This bilingual French-English catalogue, featuring texts by Elsa Boustany, Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri and Dr Rebecca Daniels, invites us to discover a little-known aspect of Francis Bacon’s practice: his creation of furniture in the early 1930s, as well as the British artist’s sources of inspiration for his creations and the influence of this period on his pictorial works. Bacon said that he was greatly influenced by French design, and also specified that post-cubism, as well as the Bauhaus, had a profound effect on him.

Martin Harrison, the journal’s main editor, also writes a piece on the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation’s activities and collection, focusing on a Jean Shepeard sketch of Francis Bacon which is part of the MB Art Collection (recently acquired from the sale of the Doreen Kern Collection, which Kern, Jean Shepeard’s niece, had inherited from her aunt).

In addition to these insightful features, Bacon Review also includes many previously unseen photographs from the artist's family archive. The publication promises several surprises that will delight fans of Bacon's work and provide a new lens through which to appreciate his art.

Details to order the journal here.

Each copy includes a numbered and stamped print of a photograph of Francis Bacon in his 7 Reece Mews studio in London, taken in 1980 by the English photographer Jane Bown.

This book has been printed in a limited numbered edition of 270, representing the number of items (photographs, books and correspondence) found in Bacon’s 7 Reece Mews studio relating to the late American photographer Peter Beard. Bacon met Beard in the mid-1960s; they shared overlapping interests, and Beard played a stimulating role in Bacon’s oeuvre as a photographer, a muse and a lifelong friend.

Only eighty copies of this publication are for sale (295€). To order a copy, please contact the Foundation.

Francis Bacon: Shadows continues in the revelatory mode established by Inside Francis Bacon. It comprises six essays on diverse topics, interpretative as well as factual, which cumulatively present an abundance of fresh ideas on Bacon. The fundamental aim of the series—to rethink Bacon’s art from new perspectives—is impressively fulfilled by its eminent authors. With previously unseen photographs and some 120 colour illustrations, this beautifully-presented book boldly treads compelling new territory, bringing to light explosive new insights on the works of one of the twentieth-century’s most highly-regarded artists.

In addition to introducing the authors of this volume and the wider context around their illuminating research, the editor shows some exciting and unseen photographs and includes a tribute to a major, if under-acknowledged, Bacon scholar, David Boxer (1946–2017). Christopher Bucklow turns his attention to the contrast between Bacon’s art and the art of our own times, setting Bacon in the context of Romantic Modernism’s confidence in the unconscious as a source. Amanda Harrison’s essay ‘Bacon’s Occult Traces’ investigates the effect of these influences through evidence that has so far remained hidden, or unrecognised, in the shadows of his paintings. In ‘Between Francis Bacon and the Intellect’, Croatian writer and artist Stefan Haus conducts a stimulating extended study into the impact of Bacon’s paintings. Drawing on the ideas of philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel, Haus’s essay is simultaneously philosophical and visceral, itself forming an analogue to the intensity of Bacon’s art.  In Hugh Davies’s many meetings with the artist in 1973 he was often invited to socialise with Bacon’s closest friends. Some of his notes were published in Francis Bacon: New Studies – Centenary Essays in 2009, but for the first time we shall be publishing in their entirety Davies’s unexpurgated on-the-spot diary entries. Passages previously considered inappropriate for publication now reveal a more rounded view of Bacon as both man and artist. In her enlightening essay, ‘Work on the Barry Joule Archive’, Sophie Pretorius expertly untangles the controversy and confusion that has surrounded Bacon’s supposed source material in the Barry Joule Archive. Finally, Harrison himself contributes his new essay, ‘Lost Bacon Paintings’. Except for those which had been published while he was still living, paintings that Bacon destroyed were excluded from Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016). Bacon had destroyed them because he considered them ‘failures’, and to circulate images of them, it was reasoned, carried the risk of misrepresenting him. Ultimately, the larger responsibility to make his oeuvre available publicly has outweighed this decision: now these 13 as yet unknown paintings – fascinating, if unresolved – can be seen for the first time.

More information on the book here.

Isabel Rawsthorne (1912-1992) was hidden in plain sight. From celebrated portraits of her in Berlin to sketches in the Tate, likenesses in museums around the world have kept her secrets. This book combs the depths of her fascinating life and the extraordinary art she herself made from it.

A contemporary of the Parisian and London avant-gardes, Rawsthorne’s own painting career was somewhat eclipsed by the many occasions on which her friends made her the subject of their art, notably Jacob Epstein, André Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Exhibited from the early 1930s, her startling work first garnered serious attention in the 1940s and she was well-known in the 1950s and 1960s; but after she died, popular biographies of Giacometti and Bacon cemented her status not as an artist, but as an artist’s muse.

Exhibiting between 1933 and 1990, usually as Isabel Lambert, Rawsthorne’s art was a poetry of things: an emptied glass, a cut flower, a felled bird, the animal or human body, caught in ephemeral frameworks. Her experiences in France encouraged her eventual rejection of neo-romantic visions of the natural world in favour of an austere contemplation of existence. Known for her unique graphic skill, she saw the touch, mark, and stroke in any media as her means of investigating ‘presence’.

This richly illustrated book takes the lead from Rawsthorne’s compelling biography to reconsider sixty years of her art, now housed in several major public collections. Jacobi re-examines the pre- and post-war art history of which Rawsthorne was a part, tracing the painter’s life and art through the upheavals of the 20^th century and her intense and often unconventional relationships with some of its most revered figures. More than a decade of research into Rawsthorne’s work, archives and the memories of her friends brings to light countless revelations.

More information on the book here

The photographs are drawn from the MB Art Collection which holds the world’s most extensive collection of photographs of Francis Bacon encompassing over 700 hundred prints by more than eighty photographers.

This book has been printed in a limited numbered edition of 206 copies, representing the number of Francis Bacon’s paintings shown during his lifetime at his solo exhibitions in France.

Featuring over 150 photographs of the British artist in France, each copy includes a numbered and signed print of a photograph of Francis Bacon taken on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris in 1982 by the French photographer André Ostier.

Only forty copies of this book are for sale (295€). To order a copy, please contact the Foundation.

Yves Peyré, writer and friend of Francis Bacon, has produced a notably complete study of the artist’s work and life, both in terms of analysis and reproduction of paintings and drawings. He evokes the major contribution of this great unclassifiable painter, from his beginnings as a young designer in the 1920s to his last large triptychs of the late 1980s, and offers a personal and touching look at his complex personality and his extraordinary oeuvre: tormented, sometimes violent, reflecting his most intimate wounds, but nevertheless luminous in its colours and through his quest for the absolute.

This account, always based on precise facts, considerably broadens our vision of the work through in-depth interpretations, making a distinctively new contribution to what has been written already. The book is based on a flawless knowledge of the artist’s work and is enriched by the author’s close relationship with Francis Bacon, offering a philosophical, poetic and artistic stroll through the various stages of an outstanding exploration.

The six essays in Francis Bacon Studies III: Inside Francis Bacon constitute a ground-breaking multi-disciplinary study of Bacon’s life and art and disclose fascinating new information about this elusive artist. Where the content of Francis Bacon Studies I and II reflected the application of theory-based methodologies, several of the authors of Inside Francis Bacon consider the artist through more traditional art-historical disciplines, including biography and the technical analysis of his paintings. This is in line with our intention that Francis Bacon Studies should embrace the widest possible range of new thinking about Bacon.

Three of the essays, those by Francesca Pipe, Sophie Pretorius and Martin Harrison, are based on archives that have been added only recently to the collection of the Estate of Francis Bacon. What they reveal will revolutionise our perceptions of Bacon. Very little is known about his early life and career, and the diaries of his two earliest patrons facilitate a much deeper understanding of his formative years than, until now, has been possible. Many of the myths that Bacon and his apologists created in the 1980s are exploded: for example, in a recent broadcast a Tate curator confidently informs the audience of Bacon’s brutal upbringing and the ‘horse-whippings’ he suffered, claims based on gossip and hearsay that evidence published in Inside Francis Bacon seriously challenges. Especially revelatory are the extensive records kept over a long period by Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass, a generous long-term loan by Ruth Brass. Sophie Pretorius’s analysis of them will require a fundamental revision of preconceived notions about Bacon’s character and psychology, and also explains the uneven production rate of his paintings.

Sarah Whitfield sheds significant new light on both Bonnard and Bacon; she has identified concerns the two artists shared that will surprise as well as inform. Joyce Townsend draws on her scientific and technical investigations into Tate’s most important Bacon paintings, as well as comparisons with the techniques of many other artists, to advance engrossingly fresh information about Bacon’s aims and techniques. Christopher Bucklow extends his meditations on the metaphor system in Bacon’s paintings published in Francis Bacon Studies I. His ideas are always compelling and challenging, and his essay reflects wide, and perhaps unexpected, terms of reference, ranging from William Blake to Japanese ukiyo‑e prints.

More information on the book here.

Presentation videos introducing essays from the book:

Inside Francis Bacon – Diana Watson’s Diary

Inside Francis Bacon – A Pathological Painter

Inside Francis Bacon – Eric Allden’s Diary

Christopher Bucklow on his essays in Francis Bacon Studies I and III

This book, the first to be dedicated to photographs of Francis Bacon, unveils iconic and often previously unseen images of the painter. The photographs are drawn from the MB Art Collection which holds the world’s most extensive collection of photographs of Francis Bacon. This collection encompasses over 700 hundred prints by more than seventy photographers, ranging from portraits by eminent photographers to rare snapshots caught by his inner circle.

Study for a Portrait offers a new glance at this singular artist. The portfolio, spanning from the 1920s to the 1990s, is accompanied by photographers’ anecdotes and memories of the shoots. This unique encounter through the camera lens opens revealing and personal perspectives on one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century.

Only 300 copies of this book are for sale (295€). To order a copy, please contact the Foundation. You can also find this publication at The Photographers’ Gallery bookshop in London as well as at the Centre Pompidou bookshop in Paris.

Martin Harrison, editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, is the series editor.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis draws together some of today’s leading philosophers and psychoanalytic critics to go beyond established readings of Bacon and open up radically new ways of thinking about his art. The essays bring Bacon into dialogue with figures such as Aristotle, Georg Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, and Martin Heidegger, and situate his work in the broader contexts of modernism and modernity.

More information on the book here.

The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation is taking part in the exhibition Francis Bacon: Books and Painting – to be presented from 11 September 2019 to 20 January 2020 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris – by contributing to the exhibition catalogue and the series of lectures, the ‘Bacon Book Club’ to be held at the Centre Pompidou during the exhibition period.

The last major French exhibition dedicated to the ardently Francophile Bacon was held in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou. More than twenty years later, ‘Francis Bacon: Books and Painting’ presents paintings executed from 1971, the year of the legendary retrospective held at the Grand Palais, to his final works in 1992. Didier Ottinger is the curator of this innovative exploration of the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s œuvre.

There are six rooms along the visitor route, placing literature at the heart of the exhibition. The event includes readings of excerpts of texts taken from Francis Bacon’s library.  The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou focuses on works produced by Bacon in the last two decades of his career. It consists of sixty paintings (including twelve triptychs, in addition to a series of portraits and self-portraits) from major private and public collections. From 1971 to 1992 (the year of the artist’s death), his painting style was marked by its simplification and intensification. His colours acquired new depth, drawn from a unique chromatic register of yellow, pink and saturated orange. 1971 was a turning point for Bacon. His Grand Palais retrospective earned him international acclaim, while the tragic death of his partner, two days before the exhibition opening, gave way to a period marked by guilt and represented by a proliferation of the symbolic and mythological form of the Erinyes (the Furies of Greek mythology) in his work. The ‘Black’ Triptychs painted in memory of his deceased friend (In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, Triptych–August 1972 and Triptych, May–June 1973), all presented at the exhibition, commemorate this loss.

Available to order online here.

Yves Peyré, writer and friend of Francis Bacon, has produced a notably complete study of the artist’s work and life, both in terms of analysis and reproduction of paintings and drawings. He evokes the major contribution of this great unclassifiable painter, from his beginnings as a young designer in the 1920s to his last large triptychs of the late 1980s, and offers a personal and touching look at his complex personality and his extraordinary oeuvre: tormented, sometimes violent, reflecting his most intimate wounds, but nevertheless luminous in its colours and through his quest for the absolute.

This account, always based on precise facts, considerably broadens our vision of the work through in-depth interpretations, making a distinctively new contribution to what has been written already. The book is based on a flawless knowledge of the artist’s work and is enriched by the author’s close relationship with Francis Bacon, offering a philosophical, poetic and artistic stroll through the various stages of an outstanding exploration.

Available online here.

PRIX BERNIER DE L’ACADÉMIE DES BEAUX-ARTS 2020

The series aims to disseminate writing that reflects original research and opens new perspectives on Bacon’s art and life. Martin Harrison, editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, is the series editor.

This volume includes contributions from Christopher Bucklow, Steven Jaron, Darian Leader, John Onians, Semir Zeki and Tomohiro Ishizu. Bacon and the Mind is being published by The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing in association with Thames & Hudson.

Available to order online: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bacon-Mind-Art-Neuroscience-Psychology/dp/0500970971/

Our Foundation financially supports Perrine Le Querrec’s last book Bacon le Cannibale, published by Hippocampe Editions in mid-October.

Using sources in the archives of the MB Art Collection (paintings, graphic works, letters, objects, photographs, and working documents, all from Bacon’s studios), the book constructs a poetic and sensitive portrait of the man and his work. From reluctant words and stubborn silence Perrine Le Querrec creates language and vision. The study and manipulation of archives and images occupy an essential place in her writing.

“To the question “Which writer has influenced you?” I would answer, without hesitation: Francis Bacon. If not a writer, he has always been an essential source of inspiration and guidance. I would never write “stories”, I would seek to compose a language that addresses the body, sensations and nervous system, a language as living and incarnate as possible. Archives are a source of memory, emotion and poetry which hold a fundamental place in the construction of my writing. Thus, in tribute to Francis Bacon, a painter who used archives and photographs, working with images in all their longevity and decay, their surface and depth, I turned to his own archives, his portraits, and his objects. These archives, conserved by a lover of Bacon’s work, have given substance to my passion. Keenly shadowing him, tracing the pattern of his actions and materials, I attempt a Study for a portrait of the artist. Through archive and poetry, I am as close as possible to a flamboyant, heart-breaking, lonely, universal creation.”
Perrine Le Querrec

Available to order online: here.

It has also been revised to include recent research and discoveries which has enabled us to expand the biography section on the artist.

Not for sale, only available from the Foundation.

Jointly published by the Foundation and Albin Michel, it has been compiled under the direction of Martin Harrison, the exhibition’s curator and author of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. Nine eminent art historians (Martin Harrison, Sarah Whitfield, Amanda J. Harrison, Catherine Howe, Dr. Rebecca Daniels, Dr Carol Jacobi, Dr. Darren Ambrose, Dr. James Wishart, Eddy Batache.) have contributed essays. The book’s foreword was written by Majid Boustany, founder/director of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.

The book invites us to explore the strong bonds Francis Bacon enjoyed with France and Monaco and sheds light on the influence of French culture on the artist’s life and work.

Available to order online (www.henipublishing.com and on amazon) and in bookstores.

Two eminent art historians, Martin Harrison and Eddy Batache, have enriched this publication with their texts. The book closes with a comprehensive chronology of the artist.

Out of Print. New edition available.