Francis Bacon “The Violence of the Real”

Dramatic depictions of human forms – writhing painfully, dissolving, wrestling or engulfing one another, seated or in motion – are ubiquitous in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon portrayed the ordeal of the vulnerable, defencelessly exposed body like no other artist of his generation.

Bacon found his models not only in the history of art, but also in photographs of athletes, soccer players, or boxers in combat. He also betrayed a strong interest in the photographic sequences through which Eadweard Muybridge, in the later 19th century, registered the path of animal movement. Such instinctively performed motions disclosed to Bacon actions of an original sensuality which he strove to capture in his pictures.

At the centre of this book, published to accompany the major exhibition at the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf, are about sixty of Bacon’s disturbing yet captivating studies of the human figure. Texts by Armin Zweite, Peter Bürger, Martin Harrison, Daria Kolacka, Frank Laukötter and Maria Müller offer new insight into Bacon’s radical and discomfiting images, so brilliantly
reproduced here.

Armin Zweite is the Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. He has written and contributed to numerous books, including Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Daniel Buren and Rebeccca Horn.