I do not think that there was much connection between Francis Bacon and George Bataille. But it is worthwhile exploring by putting them together to see what happens.

Bacon understood that humans were animals: primal and confrontational. His figures of human beings (even screaming popes) work around the animal in man.

F. Bacon, Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants,1968.

It's a very Nietzschean idea: human beings as animals.

Francis Bacon, Figures in a Garden, 1936

A scream of pain? Anger? Ecstasy? It's ambiguous.

A quote:

"Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. I don't think anyone has ever really understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher's window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it's all for sale--how unbelievably surrealistic! I often imagine that the accident that made man into the animal he has become also happened to other animals--lions or hyenas for example--while man remained a primate...I imagine men hanging in butcher's shops for hyenas, who would be dressed in fur coats. The men would be hung by their feet, or cut up for stew or kebabs."

Time to reappraise surrealism as Bataille suggested? A surrealism that recognized the absence of myth in a society ruled by instrumental reason and looks a back to the primitive to gain an insight into what has been lost.

Isn't the anaimal/human nexus one way to reach back to the primitive?

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