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74
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
95/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Mark Stevens, Annalyn Swan
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
March 23, 2021
A look at the life and art of Francis Bacon, one of the iconic painters of the twentieth century.
What The Reviewers Say
... an engrossing portrait of the artist, his art, and his incorrigible personality.
It is enormously detailed; we get the details, and the details’ details.
... over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facets to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask.
In Bacon, Mena saw something that was apt to escape others – a gilded ease, as well as an isolation; an unexpected tenderness – and in their magnificent new life of the artist, the Pulitzer prize-winning critics Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan are wise enough to make good use of it, deploying Mena’s memory at a point when others might have been inclined, in the race to the finish, to throw it away. But then, this is them all over. How judicious they are, how determined to rub away at their subject’s corners.
