Art

Francis Bacon: Late Paintings

Encompassing more than twenty-five paintings that Francis Bacon made in London and Paris during the last two decades of his life, this book serves as a companion to the 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, and is the first in-depth exploration of the innovations of the artist’s late work. In his late paintings, Francis Bacon refined themes that had long obsessed him. He quoted reflexively from his oeuvre, reworking subjects to strip them to the bare essentials. This stunning new book features over 150 color illustrations of the artist’s work and related materials, including reproductions of ephemera from Bacon’s Hugh Lane studio.

About The Author

Richard Calvocoressi is the former curator at the Tate Gallery, London, as well as the former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and of the Henry Moore Foundation. He has curated multiple exhibitions on Francis Bacon’s work. A former curator at the Tate Gallery, London and the first director of Tate Liverpool, Richard Francis curated the largest ever Francis Bacon retrospective in 1985 at the Tate Gallery. Mark Stevens is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. He is currently working on a biography of Francis Bacon with Annalyn Swan. Colm Tóibín is an award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. The author of the forthcoming Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné, Martin Harrison has published extensively on Bacon’s work.

  • Publish Date: September 06, 2016
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Art - Individual Artists - Monographs
  • Publisher: Gagosian / Rizzoli
  • Trim Size: 9-1/4 x 12
  • Pages: 208
  • US Price: $100.00
  • CDN Price: $100.00
  • ISBN: 978-0-8478-4775-4

Reviews

"As [Francis Bacon's] palette brightened form the 1960s on, and as broader areas of pure color set off his smeary, rubbery, cartoonish figures, he started to look more like a painter of mordant comedy than existential tragedy. . . Often his paintings are like much-enlarged panels from an unusually stylish graphic novel." 
THE NEW YORK TIMES 

"I was blown away by how fresh, shocking, and incredibly beautiful the paintings are. . . Perhaps those who found Bacon's early work too graphic and too 'fleshy' will be drawn in by the sheer beauty of his paintings as well as by what some might perceive as a more palatable sensibility. These later paintings convery both a technical mastery and the self-reflectiveness of an artist who had endured a new phase of maturity."  
-HYPERALLERGIC BLOGAZINE 

Author Bookshelf: Richard Calvocoressi

Author Bookshelf: Richard Francis

Author Bookshelf: Mark Stevens

Author Bookshelf: Martin Harrison