Francis Bacon was one of most elusive and enigmatic creative geniuses of the twentieth century. However much his avowed aim was to simplify both himself and his art, he remained a deeply complex person. Bacon was keenly aware of this underlying contradiction, and whether talking or painting, strove consciously towards absolute clarity and simplicity, calling himself 'simply complicated'. Until now, this complexity has rarely come across in the large number of studies on Bacon's life and work. Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait shows a variety of Bacon's many facets, and questions the accepted views on an artist who was adept at defying categorization. The essays and interviews brought together here span more than half a century. Opening with an interview by the author in 1963, the year that he met Bacon, there are also essays written for exhibitions, memoirs and reflections on Bacon's late work, some published here for the first time. Included are recorded conversations with Bacon in Paris that lasted long into the night, and an overall account of the artist's sources and techniques in his extraordinary London studio. This is an updated edition of Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008), published for the first time in a paperback reading book format. It brings this fascinating artist into closer view, revealing the core of his talent: his skill for marrying extreme contradictions and translating them into immediately recognizable images, whose characteristic tension derives from a life lived constantly on the edge. With 14 illustrations, 7 in colour

Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. A major exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, planned for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic, explores the role of animals in his work – not least the human animal. Having often painted dogs and horses, in 1969 Bacon first depicted bullfights. In this powerful series of works, the interaction between man and beast is dangerous and cruel, but also disturbingly intimate. Both are contorted in their anguished struggle, and the erotic lurks not far away: ‘Bullfighting is like boxing,’ Bacon once said. ‘A marvellous aperitif to sex.’ Twenty-two years later, a lone bull was to be the subject of his final painting. In this fascinating publication – a significant addition to the literature on Bacon – expert authors discuss Bacon’s approach to animals and identify his varied sources of inspiration, which included wildlife photography and the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. They contend that, by considering animals in states of vulnerability, anger and unease, Bacon was able to lay bare the role of instinctual behaviour in the human condition. Images below, left to right: Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. Oil and cotton wool on canvas, 140 x 108.5 cm. Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo Hugo Maertens Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), 1963. Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 144.8 cm. Private collection. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Man with Dog, 1953. Oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr, 1955, inv. K1955:3. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd All images © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020.

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.

"This fine memoir is more insightful than gossipy, and as a subject Bacon is just about unbeatable." -- The New York Times In June of 1963, when Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon, the former was a college boy at Cambridge, the latter already a famous painter, more than thirty years his senior. And yet, Peppiatt was welcomed into the volatile artist's world; Bacon, considered by many to be "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," proved himself a devoted friend and father figure, even amidst the drinking and gambling. Though Peppiatt would later write perhaps the definitive biography of Bacon, his sharply drawn memoir has a different vigor, revealing the artist at his most intimate and indiscreet, and his London and Paris milieus in all their seediness and splendor. Bacon is felt with immediacy, as Peppiatt draws from contemporary diaries and records of their time together, giving us the story of a friendship, and a new perspective on an artist of enduring fascination.

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.

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, to personal conversations with painter Sonia Delaunay, artist Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s lover in the 1930s and 1940s, and Francis Bacon, perhaps the most famous of the many artists with whom Peppiatt has formed personal friendships. Michael Peppiatt’s lively, engaging writing takes us into the company of many notable art-world personalities, such as the Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies, whom he visits in his studio, and moments of disillusion, such as his meeting with the self-mythologizing artist Balthus. Art criticism blends with anecdote: riding with Lucian Freud in his Bentley, drinking with Bacon in Soho, discussing Picasso’s trousers with David Hockney... This collection of Peppiatt’s most perceptive texts includes under-recognized artists, such as Dachau survivor Zoran Music, or Montenegrin artist Dado, whose retrospective Peppiatt curated at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Remarkably varied in their scope and lucidly written for a general reader, these selected essays not only provide us with perceptive commentary and acute critical judgment, they also give a unique personal insight into some of the greatest creative minds of the modern era.

'In Giacomettis Atelier' richtet unseren Blick auf einen der wohl einflussreichsten Orte in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, nämlich in jenes winzige, marode Atelier, in dem der große Bildhauer hinter dem Montparnasse von 1926 bis zu seinem Tod lebte und arbeitete. Für fast 40 Jahre war dieser chaotische, aber höchst kreative Ort das Zentrum von Alberto Giacomettis Welt. Sein Atelier war der Magnet für eine ganze Generation von Künstlern und Schriftstellern in Paris, von Picasso und Braque über Breton und Sartre bis zu Genet und Beckett. Michael Peppiatt ist ein intimer Kenner von Leben und Werk Alberto Giacomettis. Zunächst arbeitete der Autor in London als Kunstkritiker beim Observer, bis er Ende der sechziger Jahre nach Paris zog, um für Le Monde über Kunst und als Korrespondent für die New York Times und die Financial Times zu schreiben.

Bacon is one of the most original and attractive contemporary painters; his twisted human figures, dismembered and without a face, evoke all the horror of the 20th century. In this biography, as Richard Davenport-Hines points out, "the description of the evolution of this ideas is enlightening."

A portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors from one of our most eminent art historians Today 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 dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. It was Paris that made him, and he in turn immortalised a certain Paris through his art. Arriving from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with remarkable artists and writers – from Picasso, Breton and Dalí to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett – but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city’s unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the café-terraces buzzing with radical ideas and racy gossip. In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Paris art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, brilliantly charts the course of the artist’s life and work. From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage, this is an intimate portrait of an outstanding artist in exceptional times.