Francis Bacon: Revelations
Reviews
“[M]agnificent…. I was captivated by every line.…This book’s great achievement is that it does not confuse flexibility in the matter of relationships with insincerity, nor ravenous desire with decadence. Bacon, you come to understand, was fundamentally serious and fundamentally loving.”
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An Irish Times Book of the Year
“There are not many biographical masterpieces, but in Revelations, the life of the Irish-born painter Francis Bacon, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have produced one…an utterly thrilling read.”
John Banville, “The Irish Times books of the year: Writers and critics pick their favourites of 2021,” The Irish Times, Nov 30, 2021.
The Times of London Art Book of the Year 2021
“Vivid descriptions, enlivening anecdotes and revelatory detail … enrich this riveting narrative.… [T]his portrait of an iconoclast who found glory in squalor and snatched a sense of grandeur from life’s banality must surely count as definitive.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston and Michael Prodger, “16 best art books 2021,” The Times, November 27, 2021.
Apollo Magazine Book of the Year Shortlist
“Drawing on hundreds of interviews, this biography offers the fullest available account of Bacon’s life, from his upbringing in Ireland to his colourful decades in London. Stevens and Swan also shed valuable light on the painter’s early career in the years before he found success.”
“Apollo Awards 2021: The Shortlists: Book of the Year,” Apollo Magazine, Nov 12, 2021.
A Waterstones Best Biography of 2021
“[T]his definitive new biography paints an unforgettable picture of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary artists.”
Mark Skinner, “The Best Books of 2021: Biography,” Waterstone’s Blog, Nov 3, 2021.
The New Yorker: Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty
“[Stevens and Swan] won a Pulitzer for their 2004 biography of Willem de Kooning, and the new book is a comparable achievement…. It is enormously detailed; we get the details, and the details’ details.... Stevens and Swan are very good storytellers. Also, the book is warmed by the writers’ clear affection for Bacon. They enjoy his boozy nights with him, they laugh at his jokes, and they admire his bloody-mindedness. They do not believe everything he said, and they let us know this, but they are always in his corner, and they stress virtues of his that we wouldn’t have known to look for: his gregariousness, his love of fun, his erudition, his extreme generosity. However many people were at the table, he always picked up the tab.”
Joan Acocella, "Books: Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty." The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. This review appears in the May 24, 2021 print edition as "Books: "Art Made Flesh: The life of Francis Bacon."
Washington Post: Bejeweled with sensuous detail
“Stevens and Swan are excellent investigators, presenting novel details of Bacon’s early affairs, his short-lived interior-design career and the two years he spent in Hampshire during World War II, when asthma forced his retreat from London. The book is bejeweled with sensuous detail. . . . Bacon once said that telling his life story ‘would take a Proust.’ A tall order — though Stevens and Swan do share a Proustian eye for the social whirl and the encroachments of ‘time and the wrecking ball’…One of the achievements of Revelations is to capture this social change alongside the life of its subject. It’s a portrait of vanished worlds, of a 20th-century style of darkness now past. Our fresh horrors await new geniuses.””
Charles Arrowsmith, “Francis Bacon was an elusive figure. A new biography presents novel details of his iconoclastic existence,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2021.
The New York Journal of Books: In top form with this biography
“An engrossing portrait of the artist, his art, and his incorrigible personality. . . . [Stevens and Swan] are in top form with this biography. Their detailed analysis of Bacon’s artwork is vigorous and accessible and [. . .] as interesting as their chronicles of Bacon’s sex life, gambling, professional feuds, and glamorous art gallery fetes.”
Lew Whittington, “An Engrossing Portrait of the artist, his art, and his incorrigible personality,” The New York Journal of Books, March 30, 2021.
The Times and Sunday Times: A “best book” of 2021
“Praised in The Times as the ‘mesmerising’ and ‘definitive’ biography of Francis Bacon, this book traces the great painter’s dissolute life of booze, sexual adventure and sublime artistic achievement.”
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“The best books of 2021: The Times and Sunday Times literary teams pick their favourites of the year so far,” The Times and Sunday Times, March 26, 2021.
NY Times: Comprehensive and detailed
“The most comprehensive and detailed account of [Francis Bacon’s] life, and one that topples central pillars of the Bacon myth….The book makes use of one splendid improvisation of its own. At the end of each chapter, there is a close reading of one painting…Instead of embedding such sections into the life…the work is cordoned off by a little white space. The space is just a line or two, but it makes an argument against automatically using the art to read the life or the other way around. In a book of such ambition and scope, it is finally—and fittingly, for an artist so private about his work—the modesty of this claim, of what can be known, that is its most moving achievement.”
Parul Sehgal, “New ‘Revelations’ in the Life of Francis Bacon, a Master of Darkness and Distortion,” The New York Times, March 23, 2021
Irish Examiner: Definitive and Compelling
“Stevens and Swan [provide] a definitive and compelling account of Bacon’s life, one which goes a long way towards explaining why his art is so explosive and controversial.”
Josephine Fenton, “The Dichotomies behind painter Francis Bacon’s work revealed,” Irish Examiner, March 20, 2021.