Francis Bacon: Closer 9780500966617 Hardback

Description

A close-up study of Francis Bacons paintings, magnifying details and looking at underlying themes.Francis Bacon famously resisted explaining his work, often claiming not to know what it meant. Yet this refusal has tended to discourage close looking, with critics favouring theoretical abstraction or biographical interpretation instead. Francis Bacon: Closer sets out to reverse that tendency. Rather than reducing Bacons imagery to familiar tropes violence, distortion, the screaming popes it explores the variety and complexity of his visual language. The book centres on detailed studies of eighty paintings, organized around motifs such as heads, mouths, wounds, pigment and abstraction, revealing the anatomical and psychological preoccupations embedded in the work. While aimed at scholars, it will also appeal to anyone interested in how Bacons paintings were made and what they mean.