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Francis Bacon: Revelations
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About This Book
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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Reviews
"The book is bejeweled with sensuous detail...Such flourishes, which, in true Bacon style, speak 'directly on the nervous system,' may well have pleased the artist ..."
"over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facets to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask ..."
"Stevens and Swan...are in top form with this biography."
"He was an S&M enthusiast who lived with his childhood nanny."
"Stevens and Swan furnish an exhaustive account, painting by painting, exhibition by exhibition, of how Bacon's wild innovations in figurative art countered the mid-20th-century fashions for both abstract expressionism and pop art."
"It is Bacon's complexity and daring that Stevens and Swan illuminate so precisely in this surpassingly literary biography."
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