Bacon

by Luigi Ficacci

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 subjectravaged, distorted, and dismemberedso as to writhe and wail withintense emotional content.With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, hisgripping, often grotesque, portraitsare 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 depictovertly homosexual themes.This book introduces Bacon's erotic, unsettling, unforgettable oeuvre, a transformative body of work often emulated, much analysed, and above allfelt. 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 "

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Biography, Art History, Reference, Collections, Art Design

95 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing overall because Ficacci is a writer who likes to hear himself talk but doesn't really help the lay reader understand the complexities of Bacon's work - too much academic rhetoric and not enough explaination which is what I needed - I'm going to try the Phaidon Focus book and see if it is any better

[Konrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

It hurts me to rate this book so low. Francis Bacon has been my favorite painter since I was 6. The images presented here are all gorgeous, and worth the price of the book alone, but Ficacci's writing is painfully stilted and pedantic. Typical academic drivel. They should have sent a poet.

[Deborah Lynch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book after viewing the 'Terror and Beauty' Bacon and Moore exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I wish they had sold tiny copies of the exhibit descriptions because they would have been a lot more entertaining than this book. The exhibition was stunning, thought provoking, gave me an appreciation of Bacon that I had never thought I'd develop (I went for Moore not Bacon) and I was searching for a book that would describe his pieces in conjunction with some biographical context, just as the exhibition had done. I am not sure if the fault lies with Ficacci's writing, the translation, or both but the overall feel is turgid. Many, many, many words are used and yet nothing much is said. The best parts of the book are the illustrations and the short 3 page biography at the end. They are the only reason I gave the book 2 stars. Disappointing.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE BACON

NOMNOMNOM

[Kathrin (la_chienne) · Rating 5 out of 5]

reread

[حسن · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bacon's art is intriguing as much as amazing.
Some viewers might not admire his ‘bizarre’ portraits as much as I do, but they surely don’t leave them indifferent.

Overall the book is informative and it overviews the creativity/ inspirational concepts/ perspectives/ characteristics etc of Bacon's artistic style, based on the study and analysis of some of his masterpieces..
What I like the most about this series by Taschen is that the edition is beautiful and the numerous images included are wonderfully printed, all for a very reasonable price.


But Ficacci's interpretation of Bacon's artistic characteristics is not as profound and philosophical as Deleuze's analysis of Bacon's conception of art in his essay The Logic Of Sensation.
If you're interested to learn more on Bacon's idiosyncratic Art, Deleuze's book is highly recommended. It elaborates on a series of philosophical concepts such as the metaphysical notion of meat (in contrast to Merlau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of the flesh); and the impact of art on our senses, feelings and acts..
Deleuze's central point is that the violence involved in Bacon's paintings ("My painting is not violent, it's life itself that is violent", asserts Bacon) is the "violence of sensation" that is opposed to “the violence of the represented” (the sensational, the cliché).
Through the violence of sensation, Bacon aims to capture in his paintings the invisible and intensive forces. His contorted figures depict the combat between the invisible forces of becoming, all while taking place within the visible (revealed in the meat and emphasized with vivid colors).
According to Deleuze, Bacon has continuously rejected the dictates of the ideal form. The depictions of human bodies in his paintings reveals his attempts to rethink the figuration of the body outside of the dualist logic dominant in Western art.

Therefore, Bacon disrupts the field of the representations of body:
Bacon assigns them (the human bodies) a transgressive character. He challenges the set of boundaries that shape the body in representation and in so doing bring out or rather set free the fundamental hysteria of painting. Deleuze conceives of Bacon’s bodies as acting out a form of hysteria that leads them towards a non-representational pure presence.
The hysteria of Bacon’s paintings indicates a breakdown in the conventional sufficiency of representational norms. The hysterisized body in Bacon’s paintings is striped of any representational functions assigned by the cultural order (..)In other words he traces from the classical figuration towards the Lyotardian figural.
- [Müge Telci]

However, Deleuze’s essay on Bacon was criticized by many scholars and critics. [For an interesting article that synthesizes his theory and criticizes his arguments in favor of sensation as the primary modality of art:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/revi... ].


If you also like Kundera's literary essays as much as I do (but much less his novels), read the unexpected analogy he makes between Bacon (who btw has disapproved it in an interview after reading it) and Beckett in his collection of articles titled Encounter.

[Ksenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a real mixed bag: there are beautiful illustrations, the information behind the inspiration and influences behind Bacon's work, some insightful commentary, and analysis of Bacon's work, but there is also an utterly insufferable writing style of the author. This book is written in the "academic," an incredibly convoluted, and verbose language that purposefully conceals some of the most obvious facts. The author also has quite a tendency to repeat himself, and in general uses an archaic and, in essence, empty, prose to describe the work of one of the best painters of the 20th century. It almost seems like the author has to purposefully hide behind long and impressive-sounding words for this book to appear intellectual. The author has managed to alienate the reader with his writing style, and I am sure many of the insights and analysis will be lost and underappreciated in unnecessary verbosity.

There were a few insightful paragraphs, but some of the best moments of the book are also the simplest.

"Bacon's paintings push the effort to comprehend the human nature, it's concrete form and functioning, and it's feelings to the extreme"

"In a work like "Crouching Nude" (1951), it is clear that painting is everything for Bacon, and it's elements are entirely resolved in chromatic expression. It is not possible to distinguish between line, color, and planes of space. Painting is now instantaneous action in which he uses all the tools that the inventive process requires, without distinction or hierarchies amongst them."

"In Three Studies for Figures at the Base Of a Crucifixion 1944, Bacon has achieved a specific order of expression derived from a profound elaboration if iconographic tradition, in which he eliminated all references to the crucified man. It was the theme of suffering people, the immobile and unstoppable release of anguishing pain, articulated in the triple icon transmitted to him by the history of art and assimilated with another archetype, isolated by the history of civilization with a similar power of combination: the furies of Greek tragedy, universal personifications from victims of the expression of the vendetta (Bacon's specific source was Aeschylus)."

[Martin McDonald · Rating 1 out of 5]

Possibly one of the worst books on art I have ever read. The high-brow academic style of the writing is almost impenetrable and largely incomprehensible as well as totally lacking in any genuine analysis of the paintings, let alone Bacon's techniques or inspirations. And, with such a small format, the illustrations are interesting but not very useful. If you want a book on Francis Bacon for his art then buy something in a larger format and if you're interested in him as a person then The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson is a far better read.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amazing art, but a lack of clarity and/or substance on the part of the writer. The theses are written in verbose and vague prose that tend not to say much else about Bacon's work, nor identifies features in the art that speaks to the arguments purported.

[tiago. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confesso que estes livros da Taschen, quando entram pela arte contemporânea, perdem algum atrativo para mim; quando empregam uma linguagem tão rocambolesca quanto algumas das interpretações que extraem das obras do artista. Ainda assim, foi uma bem-vinda incursão no trabalho de Bacon, de quem não conhecia muito, e pelo qual ganhei um interesse que, espero eu, venha a explorar em museus que me traga o futuro próximo.

[Brent Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this Taschen book because if you’re cool millennial you’re suppose to have like 20 of these laying around your apartment.

Anyways it was a wonderful read analyzing Bacons work in a very accessible way. Without going super in-depth using crazy artist verbiage that only art students could understand. I’m excited to do my own analysis of Bacons work now.

[Kas Molenaar · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Dit betreft de Nederlandse vertaling, door Dirk de Rijk)

Op een kwart opgehouden met lezen. Afschuwelijk pretentieus geschreven; en poging op Francis Bacon te verheffen boven de mens die hij was, waarmee juist afbreuk gedaan wordt aan zijn persoon.

Prachtige afbeeldingen, dat wel. Maar goed, zoek dat in vredesnaam in een ander boek.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Erotic and grotesquely beautiful" just about sums him up. My favourite artist, by far.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book really hard to get into but a joy to look at. Ficacci's unpacking of Bacon's work is incredible. However, the style is difficult navigate. More often than not I found myself drifting on the rapids of his verbosity. There were a few moments where I could catch up and when I did I appreciated greatly the insights Luigi brought to the works.

I must say I wasn't familiar with Bacon before reading this book. I only picked it up after reading The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and feeling inspired to invest some of my time learning about him.

I plan on getting a print of "Three Studies for a Crucifixion" for my house. I have also purchased a new book in the Art 2.0 series on Lucio Fontana. I haven't heard of him either, but I was intrigued to learn about the idea of spatialism.

[Sjoerd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bacon is one of my favorite painters and I hoped that this book would have given me some insights about his live, his personality, his way of working. But the writer wasn't interested in all that, which he stated repeatedly in this short book.

Repetition was high in this book. And also the focus on only two or three works/tryptics. It really feels like Taschen just slapped some Francis Bacon essays about specific works to this book and added page references when by change a work was mentioned.

I think I will read other works about Bacon, because chapter 4 did give some insight, but I will stay away from works by Ficacci.

[CM · Rating 1 out of 5]

My first disappointment in this terrific series. Here, the author doesn't trace the life and work of the artist but decides to discard the biographical, or everything historical, which is not exactly a problematic approach. However, what we get is pages after pages explaining why each shape or color used in Bacon's painting is a masterpiece. I guess this book may be what auction houses are waiting for but this is neither interpretation nor analysis, it's promotion, pure and simple.

The gorgeous reproduction is the only reason for that 1 star.

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, Bacon's painting is extraordinary for sure, and one understands why it appealed Deleuze so much. The book itself is pretty much a comment on different pictures of different stages, and I wish he would have perhaps related more his life to his work; it is, perhaps, too descriptive, almost too academic to be enjoyed -bit dull. But Bacon's pictures are really extraordinary, and so it's worth it anyway.

[Gary Fowles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Francis Bacon’s paintings and purchased this book to understand more about the man and his work. Unfortunately, Luigi Ficacci isn’t quite equipped to be able to write in an accessible way. His words are so dense that one has to wonder just why has someone so obviously knowledgeable about Bacon chosen to make what he writes so impenetrable?
Very disappointing.

[Tim Newey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wonderful" - Account - Francis Bacon - Delightful - "Lovely"!!..

[Jimi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastically obscure paintings, just found the writing pedantic.

[Doris Raines · Rating 3 out of 5]

NICE BOOK.

[Seven · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love francis’ work. and he was gay so. woohooooo 🏳️‍🌈!

[Darrel Creary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book that fueled my obsession with this artist's dark style, also allowing me to learn about his curious background. His reasoning, however, still remains interpretable.

[Jessada Karnjana · Rating 5 out of 5]

ชอบซีรีส์นี้ของ TASCHEN คุณภาพการพิมพ์ดีเยี่ยม บทความประกอบก็สุดยอด ... เบค่อน หมกมุ่น ตัวตน คน ตัณหา

[Katrīna · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Perhaps no artist of the 20th century expressed in paintings the tragedy of existence more realistically than Francis Bacon”

[AndyDobbieArt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love these Taschen art books. As always the images are wonderful. I must admit, though, that I found the text to be too flowery and obtuse for my tastes.

[Cristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember not liking the text much when I read it back in college, but I always go back to this one to look at the paintings and the prints are lovely so it's still a win

[Valle Inklán · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 Francis Bacon
1 Luigi Ficacci

[Ann Delport · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gelezen naar aanleiding van expo in Londen, januari 2025.

[Bogdan Ciećwierz]

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