Francis Bacon

During the final two decades of his life, Francis Bacon increasingly subjected the imagery that had defined his career to processes of reduction, repetition, and reconsideration. Portraits and self-portraits, isolated bodies, landscapes, fragments of anatomy, and references to earlier masters reappear, but often within compositions of heightened spatial clarity and expanses of intense, sometimes startling color. Following the deaths of several people close to him, Bacon also turned increasingly toward his own image. The 2015 Gagosian exhibition brought together more than twenty works from 1976 to 1991, including six self-portraits, three major triptychs, landscapes, and paintings engaging with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Bacon's own earlier compositions.

Francis Bacon: Late Paintings expands this reassessment through more than 150 color illustrations and an unusually rich collection of primary and critical material. Richard Calvocoressi examines the increasing economy of Bacon's late compositions, while contributions by Richard Francis, Mark Stevens, and Colm Tóibín approach the work from different art-historical and literary perspectives. An interview with catalogue raisonné author Martin Harrison, historical texts by Eddy Batache, Bruce Bernard, and Jeffrey Bernard, previously unpublished documentary photographs by Edward Quinn, material from Bacon's Hugh Lane studio, and a substantial selection of interviews conducted between 1978 and 1992 situate the paintings within the artist's working methods, friendships, intellectual world, and own evolving account of his practice.