Francis Bacon : revelations
(Book)

"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Francis Bacon flung open the twentieth-century closet. By day he exposed the secrets of a dark century, and by night he swashbuckled through Soho, never concealing his homosexuality. Francis Bacon: Revelations, a decade in the making, is the first biography of this seminal artist to appear in twenty-five years. Based on hundreds of interviews and extensive new material from Ireland, Tangier, Spain, England, and France, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have written a startlingly original portrait--rich, complex, and subtle--of a commanding modern figure. Bacon concealed many im portant aspects of his life. He described himself as an asthmatic child in Ireland, with foxhunting parents and a tyrannical father, but he was also rescued by a series of formidable women, beginning with a practical nanny and an eccentric grandmother: the women in this biography emerge as important characters in their own right. He was never just a dissolute young man, but was also a passionate reader who--largely self-taught--developed an abiding fascination with Nietzsche and Aeschylus. Early on, influenced by the work of Eileen Gray, he became a hard-working and ambitious designer, a brief career explored here in detail for the first time. He dreamed of remaking the modern room. Bacon worked no less hard and ambitiously as a painter--at first with little success. Throughout the 1930s and early '40s he suffered ongoing failures, growing isolated and often ill: his health issues throughout his life were far more significant than he revealed. Then came his astonishing breakthrough in 1944, with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In the following decades, he emerged as one of the great iconoclasts and bon vinvants of his time, a Wildean figure whom one friend called "a terrific grandee." Bacon was typically celebrated as a sexual adventurer who like rough trade, but he never stopped longing for a serious committed relationshiop--however painful. He continued to make disturbing images of the strangeness within, but developed into a more varied artist than has been recognized, creating in particular an extraordinary series of self-portraits. He was an artist who believed in chance and paradox: the iconoclast eventually became an icon. This is a story, deeply researched and masterfully told, of a sickly boy who became one of the great figures of his time. The twentieth century does not know itself without Bacon. --,From dust jacket