Animals captivated Bacon, and this exhibition at the Royal Academy (29 January–17 April) allows us to examine just how much his obsessive study of their movement informed his distortions of the human figure. The show follows the painter from South Africa, where he travelled to observe animals in the wild, to bullfights he saw in France and Spain, and into the privacy of his studio, which was filled with books about wildlife and where he would pore over Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of humans and animals in motion. Find out more from the Royal Academy’s website – and for more on Bacon’s beasts, read Daisy Hildyard’s feature for Apollo here.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here
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Seeing London through Frank Auerbach’s eyes