Francis Bacon by Anthony Quinton

Francis Bacon by Anthony Quinton

The painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) defines the shattered self-image of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and his wracked human figures are now basic to the twentieth century's visual lexicon. Clearing away all moral scaffolding, Bacon made room for what he called the brutality of fact to implode onto his canvases, paring back his subjects to animal function and bloodlust. In Bacon the figure is almost always isolated and pitched against an unforgiving interior lit only by a bare light bulb (one could write an interesting history of the light bulb in art, tracking its trajectory from, say, Van Gogh to Vuillard's lamplight, to the desolate hanging bulbs of Bacon and Philip Guston). Francis Bacon had few better critics of his work than himself--as witnessed in this superb statement of intent to David Sylvester: What I want to do is distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance. But one of the few writers whose sensibility he trusted was the French author Michel Leiris. Leiris shared Bacon's feel for nerve-end acuity in art, as his great autobiography Manhood attests, and with Bacon's sanction, wrote the essay for Poligrafa's landmark monograph of 1987, which also included a selection of 240 key paintings made by Bacon himself. That volume, an essential text for Bacon fans and scholars, is here revised and reprinted for the first time.

About the Authors:
James McConica is a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Anthony Quinton was President of Trinity College, Oxford from 1978 to 1987. Sir Anthony Kenny is President of the British Academy. Peter Burke is reader in Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192875242
ISBN 10	0192875248
Title	Francis Bacon
Author	Anthony Quinton
Series	Past Masters S
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1980-10-01
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.