Bacon

This is one of the "Great Modern Masters" series on 20th-century artists, offering introductions to modern art and artists. This book covers Francis Bacon (1909-1992), a controversial British painter, whose art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form, but 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 the viewer to see the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure. 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 68 of Bacon's most important paintings, including several of his well-known triptychs. It includes documentary photographs of Bacon's studio, his associates, and models, and works by other artists that strongly affected Bacon's paintings.