First published 2011
Jonathan Littell stands before Francis Bacon paintings in Madrid's Prado, trying to decode what makes them so visceral. The author of The Kindly Ones turns his attention to the British painter's canvases, peeling back layers of technique and biography. Littell traces Bacon's path from his troubled Irish upbringing through his fixation on Velázquez's classical works to the devastating suicide of his lover George Dyer, which sparked Bacon's most celebrated triptych series. Moving between gallery spaces and café tables, Littell pursues the sources that fed Bacon's violent, distorted figures. He examines how we process visual art, what draws us to images of suffering, and why Bacon's twisted forms feel so immediate. This meditation connects one writer's obsession with seeing to a painter's compulsion to show us ourselves transformed.
Genres: biography, art, literary-fiction, non-fiction, criticism, art-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: obsession, visual-storytelling
Setting: Madrid, Prado
Period: 20th-century
144 pages · Paperback · Editions Gallimard