Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art

by Barbara Steffen, Norman Bryson (Editor)

This exhibition catalogue is not a retrospective but rather an examination for the first time of the artist's work within a network of relationships and influences from the Old Masters to the artists of the twentieth century.The eminent English painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is known for his brutal, haunting and grotesque portraits of man and beast. In this eyeopening study Bacon stands besides artists like Velazquez, Rembrandt, Titian, Ingres, Degas, Schiele, and Van Gogh - his real sources. To support this thesis, the text draws connections between Bacon and his predecessors according to Bacon's papal portraits, the Motif of the Scream, Bacon and Surrealism, Mirrors and Reflections, the Cage Motif. This sumptuously illustrated book offers a firsttime study of a modernist's work in relation to the masterpieces of art history.

Genres: Art

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 17, 2004

Reviews

[Cris]

In the movie Batman Returns, the Joker goes on a crime spree destroying an art exhibit, but he discriminatingly stops his henchmen from spraying a painting by Bacon. Clearly only a madman would could Bacon and his paintings of raw meat and screaming heads. However, Bacon had a very specific method to his madness: drawing fron the realist masters but also seeking a Pollock-like loss of control by intuitively defacing his own work. This book is a very detailed and narrow look at some of Bacon's portraits and their sources: Velazquez, Ingres and random photos of friends, dental work and electric effects, but it is very restrained in its analysis of Bacons's themes and biography. (George Dyer is only identified as a friend, not as lover.) There is a bio outline at the end but very little cohesive analysis. I was disappointed that though there was a brief look at Bacon's crucifixion triptych there was no plate of the Cimabue painting that inspired it. Also the scandalous two nudes canvas was not discussed. Bacon famously said that he used Christian art to paint pain because it was the only place you could see real suffering in art, (he derided picasso's Guernica) but this book is less concerned with Bacons existentialist themes (the soul in the raw animal meat) but more with his techniques and composition.

[Ed Smiley]

Great information on Bacon's art practice, and in general on the dialog between artists of the present and past.
Not a great deal of organization of the material; the presentation seems a bit jumbled, like Bacon's studio.