Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
The Cunning of Francis Bacon
By Julian Bell
Francis Bacon in the 1950s
catalog of the exhibition by Michael Peppiatt
an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, May 5–July 30, 2007.
Yale University Press, 200 pp., $50.00
Francis Bacon's Studio
by Margarita Cappock
Merrell, 239 pp., $59.95
Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict
by Wieland Schmied
Prestel, 183 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Interviews with Francis Bacon
by David Sylvester
London: Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real
catalog of the 2006 Düsseldorf exhibition edited by Armin Zweite, with Maria Müller
London: Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., £32.00
In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting
by Martin Harrison
London: Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., $39.95 (paper)
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
by Michael Peppiatt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 366 pp., $30.00
Some 40 percent of a plate has been ripped out of the Atlas-Manuel des maladies de la bouche, a French translation of an 1894 German medical textbook. The torn-away trapezoid shows 'Fig. 1': a heavily retouched photo of lips prised apart by forceps to reveal gums disfigured by an abscess, chipped teeth, and froth about the tongue. The chromolithograph with its flesh reds stands as an oval vignette on the creamy fragment of coated paper. But then the scrap has been scuffed by brushes loaded with green and cerulean; there are fingerprints to the right in blue-black and mauve, little splats of yellow and scarlet. The paper's edges are frayed and nicked, it has a riverine crack where those clutching fingers have bent it: a vertical sever being a further result of decades of overhandling.
Review, 4056 words
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