Interviews With Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact
by David Sylvester
from Thames & Hudson
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
by Gilles Deleuze
from Univ Of Minnesota Press
Afterword by Tom Conley
Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century’s most original and important painters.
In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, Francis Bacon has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art.
In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but at the same time finds a place in the “general logic of sensation.” Illuminating Bacon’s paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work—presented in lucid and nuanced translation—also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. Francis Bacon is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole.
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs, and others, are published in English by Minnesota.
Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University.
Francis Bacon: Anthology
from Skira
Published for the exhibition in Milan between March 4th and June 29th, 2008, this catalog offers a selection of approximately sixty works by Bacon. The collection spans his works from his first paintings in the 1930s, which reveal how early he was attracted to a figure’s deformation and ambiguity, to his late triptychs, in which the artist’s existential torment seems to move towards a suffered serenity. This publication includes important contributions from leading international scholars as well as technical information on all the exhibition works. Artworks are gathered from such prestigious museums as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Birmingham Museum, the Sara Hilden Museum in Tampere, the Fondazione Beyeler in Basel, the Museo de Arte Contemporanea in Caracas, the Toyota Municipal Museum in Aichi, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The publication also includes a series of documents—drawings, photographs, and works on paper such as collages and retouched photographs—from the Dublin City Gallery.
Francis Bacon: Commitment And Conflict
by Wieland Schmied
from Prestel Publishing
Francis Bacon Commitment and Conflict Wieland Schmied
Francis Bacon is given a highly insightful re-examination through critical commentary, brilliant reproductions and private photographs in this beautifully produced flexi edition.
The existential anxiety of modern man, the inescapability of death, and the catastrophe of loneliness are some of the themes that wend their way through Francis Bacon's work, much of which took the form of triptychs or tortured self-portraits. In this comprehensive study of one of the twentieth century's most passionately committed artists, Wieland Schmied offers an insightful overview of Bacon's life, analyzes his paintings and examines the creative processes they embody. He explores in depth Bacon's subtle use of space, the development of his imagery, idiosyncratic painting technique, and place in the pantheon of twentieth-century artists.
Wieland Schmied is the author of many books on twentieth-century art. He lives in Munich, Germany.
Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads
by Martin Hammer
from National Galleries Of Scotland
Includes an in-depth chronology of Bacon's life and work. Accompanies the Edinburgh International Festival at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, June 4- Sept 4, 2005.
Francis Bacon: 1909-1992 (Taschen Basic Art)
by Luigi Ficacci
from Taschen
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 Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (Virago Modern Classics)
by Daphne du Maurier
from Virago UK
In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting
by Martin Harrison
from Thames & Hudson
"Strikingly produced and limpidly written."—Library Journal
Francis Bacon famously found inspiration in photographs, film stills, and mass-media imagery. In Camera, a bravura accomplishment of original research, reveals how these new media informed some of Bacon's most important paintings and triggered turning points in his stylistic development.
Martin Harrison, who was granted privileged and unparalleled access to unpublished material from the archives of the Bacon estate, provides a new under-standing of the thought processes and working methods of the creator of one of the most compelling bodies of work in twentieth-century art. Throughout the book, sharp analysis leads to startling insights into this complex, tortured, and hugely creative artist and into the unique iconography of his art. With the aid of over 270 superb illustrations (200 in color), including a broad range of source images and documents, the book addresses important questions about Bacon's practice and reassesses key paintings to shed new light on his life and work.
Francis Bacon: The Human Body
by David Sylvester
from University of California Press
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" images: 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.
Discoveries: Francis Bacon (Discoveries (Abrams))
by Christopher Domino
from Harry N. Abrams
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