"In 1949 Francis Bacon found his subject - the human body - and from then on it remained his principal theme. But he did not paint from life. Instead he appropriated images from the mass media that he manipulated into his 'studies'. His paintings bore witness to the shattered psychology of the time and shot him to a prominence that hardly diminished over the next fifty years, and that continues to rise." "This book presents many of the 'working documents' about which Bacon was entirely secretive but which, it emerges, were integral to his creative process. Culled from thousands of pieces of original material found in his studio, including newspapers, magazines, books and photographs, these items have each been exhaustively and minutely researched, providing for the first time comprehensive details of the artist's sources. This base material - folded, torn, clipped and spattered with paint - underwent an alchemical transformation frond mundane matter into new images." "Nearly all previously unseen, these visually thrilling documents demonstrate Bacon's tactile, visceral relationship with his sources, and his unerring eye for seeking out visual stimulation in the most unexpected places. His paintings emerged from a dialogue between great art of the past and photographic imagery of the present: and, as a painter of the transient, his work also shared the pulse and flicker of his other significant inspiration, early cinema. His fascination with medium itself - the texture of paint, the quality of newsprint, the techniques of mechanical reproduction of both the still and moving image - throws light on the nature of Bacon's points of contact with the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

This is a photographic portrait of painter Francis Bacon's south London studio in the days following his death. A visual statement of Bacon's frenetic life and work. 60 photos.

The first in a series of books that sheds new light on Francis Bacon's art and motivations, published under the aegis of the Estate of Francis Bacon Bacon and the Mind sheds light on Francis Bacon’s art by exploring his motivations, and in so doing opens up new ways of understanding his paintings. It comprises five essays by prominent scholars in their respective disciplines, illustrated throughout by Bacon’s works. Christopher Bucklow argues compellingly that Bacon does not depict the reality of his subjects, but rather their reality for him—in his memory, in his sensibility, and in his private world of sensations and ideas. Steven Jaron’s essay questions the psychological implications of Bacon’s habitual language, his obsession with “the wound,” vulnerability, and the nervous system. Darian Leader’s essay “Bacon and the Body,” presents the latest of his fresh and stimulating insights into the artist. The focus in John Onians’s “Francis Bacon: A Neuroarthistory” is the effect of Bacon’s unconscious mental processes in the creation of his paintings. “The ‘Visual Shock’ of Francis Bacon: An Essay in Neuroaesthetics” is a newly edited and now fully illustrated re-presentation of an article by Semir Zeki, previously accessible only as an online academic paper.

British artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992), one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century, is known for his expressive figurative paintings. Perhaps Bacon's most famous image - the so-called 'screaming pope' in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) - became the touchstone for the longest series of paintings in his career, the Papal Portraits of 1953.In 1953 'haunted and obsessed by the image...by its perfection,' Bacon sought to reinvent Velázquez's seventeenth-century Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) in the paintings that are the focus of this book. Francis Bacon replaced the grand, official state portrait with an intimate, spontaneous 'candid camera' glimpse behind the well-ordered exterior. While the Spanish master Velázquez portayed the pope ex cathedra, Bacon captured him in camera, as if behind a closed door or through a one-way mirror.This series of eight papal portraits, painted during a period of just a few weeks in the summer of 1953, was brought together for the first time by noted Bacon scholar Hugh M. Davies for a 1999 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, along with several other works from the same period, including Sphinx I and two recently found Study after Velázquez paintings from 1950. This book includes a new essay by Davies, discussing the artist's influences and sources of imagery for the series, and a previously unpublished interview that Davies conducted with Bacon in 1973.

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.

This book with its subsequent revised and augmented editions--has been considered a classic of its kind, and that reputation has become worldwide. As a discussion of problems of making art today it has been widely influential not only among artist but among writers and musicians. It has also been seen as the most revealing portrait that exists of one of the most singular artistic personalities of our times.

Madrid. Unfinished. Man dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed, synapses firing, writhing and reveling in pleasure and pain as a lifetime of chaotic and grotesque sense memories wash over and envelop him. In this bold and brilliant short work of experimental fiction by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Max Porter inhabits Francis Bacon in his final moments, translating into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. Writing as painting rather than about painting, Porter lets the images he conjures speak for themselves as they take their revenge on the subject who wielded them in life. The result is more than a biography: The Death of Francis Bacon is a physical, emotional, historical, sexual, and political bombardment--the measure of a man creative and compromised, erotic and masochistic, inexplicable and inspired.

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.