Francis Bacon: Closer

… every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image.  

Francis Bacon, 1952 

Presented in the same format as Revisions: Francis Bacon in the Act of Painting (2024), Francis Bacon: Closer is the second and final supplementary volume to the 2016 Catalogue Raisonné.

What do we perceive in Francis Bacon's paintings? Bacon himself resolutely refused to analyse them, saying he didn’t know what half of them meant. Curiously, few critics have attempted to sidestep his disingenuousness, opting for theoretical generalities or biographical explanations rather than the close observation of individual paintings. 

The principal aim of Closer is to reconsider the manifold aspects of Bacon's imagery that have been overlooked. His subject matter still tends to be interpreted merely as violent or reduced to clichés – for example the so-called 'screaming popes'; instead, Closer attends to the variety and breadth of expression in Bacon's recording of appearance. It reframes his iconographic range by paying attention to details of his paintings that reveal, for the first time, crucial facets of his modus operandi.

The book opens with a broad analysis of what the study of these details signifies and identifies certain persistent themes. We then explore key aspects of Bacon's oeuvre that illuminate his anatomical and psychological obsessions; these are arranged under the following headings: Body / Head / Mouth / Hands / Wound / Witness / Detail / Reflection / Irrational Marks / Paint.