore his animalistic treatment of the human body.

“We are all meat, we are all potential carcasses,” Bacon once declared; he claimed to be surprised, when inside a butcher’s shop, not to be hanging off a hook himself. In a world without a higher power, humanity was reduced to its animal instincts: “We are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.”