Cover of The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon

The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon

"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. Drawing on his unparalleled personal knowledge of Bacon's inspirations and intentions, he first offers a critical overview of the development of Bacon's work from 1933 to the early 1990s, and then addresses its crucial aspects. Sylvester also reproduces previously unpublished extracts from his celebrated conversations with Bacon in which the artist speaks about himself, modern painters, and the art of the past. Finally, he gives a brief account of Bacon's life, correcting errors that elsewhere have been presented as facts.

Read more

Accompanying the incisive and revealing text are reproductions of almost every Bacon work discussed, including twelve triptych fold-outs. The most complete work on Bacon yet, this book constitutes a portrait of one of the creative geniuses of our age by a writer of comparable distinction.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 208 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Blast #1 Shares art, bowie, nonfiction
  2. Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music Shares bowie, nonfiction, bowie’s
  3. Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art: Revised Edition Shares art, bowie, nonfiction
  4. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series Shares bowie, nonfiction, art

“People who read The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Strange People
  2. Tales of Beatnik Glory
  3. The Life And Times Of Little Richard
  4. In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

“If you want more of the same (biography about art), start with these.”

  1. Banksy.: You Are an Acceptable Level of Threat
  2. Linda McCartney. Life in Photographs
  3. Pilgrimage
  4. Tim Walker: Story Teller

“If it was the art that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Schiele
  2. The Artificial Kingdom: On The Kitsch Experience
  3. Jazz
  4. The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Titian: His Life
  2. Frida Kahlo And Diego Rivera
  3. Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
  4. Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing