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It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes...
Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine that he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later.
Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted.
The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos that Bacon created around him, Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined.
In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.
Published | Aug 27 2015 |
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Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 416 |
ISBN | 9781408856239 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury USA |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pleasurable reading . . . Skillfully sewn together . . . [Peppiatt] had a 30-year acquaintance with his subject and made good use of it.
The New York Times Book Review on FRANCIS BACON: ANATOMY OF AN ENIGMA, Notable Books of the Year
[Peppiatt] makes you feel Bacon as a living presence.
Salon on FRANCIS BACON: ANATOMY OF AN ENIGMA
Michael Peppiatt's biography has long been viewed by Bacon scholars as the definitive life of a fascinatingly flawed figure . . . There is no denying the often disturbing cumulative force with which Bacon -- the man, the artist and, towards the end of his life, the commercial wonder -- is presented. As an examination of his life and art, Anatomy of an Enigma is superb, but arguably it's even better as a portrait of the Soho demimonde in which Bacon thrived, vividly capturing the grubby ennui of postwar Britain that suited his grim sensibilities so well.
The Guardian on FRANCIS BACON: ANATOMY OF AN ENIGMA
Brilliantly and evocatively written.
Antonia Fraser, Daily Mail, on FRANCIS BACON: ANATOMY OF AN ENIGMA
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