Bacon (Great Modern Masters)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Bacon (Great Modern Masters) Details
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), arguably the preeminent British painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon's art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist's penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure.Bacon's treatment of the face could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Even in repose the features shift and reshape themselves before our eyes, yet they never become unrecognizable despite the swirling paint.Often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called "the brutality of fact."This book reproduces in full color sixty-eight of Bacon's most important paintings, including several of his well-known triptychs. Completing the volume are documentary photographs of Bacon's studio, his associates and models, and works by other artists that affected Bacon's paintings.
Reviews
As in all titles in the Great Modern Masters series published by Abrams: Colors are not vibrant, often with a brownish tint or/and too dark, and their accuracy is just O.K. There are 64 pages of a good size 9.5x12 inches (24x30.5 cm). It begins with an introduction with 5-6 small b&w pictures on 2 pages, which is followed by a biography with 5-6 small b&w pictures on 2 next pages. The rest is dedicated to good size over 60 full color plates divided into chapters dedicated to artist's carrier periods, style directions, or themes, each described by 12-16 lines of text. The series is inferior to the same size paperback series published by Taschen in 1990s, but superior to Taschen's series of smaller sizes published latter. Unfortunately, the Taschen series does not cover Bacon, Botero, Brancusi, Braque, Calder, de Chirico, Johns, Kokoschka, Leger, Man Ray, Malevich, Modigliani, and Rouault this series does.