Eric Allden News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Francis Bacon, 1984. (Photo by Ulf Andersen / Getty Images) In August of 1998, a team of curators, conservators, and archaeologists arrived at 7 Reece Mews, a small flat in London’s South Kensington neighborhood, to start work on the month-long task of transporting its contents to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. There, over the next five years, the team labored to painstakingly reconstruct the flat, which for some 30 years had served as the home and studio of Francis Bacon. The artist had moved to Reece Mews in the fall of 1961 and lived there until his death, in 1992, of a heart attack ...

Knopf, 880 pp., $60.00 This episode suggests ruthless careerism, but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critics Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan write in their new biography,  Francis Bacon: Revelations, the reality turned out to be more haunting. Beginning in 1972, Bacon regularly checked into the hotel room where Dyer died. He slept in the same bed where Dyer had cheated on him; he sat on the toilet where Dyer took his last breath. Bacon wasn’t spiritual, but these private rituals, which could last up to two weeks, had the intimacy of a séance. It was the closest Bacon came to sentimentality.

How Francis Bacon shunned the traditions of British art A new book, Francis Bacon: Revelations, shows the painter as he tried to recapture the intensity of wartime when the world turned mundane.   How great was the work of Francis Bacon? That’s the only question that matters, and it’s still a hard one to answer. Thirty years after his death, he hovers so large over British visual culture – such a vivid, garrulous, flamboyant, theatrical figure – that it is difficult to assess what he actually did, day after day, in the studio. This large, generous book contains it all: the chil...