The third book in the Francis Bacon Studies series, published under the aegis of The Estate of Francis Bacon

The third instalment in the Bacon Estate’s groundbreaking series discloses the most exciting new research and information to emerge in many years on this elusive artist. Three of the essays, by Francesca Pipe, Sophie Pretorius and Martin Harrison, are based on archives recently added to the collection of the Estate of Francis Bacon. Very little is known about Bacon’s early career, and the diaries of his two first patrons provide a far deeper understanding of his formative years than has been accessible hitherto. Especially revelatory are the extensive records kept over a long period by Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass: what they reveal will revolutionise thinking on Bacon.

Sarah Whitfield sheds new light on both Bonnard and Bacon; she has identified concerns the two artists shared that will surprise as well as enlighten. Joyce Townsend draws on her scientific and technical investigations into Tate’s most important Bacon paintings to advance significant new information about Bacon’s methods. Christopher Bucklow is an expert on Japanese art, which forms an important, if unexpected, aspect of his rethinking of the metaphor system in Bacon’s paintings.

About the Authors:

Martin Harrison is one of the foremost scholars of Francis Bacon, and the editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné.

Christopher Bucklow is an artist, photographer and art historian.

Francesca Pipe has transcribed and annotated all the extant diaries of Eric Allden dating from the period 1920 to 1946.

Sophie Pretorius is Archivist of the Estate’s Bacon collection, and has transcribed all Bacon’s surviving medical records.

Joyce H. Townsend is senior conservation scientist at Tate. She is the author of numerous books, including Turner’s Painting Techniques and, with Tony Smibert, The Tate Watercolour Manual: Lessons from the Great Masters.

Sarah Whitfield is an art historian, writer and curator. She is co-author of the René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, and serves on the authentication committee for the Estate of Francis Bacon.

Forms of feeling. The human body in distress

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions.

Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe and wail with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.

This book introduces Bacon's erotic, unsettling, unforgettable oeuvre, a transformative body of work often emulated, much analysed, and above all felt.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:

 - a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
 - a concise biography
 - approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

A new selection of letters, statements and interviews reveal the preoccupations, thoughts and ideas of Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s most influential and important artists.

The documents selected for Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words illustrate Bacon’s sharp wit and ability to express complex ideas in highly personal, memorable language. Included here are not only letters to friends, patrons and fellow artists, but also intriguing notes and lists of paintings. They often come with a sketch as an aide-mémoire or an injunction to himself as he worked in the studio, and many have only come to light since his death.

Bacon’s letters mirror and reveal his dominant preoccupations at different points throughout his long career. Most of Bacon’s letters have never been published and include several that he wrote to the author. Particularly intriguing is the record of a dream that he jotted down, outlining impossibly beautiful paintings he had conjured up in his sleep. Together with photographs, archive material and works by the artist are numerous reproductions of Bacon’s characteristic handwriting, from the briefest jottings and notes to more extensive letters and statements.

Bacon frequently came up with memorable epithets and definitions. He delighted in doing with words what he set out to do in painting: 'I like phrases that cut me.' Michael Peppiatt explores the personal legacy of one of the 20th century’s most important painters and presents a compelling verbal self-portrait that reveals both man and artist.

Contents List:

Introduction
Statements and Quotations (1949 – 1989)
Letters (1943 – 1992)
Studio Notes (1954 – 1990)
Selected Interviews (1958 – 1986)
Chronology

About the Author:

Michael Peppiatt is a well-known writer and curator, who began his career as an art critic in London and Paris in the 1960s. Described by The Art Newspaper as ‘the best art writer of his generation’, his previous books include Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma and Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. He was guest curator of the Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’ (London, 2022).

A focused look at double-figure paintings by the celebrated British artist, whose disturbing portrayals radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century.

This book highlights a theme that preoccupied Francis Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological. At its heart are two of the most uninhibited images that Bacon ever painted: Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). After completing these interrelated works, Bacon did not return to the subject until 1967, the year that homosexual acts in private were decriminalized in England and Wales, when he painted Two Figures on a Couch, also featured in this volume. In Bacon's paintings, the human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred, watchful figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which male and female bodily traits are transposed or fused. A number of the works in Couplings were inspired by Bacon's own fraught relationships.

Francis Bacon: Couplings features an introductory text by Richard Calvocoressi; a new essay and plate texts by Martin Harrison; and a never-before-published interview with Bacon by Richard Francis and Ian Morrison; as well as studio ephemera and working documents that illuminate Bacon's process.

About the Authors:

Richard Calvocoressi is an art historian and a director and senior curator at Gagosian, London. Martin Harrison, a curator and writer on art and photography, is an authority on the work of Francis Bacon.

A lavishly illustrated look at the sources behind the paintings of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon famously found inspiration in photographs, film-stills and mass-media imagery. In this new, updated edition of In Camera, Martin Harrison reveals how these sources informed some of Bacon’s most important paintings and triggered decisive turning points in the artist’s stylistic development.

Key influences, including the masters Velázquez, Poussin and Rodin, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the film director Sergei Eisenstein, are given close consideration. Bacon’s work is examined in relation to the precedents set by other artists working in the tradition of making use of mechanical reproductions, including Pablo Picasso and Walter Sickert, and in the context of his contemporaries Lucian Freud, Mark Rothko, Graham Sutherland and Patrick Heron.

With the aid of over 270 illustrations, including valuable source images and documents, In Camera is a bravura accomplishment of original research, addressing important questions about Bacon’s painting practice and shedding fresh light on his life and work.

Contents List:

Introduction • After Picasso • Michelangelo and Muybridge • Raw Material • In Camera • Skin/Flicks

About the Author:

Martin Harrison is one of the foremost scholars of Francis Bacon, and the editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné.

Francis Bacon (19091992) was renowned for his dramatic depictions of the human form; he portrayed the ordeal of the vulnerable, defencelessly exposed body like no other artist of his generation.

At the centre of this volume are about sixty of Bacons disturbing yet captivating studies of the human figure, encompassing works from the late 1940s until his death.

Texts by a range of experts on the artist offer new insights into these radical and often discomfiting images, so brilliantly reproduced on the pages of this book.

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." This book presents over 200 of these documents, about which Bacon was 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. 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.

This unique selection of material from Bacon's sudio - meticulously documented and compellingly presented - will provide an invaluable insight into both the artist's work and his working methods.

This landmark publishing event presents the entire oeuvre of Bacon’s paintings for the first time in a deluxe five-volume boxed set

Editor Martin Harrison, following his appointment by the Estate of Francis Bacon, has devoted over a decade to the creation of this magnificent publication, the first-ever complete catalogue raisonné of the work of the great British painter. Including many previously unpublished paintings, this five-volume set allows Bacon’s oeuvre to be seen and assessed in its entirety for the first time, with all works reproduced in full colour. The only previous Bacon catalogue raisonné was published in 1964, gathering only 37% of Bacon’s ultimate oeuvre, and featuring only 27 colour reproductions. Only about half of the 584 paintings that survive are accessible to the public in exhibitions and publications; with Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, the painter’s entire oeuvre can be seen and assessed for the first time.

The catalogue, containing around 800 illustrations across five clothbound, hardcover volumes, includes three books comprising the study of Bacon’s entire working history, which are bookended by two further volumes: the first including an introduction, chronology and an indispensable index and users’ guide, and the second a catalogue of Bacon’s sketches with an illustrated bibliography. Beautifully produced and printed, the five volumes of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné are boxed within a handsome cloth slipcase.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the great figurative painters of the twentieth century.

This book, newly available in paperback, provides a thorough account of the life and work of this complex and conflicted artist, whose paintings retain their visceral impact and relevance today. Essays by international scholars provide new insights into Bacon's art and life, and some fifty art works from every decade of his career from the pensive and shocking works of the 1940's to the exuberantly coloured and visceral large paintings of the 1970s and 80's show Bacon' unique representations of the human body through his mastery of paint.

Over 150 additional illustrations portray his studio, friends and lovers, and reveal the diversity of his source materials, from Velázquez to the motion photos of Eadweard Muybridge.

Francis Bacon and the Masters presents more than twenty of the artist’s paintings, the majority coming from the extraordinary collection assembled by Bacon’s patrons, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, over the course of the artist’s lifetime and now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Along with other landmark paintings from the Tate Collection and other major public and private collections, these are placed in the context of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and a number of the museum’s most famous paintings such as Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr and Picasso’s A Young Lady. These remarkable works, brought together for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Hermitage and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, are given further context by items and photographs from Bacon’s own studio archive, now in Dublin.

The exhibition is guest curated in both venues by Dr Thierry Morel, and co-curated by Amanda Geitner and Calvin Winner from SCVA. The contributing authors are Dr Thierry Morel, Professor Paul Joannides (Cambridge University), Amanda Geitner (SCVA), Calvin Winner (SCVA) and Margarita Cappock (Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane).

The power and magnitude of his lifes work are vividly conveyed by this thorough evaluation written by Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and art historian Sally Yard. Born in Dublin, as a teenager Bacon moved to London, where he worked as an interior designer and taught himself to paint. Responding to influences as diverse as Michelangelo and the photographer Muybridge, he has created a motion-filled style uniquely his own. Fascinated by the challenge of capturing what he calls "the mysteries of appearance," Bacon confronts us with emotional images that demand an emotional response.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) possessed the rare ability to transform unconscious compulsions into figurative, human-like forms that seem to evoke the raw emotions that bore them. Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.

The author:
Luigi Ficacci studied Art History in Rome under Giulio Carlo Argan. He is curator at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome and lectures at different Italian universities. The focal points of his research work are the issues raised by 17th and 18th century and contemporary Italian art.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography