Francis Bacon: The Human Body

By 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" images: reproductions of Michelangelo, Vel squez, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520215397
• ISBN13: 9780520215399
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.5" x 0.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

For inspiration

Not so long before I had no idea of who Bacon was and what he painted. Remember how I once skipped lectures in university and played PSX game Silent Hill all day along. In Making OF of this game I first time heard that some art inspiration for game was taken from Bacon paintings. And so I came to Bacon and his art :) Personally for me, and again just for me, I gave this book 5 stars because pictures here catch my eye like none art before. Bacons pictures by some reason looks stunning and scary at the same time. This book contains his pictures of human body theme only, as a cover says. I liked the way author gone - less text, more pictures. Second half of the book is containing just paintings with minimum comments below, mainly one paint picture on whole page. There are also few "three page rollout" inserts, showing few Bacon's triptych paintings which I liked. Pictures of second half is fully colourfull, first half of the book contains one page for text and other page for black and white, zoomed in picture of Bacon, that gives kinda cool look. This book will gave it's best to filmmakers, animators, concept artists, scriptwriters, Bacon enthusiasts who seek to take inspiration for horror art, movies, animations, whatever.

A marriage of words and paintings

David Sylvester is one of the finest biographers of contemporary painters on the shelves today. His insights into such obtuse minds as Giocomettti and de Kooning and Francis Bacon have brought us, the viewer and thinker, closer to the real synapses at work. In this lavishly illustrated catalogue the emphasis is on the whole human body - alone, in confined spaces, distorted and reassembled in triptychs. Sylvester opens this format with terse discussions about particular paintings, using only black and white details of the works he is discussing. Then, once we have the groundwork established, the last half of the book is simply the paintings, printed on the finest peper, with foldouts that do justice to the triptychs and color separations that are as near to the originals as is possible. A feast for the eyes and mind....and imagination.