Francis Bacon

by Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon (Artist)

The painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) defines the shattered self-image of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and his wracked human figures are now basic to the twentieth century's visual lexicon. Clearing away all moral scaffolding, Bacon made room for what he called "the brutality of fact" to implode onto his canvases, paring back his subjects to animal function and bloodlust. In Bacon the figure is almost always isolated and pitched against an unforgiving interior lit only by a bare light bulb (one could write an interesting history of the light bulb in art, tracking its trajectory from, say, Van Gogh to Vuillard's lamplight, to the desolate hanging bulbs of Bacon and Philip Guston). Francis Bacon had few better critics of his work than himself--as witnessed in this superb statement of intent to David "What I want to do is distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance." But one of the few writers whose sensibility he trusted was the French author Michel Leiris. Leiris shared Bacon's feel for nerve-end acuity in art, as his great autobiography Manhood attests, and with Bacon's sanction, wrote the essay for Poligrafa's landmark monograph of 1987, which also included a selection of 240 key paintings made by Bacon himself. That volume, an essential text for Bacon fans and scholars, is here revised and reprinted for the first time.

Genres: Art, Biography

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Born in Paris in 1901, Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. In the 1920s he became a member of the surrealist movement and contributed to La révolution surréaliste. In those years, he wrote a surrealist novel: Aurora.

After his exit from the surrealist group, he teamed up with Georges Bataille in the magazine Documents.

Reviews

[Grady]

Francis Bacon, full face and in profile, July 14, 2009
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Though many reviewers and critics of this new edition of a 1983 book published in Spanish by the same name and by the same author are angry with the presentation of the Bacon paintings included, the simple fact that Michel Leiris' fine essay on Bacon, possibly the finest ever written, is once again available to the public more than makes up for the quality of the reproductions of the art. Leiris was in many ways Bacon's confidant, a man and a writer with whom Bacon shared his inner most feelings and life and stimuli for the paintings he created. Leiris writes with a quiet authority, with an immensely readable style, and offers more information about the real Francis Bacon than others - and the list of Bacon authorities grows all the time.

In this hardcover edition there is a quotation as a frontispiece that bears repeating. Georg Büchner: 'In everything I demand that there should be life, the possibility of existence, and then all is well; we are not then called upon to ask whether the work is beautiful or ugly. The feeling that what has been created has life comes before either consideration and is the only criterion in matters of art.' This, from the creator of 'Woyzeck'. After Leiris elegant essay the book contains a large number of Bacon's canvases. Even with less than perfect reproduction these works seem to take on new meaning, reflecting the information in Leiris' words.

This particular reincarnation of the 1983 book includes a full chronology of Bacon's life, a list of all the interviews recorded and a very complete bibliography that includes catalogues from exhibitions and an updated listing of all the public collections of the artist's works. Despite the flaws of production this book is well worth owning, especially since the Leiris essay is not otherwise available. Grady Harp

[morgan]

great compilation. good full colour reproductions.

[Victor]

Michel Leiris is at least as impressive as Bacon here. All color reproductions, but a lot of somewhat small ones.

[Momo García]

Las tres estrellas son por el ensayo que acompaña a las reproducciones df Francis Bacon. No sirve en nada para conocer al artista, sólo se limita a unir ilimitadamente conceptos vagos. Gracias a Dios, sólo son 30 páginas.

Después de eso vienen más de 200 páginas con reproducciones de Bacon. En general, son buenas, pero por momentos tuve la sensación de que Bacon es ligeramente aburrido: abusó mucho de su estilo. Extrañé una reproducción del Bacon que existe en el Museo Tamayo.

[Brothier]

Belles reproductions de F. Bacon et un texte époustouflant de Leiris pour analyser l'œuvre du peintre