Francis Bacon
Extract: Bacon in Moscow by James BirchFriday, 07 July 2023
In 1988, James Birch – curator, art dealer, and gallery owner – took Francis Bacon to Moscow. It was, as he writes, "an unimaginable intrusion of Western Culture into the heart of the Soviet system". At a time of powerful political tension and... Read more... |
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, Royal Academy review – a life lived in extremisThursday, 27 January 2022
Francis Bacon Man and Beast fills most of the main galleries at the Royal Academy. Thankfully, five of the rooms are empty. The exhibition is such a dispiriting experience, I’d have been hollering like a howler monkey if there’d been any more. And... Read more... |
Best of 2019: Visual ArtsTuesday, 31 December 2019
Notable anniversaries provided the ballast for this year’s raft of exhibitions; none was dead weight, though, with shows dedicated to Rembrandt, Leonardo and Ruskin among the most original and exhilarating of 2019’s offerings. Happily, a number of... Read more... |
Michael Peppiatt: The Existential Englishman review - we'll always have ParisSunday, 27 January 2019
In this memoir, subtitled “Paris Among the Artists”, Michael Peppiatt presents his 1960s self as an absorbed, irritatingly immature and energetically heterosexual young man let loose in Paris to find himself (or not). The young art historian,... Read more... |
Martin Gayford: Modernists & Mavericks review - people, places and paintSunday, 22 April 2018
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours... Read more... |
All Too Human, Tate Britain review - life in the rawSaturday, 03 March 2018
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here to draw in the crowds, but also to set the tone of a Tate Britain exhibition that explores the equivalence of flesh and paint in depictions of the body that even at their most tender and sensual rarely stray... Read more... |
The Most Expensive Paintings Ever SoldThursday, 16 November 2017
Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting... Read more... |
Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence, BBC TwoSunday, 29 January 2017
Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith's documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and... Read more... |
Arena: Night and Day, BBC FourMonday, 23 November 2015
Arena is the longest-running arts documentary programme for television at the BBC, and perhaps the world: as the BBC itself phrases it, this compendium celebration presented 24 hours in 90 minutes for 40 years, marking the show's latest anniversary... Read more... |
Jasper Johns: Regrets, Courtauld GalleryThursday, 18 September 2014
In your ninth decade it may not come as a surprise to find death staring you in the face. But it might be unnerving if you’re an artist and a menacing “death's head” skull emerges, quite unexpectedly, in an image you’ve been staring at and working... Read more... |
The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of VenisonMonday, 19 December 2011
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which... Read more... |
George Condo: Mental States, Hayward Gallery/ Drawings, Sprüth Magers LondonSunday, 30 October 2011
The easiest mistake to make in appreciating George Condo would be to assume that his manic style reflects a manic creation or a manic practice. Some of Condo's paintings and drawings, with their childlike loops and gurning, disfigured faces, look... Read more... |
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