12 Photographs Of Francis Bacon

Draws on a broad range of source images and documents to discuss the role of photography, film stills, and mass-media imagery in some of Francis Bacon's most important paintings and stylistic development, in an account that places Bacon's work in a context of the mechanical reproduction process and the influences of his time.

With the aid of over 250 source images and documents, this text reveals how photographs, film, mass-media imagery and other sources informed Bacon's painting and, in particular, how 'lens-based images' helped to trigger the most significant turning point in his stylistic development.

Brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two works that have never been reproduced before In the early 1950s, Lucian Freud produced several works in oil paint on copper, a technique favored by 17th-century artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, but unusual for a 20th-century painter. Originally thought to be only a handful, Freud in fact painted more than a dozen copper works--all small-scale, enamel smooth and astonishingly intense. Based on a decade of research, this book, for the first time, brings together all of Freud's "coppers," including two works that have never been reproduced before. Among these paintings is Freud's famous portrait of Francis Bacon, labeled by Nicholas Serota as "the most important portrait of the 20th century." The work was stolen in 1988--its whereabouts still unknown--but during research for the book a rare photograph was discovered that shows the work just minutes before the theft, and it is published here for the first time.

The British painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is famed for his idiosyncratic mode of depicting the human figure. Thirty years after his death, his working methods remain underexplored. New research on the Francis Bacon Studio Archive at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, sheds light on the genesis of his works, namely the photographic source material he collected in his studios, on which he consistently based his paintings. The book brings together the artist’s pictorial springboards for the first time, delineating and interpreting recurring patterns and methods in his preparatory work and adoption of photographic material. In addition, it correctly locates ‘chance’ as a driving force in Bacon’s working method and qualifies the significance of photography for the painter.

A bold and brilliant short work by the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny.Madrid. Unfinished.Man Dying.A great painter lies on his deathbed.Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.

A focused look at double-figure paintings by the celebrated British artist, whose disturbing portrayals radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century. This book highlights a theme that preoccupied Francis Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological. At its heart are two of the most uninhibited images that Bacon ever painted: Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). After completing these interrelated works, Bacon did not return to the subject until 1967, the year that homosexual acts in private were decriminalized in England and Wales, when he painted Two Figures on a Couch, also featured in this volume. In Bacon's paintings, the human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred, watchful figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which male and female bodily traits are transposed or fused. A number of the works in Couplings were inspired by Bacon's own fraught relationships. Francis Bacon: Couplings features an introductory text by Richard Calvocoressi; a new essay and plate texts by Martin Harrison; and a never-before-published interview with Bacon by Richard Francis and Ian Morrison; as well as studio ephemera and working documents that illuminate Bacon's process.

Jointly published by the Hayward Gallery and the University of California Press on the occasion of the exhibition "Francis Bacon: the human body " organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, 5 February-5 April, 1998.