50 minutes
2007
DVD R0 (PAL)
5060033837399
Download (MP4 HD)

The Art of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is the essential British painter of the twentieth century. From the end of the Second World War until his death in 1992, he created an extraordinary body of intense and uncompromising figure paintings and portraits. Drawing on diverse influences including Picasso, Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Bacon undertook a pitiless analysis in painting of himself and his friends, of the human body, and of our place in a godless universe.

The Art of Francis Bacon explores many of his key canvases which have been newly filmed in HD. The works are complemented solely with Bacon’s own words, recorded by Derek Jacobi. The artist’s biography is outlined, but the focus is on his ideas: his thoughts about his work, and his reflections about how and why he paints.

The result is a rigorous and revealing portrait of one of the few artists who has truly changed the way we see and understand ourselves.

More on our blog:

Back to Bacon  July 21 2008 (link on website doesn’t work)

Related Books

Interviews with Francis Bacon

David Sylvester

Thames & Hudson, 1987 (Third Edition)

ISBN: 0500274754

Looking Back at Francis Bacon

David Sylvester

Thames & Hudson, 2000

ISBN: 0500019940

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

Martine Hammer, Paul Bailey

National Galleries of Scotland, 2005

ISBN: 190327866X

In Camera, Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting

Martin Harrison

Thames & Hudson, 2005

ISBN: 0500238200

Francis Bacon in the 1950s

Michael Peppiatt

Yale University Press, 2006

ISBN: 030012192X

Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real

Peter Burger, Maria Muller and Armin Zweite

Thames & Hudson, 2006

ISBN: 0500093350

Websites

The Estate of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon Studio

Tate