After Study for Bullfight No.2 (1969) — Right Panel by Francis Bacon returns to the corrida as a site where the most fundamental questions about human existence are played out in real time — mortality, masculinity, the body under terminal pressure, the performance of control at the exact moment control might fail.

The bullfight had run through the work of the artists Bacon most admired with an insistence that was never merely decorative. Picasso's engagement with the corrida stretched from his earliest Barcelona years through the Minotaur prints and drawings of the 1930s — the arena as a space where the boundary between the human and the animal dissolves, where masculine identity is constructed and destroyed simultaneously, where the outcome is always genuinely uncertain. Goya had been there before him, painting the corrida with a darkness that understood it as spectacle and slaughter in equal measure. For both, the bullring was not entertainment but a concentrated image of something central to the human condition — the body in direct encounter with its own extinction.

Michel Leiris, whose intellectual friendship with Bacon was one of the most significant of his life, had written about the corrida in Miroir de la Tauromachie with a precision that matched exactly what Bacon was trying to paint. Leiris read the matador's art as consisting in the deliberate narrowing of the margin between life and death — bringing the body into proximity with the bull's horn, holding it there with absolute stillness and absolute control, and in doing so transforming mortal risk into something that briefly resembles beauty. The bullfight was, for Leiris, the only honest art form — one in which the artist's life is genuinely at stake, where there is no gap between performance and reality.

Bacon had grown up surrounded by animals, his father a racehorse trainer in Ireland, and the boundary between the human and the animal had always been unstable in his imagination. His father's world — masculine, physical, hierarchical, defined by the management of powerful and dangerous creatures — left its mark. The figures in the bullfight works occupy the same liminal territory as the figures in his papal portraits and his studies of the human body — caught between categories, neither fully one thing nor another, the flesh simultaneously noble and vulnerable, the outcome of the encounter held open for as long as the image lasts.

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