Francis Bacon
Revelations
-
- €15.99
-
- €15.99
Publisher Description
The Times Art Book of the Year 2021
FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD 2022
‘Must surely be the definitive life of Francis Bacon … A biography that no Bacon fan – or indeed foe – can afford to overlook … Mesmerising’ THE TIMES
‘A magnificent triumph … I was captivated by every line’ OBSERVER
A decade in the making, based upon hundreds of interviews and extensive new material, Pulitzer Prize winners Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have written a startlingly original portrait – rich, complex, and subtle – of a commanding modern figure.
Bacon concealed many important aspects of his life. He described himself as an asthmatic child in Ireland with foxhunting parents and a tyrannical father, but he was also rescued by a series of formidable women – women who in this biography emerge in their own right. He was never just a dissolute young man but was also a passionate reader, largely self-taught. Early on, influenced by Eileen Gray, he became a hard-working and ambitious designer, a brief career explored here in detail for the first time. He dreamed of remaking the modern room.
Bacon worked no less hard or ambitiously as a painter, at first with little success. Throughout the 1930s and early ’40s he suffered ongoing failures, growing isolated and often ill. His health issues throughout his life were far more significant than he revealed. Then came his astonishing breakthrough in 1944, with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In the following decades, he emerged as one of the great iconoclasts and bon vivants of his time, a Wildean figure whom one friend called ‘a terrific grandee.’ Bacon was typically celebrated as a sexual adventurer who liked rough trade, but he never stopped longing for a serious committed relationship, however painful. He continued to make disturbing images of the strangeness within, but developed into a more varied artist than has been recognised, creating in particular an extraordinary series of self-portraits. He was an artist who believed in chance and paradox: the iconoclast eventually became an icon.
This is a story, deeply researched and masterfully told, of a sickly boy who became one of the great figures of his time. The twentieth century does not know itself without Bacon.
About the author
Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens are authors of de Kooning: An American Master, a biograph of Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, which was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle prize for biography and the Los Angeles Times biography award. It was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by the New York Times.
https://www.stevensandswan.com/
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this monumental work, Pulitzer Prize–winning art critics Stevens and Swan (De Kooning: An American Master) make a convincing case that "the twentieth century does not know itself without" the work of English painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992). Starting with Bacon's birth and fraught childhood in Ireland, the authors trace his exploration of cubism, surrealism, and expressionism on his way to emerging as a major figure on the international art scene near the end of WWII, a lofty position that has only increased since his death. Throughout, Swan and Stevens provide penetrating insights into his complex psyche, his sexuality (Bacon was gay), his friendships, and how such a "handsome, witty, and amiable" person could have created paintings that many see as grotesque and even nightmarish. While his contemporaries, such as Henry Moore, created art that "sensitively expressed ‘the terrible toll of war,' " Bacon shocked audiences by "mercilessly attacking every comforting platitude of the twentieth century" and exposing the hypocrisy of postwar London society. Often mocking religious iconography with distorted figures and tormented ghouls, he captured the "living tension between power and powerlessness." Full of illuminating details and written in exquisite prose, this a fascinating look at the dichotomy between an artist's inner life and their work.
