With a rare and brilliant use of language, Bacon talks about his aims as a painter and the ways in which he works, responding always with vivacity and candour to Sylvester’s searching questions.
Bacon’s obsessive effort to record and re-create the human form, his practice of making variations on old masters’ paintings and on photographs, his dependence upon chance, and his views about the way in which his work has been interpreted are only some of the many subjects discussed and investigated in depth during these historic encounters.
Offering unparalleled access to the thought, work and life of one of the creative geniuses of the twentieth century, this book – with its subsequent revised and augmented editions – has become a classic.
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Stephen Spender
David Sylvester CBE (1924–2001) was a prominent writer, art critic and curator, and a leading authority on René Magritte, Henry Moore and, in particular, Francis Bacon. He first wrote about Bacon’s work in the late 1940s, and the pair soon became close friends. Over the next forty years, he was Bacon’s Boswell, interpreter, confidant, occasional model and briefly agent. He curated or co-curated numerous major exhibitions at museums around the world, including one-man shows of Picasso, Miró, Magritte, Moore, Giacometti and Bacon. His published books include Interviews with Francis Bacon, Looking Back at Francis Bacon and the five-volume Magritte catalogue raisonné.
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