Francis Bacon

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master, a revelatory and intimate new biography of Francis Bacon. A decade in the making, based upon hundreds of interviews and extensive new material, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have written a startlingly original portrait – rich, complex, and subtle – of a commanding modern figure. Bacon concealed many important aspects of his life. He described himself as an asthmatic child in Ireland with foxhunting parents and a tyrannical father, but he was also rescued by a series of formidable women – women who in this biography emerge in their own right. He was never just a dissolute young man but was also a passionate reader, largely self-taught. Early on, influenced by Eileen Gray, he became a hard-working and ambitious designer, a brief career explored here in detail for the first time. He dreamed of remaking the modern room. Bacon worked no less hard or ambitiously as a painter, at first with little success....