Francis Bacon.

New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975. Oblong 4to.; illustrated throughout in color; illustrated wrappers; minor wear to edges; held in a custom made black slipcase. With signed, hand painted drawing on inside front cover.

Price upon request.

Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Bacon’s oeuvre was dominated by depictions of the human body, exposed and emotionally charged. In his art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures strain like savage forces of nature against the shallow, large fields of intense color and the cool armatures that bind them to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching serialization of the human body and its sensations, he shows himself to be the unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of the body and the primal fear of those who inhabit it. Over a period of thirty years, Bacon completed thirty-three large triptychs, several of which he subsequently dismantled or destroyed.

In the famous interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon states,"…I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences…. one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they’re better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I’ve never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say more.” Thus Bacon’s painting, with its visceral, ever-intensifying exploration of the relation between figure and field, proceeds through series: series of crucifixions, series of Popes, series of portraits and self-portraits, series of simultaneity itself, as in the triptychs. And within each work, whether single or triple, each painting, each figure is itself a shifting sequence or series of sensations; each sensation exists at different levels, in different orders, or in different domains, brought together in the artist’s attempt, as he himself describes it, ‘to capture the appearance together with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me.”

Bacon made drawings in a few books belonging to the young graduate student Nelson Diaz. Diaz studied Bacon’s work and, having met with the artist several times for interviews and research, eventually became part of his circle. Diaz began his research with highly theoretical ideas about the philosophical and art historical underpinnings of Bacon’s work. As demonstration Bacon made these drawings in order to show how his actual approach was much more fluid and intuitive than Diaz believed.