Francis Bacon: Revelations

Bacon played an outsized role in both the art — and the life — of his time.

In the studio, he captured the shadows of a dark century. After work, he swashbuckled through London’s Soho, a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual during a period when many contemporaries remained closeted. (He had a laugh, a friend said, “like a Highland cock on heat.”) He was equally at home in the cockney East End of London, the literary salons of Paris, and the hedonistic worlds of Tangier and the south of France, his exploits sometimes seeming to his friends as unforgettable as his painting.

And yet, Bacon was a far more varied, nuanced, and surprising figure than the celebrated persona suggests. He concealed much about his life. Francis Bacon: Revelations — ten years in the making and based upon newly-discovered diaries, hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research in Ireland, Tangier, Spain, England and France — presents a startlingly fresh portrait of the artist. Bacon comes newly to life as an asthmatic child in Ireland; an ambitious young designer in Paris and London who dreamed of remaking the modern room; and a tormented, mostly failed painter in the 1930s.

The biography charts his subsequent successes — beginning with the stunning appearance in 1945 of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion — but also explores with fresh insight the paradoxes of his emotional and artistic life. Bacon was not only a sexual adventurer: he also longed for a settled relationship. He was not only a bon vivant but a serious reader. He could be a shocking painter but also one of delicate melancholy. He kept up with family. He loved his friends. He was never merely bleak: he confessed to “adoring” life.

This is a story, deeply researched and masterfully told, of a sickly boy who became one of the great iconoclasts of his time. The twentieth century does not know itself without Bacon.