ART 236 : Modern Art History

Francis Bacon's style was so personal and distinctive that his influence lay more in the intensity of his commitment to art itself than in any direct stylistic legacy. The British artist developed a way of portraying the human body that was unique in the history of painting--usually in isolation, at moments of extreme tension or even pain, distorted like figures from a fantastical nightmare.

This latest addition to Prestel's successful Living Art series offers a critical portrait of Francis Bacon, one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists, to reveal a conflicted man of prodigious talent. This accessible look at Bacon's life and art displays the many facets that make his career so intriguing. Filled with personal photographs, quotations, and beautiful reproductions of his bold, austere and often grotesque paintings, this volume introduces readers to the various themes surrounding Bacon's life.

An examination of Bacon's work within a network of influences from Old Masters to the twentieth century.

Controversial in both life and art, Francis Bacon was one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently". Eminent writer and curator David Sylvester provides the definitive account of the career of an artist whose friend and collaborator he was for more than forty years.

This work elucidates the values and meanings that can be ascribed to Bacon's work, and discusses criticisms of Bacon by distinguished critics and philosophers.