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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.
Reviews
"They do not believe everything he said, and they let us know this, but they are always in his corner, and they stress virtues of his that we wouldn't have known to look for: his gregariousness, his love of fun, his erudition, his extreme generosity."
"It is Bacon's complexity and daring that Stevens and Swan illuminate so precisely in this surpassingly literary biography."
"He was an S&M enthusiast who lived with his childhood nanny."
"Bacon often spoke of his attempt to 'trap' his subject, so as to capture the sense of its vitality 'more vividly'."
"The authors, so frank on de Kooning's private life, turn prim and almost anthropological when it comes to Bacon — and not even on the rough stuff."
"The American art critics Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have compiled a weighty, thorough and compelling biography of the artist that records nine decades of intense moments."
"The authors excel at illustrating his formation—Bacon destroyed almost all his early work—his manipulation of his image and value, and his helpless gambling in the power games of love."
"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 ..."
"Their comprehensiveness is particularly instructive when illuminating his years as a commercial furniture and rug designer in the 1930s, a facet of his career that Bacon rarely discussed in public, lest it detract from his reputation as a painter of the macabre ..."
"The authors are diligent about the shows, the critics, the mentors."
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