Francis Bacon
Revelations
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
THE TIMES BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD AND THE APOLLO AWARD • “There are not many biographical masterpieces, but…Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have produced one,” wrote the novelist John Banville of Francis Bacon: Revelations. By the Pulitzer prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master, this acclaimed biography contains a wealth of never before known details about one of the iconic artists of the 20th century—a singularly private, darkly funny, eruptive man and his extraordinary art, whose iconoclastic charm “keeps the pages turning” (The Washington Post).
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.
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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.
