Inside Francis Bacon

The third book in the Francis Bacon Studies series, this volume reveals fundamental insights into the artist’s character and psychology that will change existing perceptions. Very little is known about Francis Bacon’s early career, but this third installment in the Bacon estate’s groundbreaking series provides exciting new insight into and analysis of the elusive artist. Archived material recently added to the Estate of Francis Bacon’s collection—including the diaries of Bacon’s first two patrons and an extensive number of records kept by Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass—has allowed Francesca Pipe, Sophie Pretorius, and Martin Harrison to delve deeper into the artist’s formative years than ever before and revolutionize existing perceptions of Bacon’s character and psychology. Essays by Sarah Whitfield, Joyce Townsend, and Christopher Bucklow draw on biographical details of the artist’s life and technical analysis of his work. Utilizing this more traditional, art-historical approach, these scholars examine the complex relationships between Bacon and his peers and offer new insights into the artist’s methods and the system of metaphors within his paintings. This fascinating collection of scholarship will interest anyone looking to learn more about Francis Bacon, contemporary art, or the artistic imagination.

Published in 1996, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was the first in-depth study of the artist's life. It has not been superseded. In this substantially revised, updated edition - to coincide with the artist's centenary, which will be celebrated from autumn 2008 through summer 2009 - Peppiatt will incorporate confidential material Bacon gave him, which he did not include in the first edition. This valuable, first-hand information comes from the hundreds of conversations Bacon had with Peppiatt, often late into the night, over thirty years, particularly during the periods Bacon spent living and working in Paris. It includes insights into Bacon's intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and his general view of life, as well as his acerbic comments on his contemporaries. Peppiatt will draw on some of the fascinating information that has become available in the fifteen years since the artist died. Once jealously guarded by the artist himself, the contents of Bacon's studio can now be freely consulted; Peppiatt has had privileged access to these archives, and he will show how a number of recent discoveries - including wholly unexpected source material - have radically changed the way we look at Bacon's work. Similarly, his recent research into the artist's background - his tortured affair with the sadistic Peter Lacy in Tangier, for instance, and the baffling circumstances of his death in Madrid - will shed light on unexplored areas of Bacon's life and work. Peppiatt will also unveil new information from several people who knew Bacon intimately and who have never gone on record previously.

THE TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEAR Named one of The Irish Times' Books of the Year for 2021 A compelling and comprehensive look at the life and art of Francis Bacon, one of the iconic painters of the twentieth century—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master. This intimate study of the singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his extraordinary art “is bejeweled with sensuous detail … the iconoclastic charm of the artist keeps the pages turning” (The Washington Post). “A definitive life of Francis Bacon ... Stevens and Swan are vivid scene setters ... Francis Bacon does justice to the contradictions of both the man and the art.” —The Boston Globe Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life—from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images "so unrelievedly awful" that people fled the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992. Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. He moved among the worlds of London's Soho and East End, the literary salons of London and Paris, and the homosexual life of Tangier. Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon's childhood in Ireland (he earned his father's lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career—never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In all, Francis Bacon: Revelations gives us a more complete and nuanced--and more international--portrait than ever before of this singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his equally eruptive, extraordinary art. Bacon was not just an influential artist, he helped remake the twentieth-century figure.

In June of 1963, when Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon, the former was a college boy at Cambridge, the latter already a famous painter, more than thirty years his senior. And yet, Peppiatt was welcomed into the volatile artist's world; Bacon, considered by many to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” proved himself a devoted friend and father figure, even amidst the drinking and gambling. Though Peppiatt would later write perhaps the definitive biography of Bacon, his sharply drawn memoir has a different vigor, revealing the artist at his most intimate and indiscreet, and his London and Paris milieus in all their seediness and splendor. Bacon is felt with immediacy, as Peppiatt draws from contemporary diaries and records of their time together, giving us the story of a friendship, and a new perspective on an artist of enduring fascination.

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.

Since his death in April 12 Francis Bacon has been acclaimed as one of the very greatest of modern painters. Yet most analyses of Bacon actually neutralize his work by discussing it as an existential expression and as the horrifying communication of an isolated individualâe"which simply transfers the pain in the paintings back to Bacon himself. This study is the first attempt to account for the pain of the viewer. It is also, most challengingly, an explanation of what Baconâe(tm)s art tells us about ourselves as individuals. For, during this very personal investigation, the author comes to realize that the effect of Baconâe(tm)s work is founded upon the way that each of us carves our identity, our âeoeself,âe from the inchoate evidence of our senses, using the conventions of representation as tools. It is in his warping of these conventions of the senses, rather than in the superficial distortion of his images, that Bacon most radically confronts âeoeart,âe and ourselves as individuals.

A lavishly illustrated look at the sources behind the paintings of Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon famously found inspiration in photographs, film stills, and images from the media. In this new, updated edition of In Camera, Martin Harrison reveals how these sources informed some of Bacon’s most important paintings and triggered decisive turning points in the artist’s stylistic development. Key influences—including the masters Diego Velázquez, Nicolas Poussin, and Auguste Rodin; the photographer Eadweard Muybridge; and the film director Sergei Eisenstein—are given close consideration. Bacon’s work is examined in relation to the precedents set by other artists who made use of mechanical reproductions, including Pablo Picasso and Walter Sickert, and in the context of his contemporaries Lucian Freud, Mark Rothko, Graham Sutherland, and Patrick Heron. With over 270 color illustrations, including valuable source images and documents, In Camera is a bravura accomplishment of original research, addressing important questions about Bacon’s painting practice and shedding fresh light on his life and work.