Третя книга із серії «Дослідження Френсіса Бекона», виданої під егідою видавництва «Спадок Френсіса Бекона».

Третя частина новаторської серії «Спадок Бекона» розкриває найцікавіші нові дослідження та інформацію, що з'явилися за багато років про цього невловимого художника. Три есе, написані Франческою Пайп, Софі Преторіус та Мартіном Гаррісоном, базуються на архівах, нещодавно доданих до колекції спадку Френсіса Бекона. Про ранню кар'єру Бекона відомо дуже мало, а щоденники двох його перших покровителів дають набагато глибше розуміння його років становлення, ніж було доступно досі. Особливо показовими є великі записи, які протягом тривалого часу зберігав лікар Бекона, Пол Брасс: те, що вони розкривають, революціонізує уявлення про Бекона.

Сара Вітфілд проливає нове світло як на Боннара, так і на Бекона; вона визначила проблеми, які розділяли цих двох художників, і які здивують, а також просвітлять. Джойс Таунсенд спирається на свої наукові та технічні дослідження найважливіших картин Бекона в галереї Тейт, щоб отримати важливу нову інформацію про методи Бекона. Крістофер Баклоу — експерт з японського мистецтва, що є важливим, хоч і несподіваним, аспектом його переосмислення системи метафор у картинах Бекона.

Про авторів:

Мартін Гаррісон — один із найвидатніших дослідників Френсіса Бекона та редактор каталогу Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné.

Крістофер Баклоу — художник, фотограф та історик мистецтва.

Франческа Пайп транскрибувала та анотувала всі збережені щоденники Еріка Аллдена, що датуються періодом з 1920 по 1946 рік.

Софі Преторіус — архіваріус колекції Бекона маєтку та транскрибувала всі збережені медичні записи Бекона.

Джойс Х. Таунсенд — старший науковий співробітник з питань охорони пам'яток у галереї Тейт. Вона є авторкою численних книг, зокрема Turner’s Painting Techniques Тернера та, разом із Тоні Смібертом, The Tate Watercolour Manual: Lessons from the Great Masters.

Сара Вітфілд — історик мистецтва, письменниця та кураторка. Вона є співавторкою René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné та входить до складу комітету з автентифікації спадщини Френсіса Бекона.

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.

Ця знакова видавнича подія вперше представляє всю творчість картин Бекона у розкішному п'ятитомному наборі.

Редактор Мартін Гаррісон, після призначення спадкоємцями Френсіса Бекона, присвятив понад десять років створенню цього чудового видання, першого в історії повного каталогу-резоне робіт великого британського художника. Цей п'ятитомний комплект, що включає багато раніше неопублікованих картин, дозволяє вперше побачити та оцінити творчість Бекона в повному обсязі, причому всі роботи відтворені у повному кольорі. Єдиний попередній каталог-резоне Бекона був опублікований у 1964 році, зібравши лише 37% від загальної творчості Бекона та маючи лише 27 кольорових репродукцій. Лише близько половини з 584 картин, що збереглися, доступні для публіки на виставках та у публікаціях; завдяки Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné всю творчість художника можна побачити та оцінити вперше.

Каталог, що містить близько 800 ілюстрацій у п'яти томах у твердій палітурці з тканини, включає три книги, що охоплюють вивчення всієї творчої історії Бекона, доповнені двома додатковими томами: перший містить вступ, хронологію та незамінний покажчик і посібник користувача, а другий — каталог ескізів Бекона з ілюстрованою бібліографією. Чудово оформлені та надруковані, п'ять томів Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné упаковані в красиву тканинну обкладинку.

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.

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