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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
"At the end of each chapter, there is a close reading of one painting...In a book of such ambition and scope, it is finally — and fittingly, for an artist so private about his work — the modesty of this claim, of what can be known, that is its most moving achievement."
"What Revelations leaves us with powerfully is Bacon's mercurial, electric character and a palpable sense of his body: his fluid gait, his 'flutey' voice, and a face ever more asymmetrical as time progressed."
"This book's great achievement is that it does not confuse flexibility in the matter of relationships with insincerity, nor ravenous desire with decadence."
"An appropriately hefty biography of the mercurial artist ..."
"The authors are adept at contextualizing Bacon's artistic development within the story of his romances and exploits and go to great lengths to correct the record, dispelling errant mythologies (often propagated by Bacon himself) that lean too heavily on assertions of natural genius ..."
"Underneath it, though, as the authors show in their measured and non-judgmental way, lay poignancy and neediness too."
"authoritative and immersive account ..."
"Stevens and Swan...are in top form with this biography."
"The iconoclastic charm of the artist keeps the pages turning ..."
"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."
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