Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Essays in Art and Culture)

By Ernst van Alphen

Book Overview

Since his death in April 1992 Francis Bacon has been acclaimed as one of the very greatest of modern painters. Yet most analyses of Bacon actually neutralize his work by discussing it as an existential expression and as the horrifying communication of an isolated individual - which simply transfers the pain in the paintings back to Bacon himself. This study is the first attempt to account for the pain of the viewer. It is also, most challengingly, an explanation of what Bacon's art tells us about ourselves as individuals. For, during this very personal investigation, the author comes to realize that the effect of Bacon's work is founded upon the way that each of us carves our identity, our self, from the inchoate evidence of our senses, using the conventions of representation as tools. It is in his warping of these conventions of the senses, rather than in the superficial distortion of his images, that Bacon most radically confronts art, and ourselves as individuals.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674317637
• ISBN13: 9780674317635
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.3"