In "a frank and stylish memoir," an art historian recalls his thirty year friendship with Bacon against the background of the European art world ( The New Yorker ).Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon in June 1963, in the French House in Soho. Peppiatt was immediately swept into the controversial painter's world and, over oysters and champagne, they embarked on a friendship that would endure for thirty years. From Baco...

Francis Bacon was one of the most powerful and enigmatic creative geniuses of the twentieth century. Immediately recognizable, his paintings continue to challenge interpretations and provoke controversy. Bacon was also an extraordinary personality. Generous but cruel, forthright yet manipulative, ebullient but in despair: He was the sum of his contradictions. This life, lived at extremes, was filled with achievement and triumph, misfortune and personal tragedy.In his revised and up...

Leading art historian and biographer Michael Peppiatt examines the crucial role played by women in the life and art of 20th century British artist Francis BaconFrancis Bacon (1909-1992) is still widely seen as the great painter of masculine anguish: the bars and the brutality, the writhing male bodies and the screaming popes. Yet this portrayal of Bacon, so often repeated, misses a crucial truth. Women were not marginal to his life or work. They were central.

A new selection of letters, statements, and interviews reveals the preoccupations, thoughts, and ideas of Francis Bacon, one of the twentieth century’s most influential and important artists.The documents selected for Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words illustrate Bacon’s sharp wit and ability to express complex ideas in highly personal, memorable language. Included here are not only letters to friends, patrons, and fellow artists, but also intriguing ...

Engaging encounters, personal anecdotes, and jargon-free critical insights into some of the liveliest creative minds in modern art, by an international art-world insider.Praised by The Art Newspaper as “the best art writer of his generation,” Michael Peppiatt has encountered many European modern artists over more than fifty years. This selection of some of his best biographical writing covers a wide spectrum of modern art, from Van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard,...

THE TIMES AND WATERSTONES BEST ART BOOK OF 2023'Intimate and insightful . . . reads like a novel by Samuel Beckett' Paul TherouxA portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest sculptors from one of our most eminent art historiansToday the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a ...

The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris – a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: 'You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you'. This, then, is one man's not uncritical love letter to Paris.Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt's relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around...

Published in 1996, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was the first in-depth study of the artist's life. It has not been superseded.In this substantially revised, updated edition - to coincide with the artist's centenary, which will be celebrated from autumn 2008 through summer 2009 - Peppiatt will incorporate confidential material Bacon gave him, which he did not include in the first edition.This valuable, first-hand information comes from the hundreds of convers...

This book, a biography on Francis Bacon, is inspired by the friendship the author had with Bacon and based on records of the conversations that took place since 1963. The book forms the first comprehensive account of the artist's life and his work.

Alan Bennett's first collection of prose since Writing Home takes in all his major writings over the last ten years. The title piece is a poignant family memoir with an account of the marriage of his parents, the lives and deaths of his aunts and the uncovering of a long-held family secret. Bennett, as always, is both amusing and poignant, whether he's discussing his modest childhood or his work with the likes of Maggie Smith, Thora Hird and John Gielgud. Also included are his muc...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays o...

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights.Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy,...