Just when you thought you had every treatise about the edgy painter of confrontational imagery from the brush of Francis Bacon, up pops this well designed and written book on just how this amazing artist approached an image, an idea, and carried that to completion. Written by Bacon scholar Hugh Marlais Davies and including an interview with the artist that to my knowledge finds its first publication in this volume, this small but impressive book served as a catalogue for the exhibition FRANCIS BACON: THE PAPAL PORTRAITS OF 1953 presented by the Museum of Contemporary art of San Diego in La Jolla, California in 2001.
The exhibition, and this accompanying catalogue, was powerful in that it focused on eight studies for the papal series (emphasizing the response to Velasquez' popes) that Bacon painted in three weeks time in 1953. Here is all of the energy and agony, the distillation of Bacon's view of the Church and the Universe, and the opportunity to scrutinize Bacon's technique of drawing to painting that makes these portrait studies so important to artist, scholar and art lover alike.
As in the exhibition, the portraits are ordered in a circular fashion in the main hall, and this installation is reproduced well in this volume. Then each portrait study is individually presented with the exceptionally educational essay by Davies. One leaves this books the same way the exhibition impressed the visitors - informed, appalled, fascinated and moved. An important document in the books on the life and works of Francis Bacon. Grady Harp, March 05