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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Boston Globe: A definitive life of Bacon
“A definitive life of Bacon…. Painting by painting, exhibition by exhibition [this is an account] of how Bacon’s wild innovations in figurative art countered the mid-20th-century fashions for both abstract expressionism and pop art. Swan and Stevens have great fun, too, as they chronicle Bacon’s wit, charm, extravagance, and cruelty, including some shocking abuses of friends, family, and art-world colleagues…Stevens and Swan are vivid scene setters. They’re also shrewd evaluators of the people in Bacon’s life…Francis Bacon does justice to the contradictions of both the man and the art.”
Michael Upchurch, “A new biography gives us Francis Bacon in full,” Boston Globe, March 18, 2021.
American Scholar: Familiar set pieces nestled in rich context
“An intellectual history of an unschooled painter, a family history that goes back several gilded generations, a cultural history of the 20th century, a financial accounting of a highborn gambler, a guide to midcentury Soho drinking clubs, a description of an evolving artistic oeuvre, and a re-created diary of lowbrow fun with art luminaries, socialites, and thugs…One of the pleasures of comprehensive biographies like this one is seeing familiar set pieces nestled in rich context.”
Sierra Bellows, “Artist of Excess,” The American Scholar, March 16, 2021.
Times Literary Supplement: Lucid and Engrossing
“Bacon’s life has long been a kind of myth, structured around signposts…Now, over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facts to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask…The authors give the tale a fresh momentum, a feeling of life as it happened, rather than the chiaroscuro Life that became the foundation of Bacon’s persona and the mirror image of his art…One of the many marvels of Revelations is just how present and immediate Bacon is made to seem. Even as he ebbs away, we see and hear him vividly.”
James Cahill, “The Face of an Angel: Beyond the Myth of Francis Bacon,” The Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 2021
Literary Hub: Tells the Full Story
“Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan tell the full story of a man fearless in his art and in his life, who gloried in transgression, and refused to be anyone other than himself, whether it was out in London’s East End demimonde or sequestered in the chaos of his studio. If there was any doubt, Revelations shows us one of the great artists of the 20th century.”
Jonny Diamond, in “New and Noteworthy Nonfiction to Read This March,” Literary Hub, March 5, 2021.
National Book Review: Captures Bacon’s Power and Charisma
“The authors wonderfully capture Bacon’s charismatic personality, but as especially gifted art critics they also convey the power of his piercing portraits and the bleakness of his paintings, especially the triptychs and diptychs for which he is justly celebrated.”
“Five Hot Books,” The National Book Review, March 2021.
Publisher’s Weekly: Written in exquisite prose
“In this monumental work, Pulitzer Prize–winning art critics Stevens and Swan (De Kooning: An American Master) make a convincing case that ‘the twentieth century does not know itself without’ the work of English painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992)…Throughout, Swan and Stevens provide penetrating insights into his complex psyche, his sexuality (Bacon was gay), his friendships, and how such a ‘handsome, witty, and amiable’ person could have created paintings that many see as grotesque and even nightmarish…Full of illuminating details and written in exquisite prose, this a fascinating look at the dichotomy between an artist’s inner life and their work.”
Unsigned, Publisher’s Weekly (starred review), March, 2021.
Booklist Starred Review: Authoritative and immersive
“[An] authoritative and immersive account.…It is Bacon’s complexity and daring that Stevens and Swan illuminate so precisely in this surpassingly literary biography.”
Elizabeth Joseph, “Francis Bacon: Revelations,” Starred Review, Booklist, March 1, 2021.
The Guardian: Utterly Compelling
“Bacon always insisted that he was simply portraying the reality of the conditions that had shaped him…. The power of this meticulously researched and utterly compelling biography lies not just in the confidence with which it demonstrates the truth of that statement, but in its quieter revelations.”
Elizabeth Lowry, ”Francis Bacon: Revelations review – a landmark biography,” The Guardian, February 10, 2021.
Perspective magazine (U.K.): Immersive & Brilliant
“What’s remarkable about this biography is how extraordinarily immersive it is…. When you read Francis Bacon: Revelations you are there by the artist’s side, mingling with family, friends, lovers, and the art world characters who gave the 20th century so much of its élan…. I have no doubt this brilliant book will come to be regarded as the definitive study of one of the 20th Century’s defining artists.”
Rowan Pelling, "Book of the Month: Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan," Perspective magazine, February 2021.
Daily Mail: Magnificent
“[A] magnificent new biography of Bacon…. Wide-ranging and thoughtful.”
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, “Book of the Week: Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan,” Daily Mail, January 28, 2021.