Another new and excellent book about the painter Francis Bacon has just been issued by Thames & Hudson: Francis Bacon Incunabula by Martin Harrison (he is curating a new Bacon exhibition that will open at the Hermitage in 2010, a generous supplement to the current Bacon retrospective running in Madrid).
Most of the source objects reproduced in the book came off the floor of Bacon's studio after his death in 1992. Ultimately the studio and its contents ended up at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. That institution has kept busy cataloging and digitizing thousands of these clippings, books and fragments.
Dust jacket of a golfing manual (above) featuring the blunt arrows that turn up almost like a trademark in painting after painting.
The artist repeatedly stated that he did not draw. Apparently what he meant was that he did not draw well (as below). Since his death, hundreds of drawings have surfaced, although many are thought to be fakes. The ones he left on the floor of his studio, now in Dublin, cannot be doubted as authentic, and the fact that Bacon didn't take any trouble to destroy them while he was alive seems somewhat to justify all the curiosity about them now.
It has long been known that Bacon favored medical reference texts to help along his own painted landscapes of fleshly vulnerability. Sometimes it does seem like Bacon is the oddest possible Art God for an age that makes the confident (and absurd) claim that the flesh, treated right, can flourish forever.
Cheek by jowl with the torn and blotched textbook pages are torn and blotched reproductions of Bacon's own earlier paintings which formerly had been shaped by the clutter they are now part of.
The two images immediately above show Bacon taking the same reproduction of one of his own earlier works and overpainting it in two different ways.
Martin Harrison refutes the idea that the damage suffered by Bacon's scrap-objects was accidental, but argues instead that (as above) Bacon often damaged the material so as to paint the damage. Finally (below) the front and back views of a template used to outline or stencil the shape of George Dyer's profile. Bacon's series of tributes to and laments for Saint George are at the center of the whole achievement, but no viewer will agree with any other viewer on exactly what that achievement was.
