Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads Details
Includes an in-depth chronology of Bacon's life and work. Accompanies the Edinburgh International Festival at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, June 4- Sept 4, 2005.
Reviews
The catalogue for a 2005 exhibition held at the Scottish National Gallery of Art and at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, this book focuses on a crucial body of works that Bacon painted all throughout his career. Most of these works are small-scale, which means that little is lost of the gripping effect they usually have on first-hand viewers, through reproduction (all the more so as the illustrations are excellent). After an introductory essay that aims at debunking the various clichés that have marked the gradual public acceptance of Bacon's work (the distortion of the human figure as a reflexion of the brutality of our post-war world is one of those clichés)by showing how these portrait reveal the intimacy and innermost personality of the models, the book follows a chronological pattern, grouping the paintings by periods and models (early heads of the 40's and 50's, Men in Blue of 1954, Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne). A special section is devoted to the self-portraits from 1963 to 1987.A surprisingly high-quality publication that is one of the few reasonably priced books on Bacon.