Francis Bacon: the Violence of the Real

Dramatic depictions of human forms — writhing painfully, dissolving, wrestling or engulfing one another, seated or in motion — are ubiquitous in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon portrayed the ordeal of the vulnerable, defencelessly exposed body like no other artist of his generation. Bacon found his models not only in the history of art, but also in photographs of athletes, soccer players, or boxers in combat. He also betrayed a strong interest in the photographic sequences through which Eadweard Muybridge, in the later 19th century, registered the path of animal movement. Such instinctively performed motions disclosed to Bacon actions of an original sensuality which he strove to capture in his pictures. At the centre of this book are about sixty of Bacon’s disturbing yet captivating studies of the human figure. Texts by Armin Zweite, Peter Burger, Martin Harrison, Daria Kolacka, Frank Laukotter and Maria Muller offer new insight into Bacon’s radical and discomfiting images, so brilliantly reproduced here. Armin Zweite is the Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.