There are certain people for whom name is destiny. Usain Bolt bolted his way to Olympic gold. Bernie Madoff made off with his clients’ savings. Naughty 10-year-olds still joke about Anthony Weiner’s wiener. And the gods themselves must have been joking when they cooked up Francis Bacon, the artist who painted human beings as cold, mute slabs of meat.
Bacon’s relationship with the animal side of humanity started early. He was still a boy, legend has it, when his father had him horsewhipped to put him off homosexual behavior. (It didn’t work.) “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast,” an exhibition opening today at the Royal Academy of Arts, is as earnest and wide-ranging as its title implies, though most of what it has to say, compared with the artist’s train wreck of a childhood, seems downright cheerful.
