Francis Bacon: Closer

Francis Bacon famously resisted explaining his work, often claiming to not know what it meant. Yet this refusal has tended to discourage close looking, with critics favoring theoretical abstraction or biographical interpretation instead. Francis Bacon: Closer sets out to reverse that tendency. Rather than reducing Bacon's imagery to familiar tropes--violence, distortion, the "screaming popes"--it explores the variety and complexity of his visual language. The book centers on detailed studies of eighty paintings--organized around motifs, such as heads, mouths, wounds, pigment, and abstraction--revealing the anatomical and psychological preoccupations embedded in the work. It will appeal to scholars, as well as anyone interested in how Bacon's paintings were made and what they mean.