Bacon and beasts, Botticelli in New York, gender in Asian art in San Francisco

This week, we visit the Royal Academy in London, where a new show looking at Francis Bacon’s use of animal imagery, Man and Beast, is about to open. The RA’s director, Axel Rüger sheds light on Bacon’s means of transposing the animal into the human figure. We talk to our editor-at-large, Georgina Adam, about The Man of Sorrows, the Botticelli painting sold at auction this week—and we find out if it went beyond its guaranteed sale price of $40m. We also talk about the big art market news of the week: that MCH Group, the owner of the Art Basel fairs, is to take over Fiac's slot at the Grand Palais in Paris to host a new contemporary art fair in October. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Aimee Dawson talks to Megan Merritt of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, about a pair of works in Seeing Gender, a new exhibition that explores the museum’s collection through the lens of gender for the first time: a contemporary piece on paper by the Chinese artist Wilson Shieh and a 20th-century carved sculpture by the Indonesian artist Ida Bagus Putu Taman.

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