Francis Bacon: The Human Body

by Francis Bacon, David Sylvester

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest British artists of this century. For over fifty years the intense emotions conveyed in his works have shocked and enthralled an ever-growing audience. David Sylvester, a leading Bacon scholar, brings together many of the artist's best paintings involving the human figure, the central subject of his work. Bacon's diverse body imagery can be seen in his self-portraits; nude studies; portraits of friends such as Henrietta Moraes, George Dyer, and Lucian Freud; and his series of Popes. Many of Bacon's prototypes were "found" reproductions of Michelangelo, Velásquez, Degas, Muybridge's photographs of the human figure in motion, film stills from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin , magazine photos of politicians and boxers.

Bacon disliked working directly from a model and therefore often commissioned photographs, especially from John Deakin. A prolific creator of self-portraits, Bacon painted dozens, mostly small canvases of his head. Usually three are put together to form a triptych; sometimes one appears as a solo canvas or as a unit in a triptych along with other people's heads. One of the most powerful is a full-length portrait, the Sleeping Figure of 1974 , painted from a photograph of him stretched out on a hospital bed. Other paintings portray bodies wracked by violence—a wailing mouth, a cry of despair. Sylvester's observations show how certain images were linked to incidents in Bacon's life, such as childhood fear of his father and his lifelong devotion to his nanny. The catalog includes paintings that date from 1945 to the mid-1980s, including single canvases and triptychs from collections around the world.

Genres: Art

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Francis^^Bacon
For the Elizabethan philosopher, see Francis Bacon.

In portraits of best known Irish-British painter Francis Bacon, terror invests distorted subjects.

Artwork of this figurative collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon displays bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis...

Reviews

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a lovely opportunity to observe Bacon's work from a refined perspective. Most of the books about his art that I've read have been general studies that look at his work as a whole. David Sylvester, who's written extensively about Francis Bacon managed to do something important by focusing on a single aspect of Bacon's work and creating a nice short work to help art critics and fan understand how Bacon's approach to the human body reflects his aesthetic goals, the attitudes and paradigms that were changing art in the twentieth century, as well as illuminating Bacon's own understanding of the human body as a tool for personal understanding of self and expression. Can't recommend this book enough.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of a birthday present from the most miraculous friend in my life.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book from the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1998. Just a small showing - 5 triptychs and 18 canvases - with no heads, animals, or landscapes, so just a concentration on the human body. Sylvester's text, which takes up the first 30 or so pages and is interspersed with gray scale details from the color plates, is fairly gnomic, wandering and without thesis. Although he does make the occasional useful observation, such as when discussing why he'd like to see Warhol paintings alongside Bacon's, he suggests what they have in common is:

Things that show the transfiguration of photographic images by accidental or seemingly accidental defacements that denote nothing but suggest a great deal.

The 18 color plates of the canvases are mostly full page, and best of all, the five triptychs are reproduced as three-page foldouts, which is so much better than seeing them reduced on one or two pages.