Description
Book SynopsisMichael Peppiatt, a major art critic and close friend of Francis Bacon's, offers an entertaining and uniquely well-informed portrait of this complex artist.
Trade Review'Peppiatt writes perceptively about Bacon's endlessly contradictory nature, his generosity and cruelty, his violence and tenderness, his dandyism and love of squalor, his spectacular dissipation and iron self-discipline, and what he called his "exhilarated despair"' - Daily Telegraph
'Contains interviews with and recollections of the artist from the 1960s almost until his death... include[s] the full, fascinating text of Bacon’s answers when he was interviewed for the first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began to overtake some of his responses' - Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsIntroduction * Interviewing Francis Bacon: Interview One: From a Conversation with Francis Bacon; Francis Bacon At Work; Bacon and Picasso On La Danse (Crucifixion), 1933; An Obsession with Popes; Francis Bacon in the 1950s * Interview Two: Reality Conveyed by a Lie; The Sacred and the Profane; Mr Bacon and Miss Beston; ‘All the Pulsations of a Person’: Portraits and Self-Portraits On Four Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967; Francis Bacon and Shakespeare * Interview Three: Provoking Accidents, Prompting Chance; Francis Bacon in Paris; On Study of George Dyer, 1971; On Seated Figure, 1974; A Strange Fascination: Michel Leiris and Francis Bacon; On Two Figures, 1975; Reflections on Francis Bacon’s Late Work * Envoi: Bacon’s Eyes
