Francis Bacon Retrieved: Lost Words / New Writing
Francis Bacon Studies V
Published 10th April 2025 in the UK (1st July 2025 in the USA)
Edited by Martin Harrison. Essays by Maria Balaska, Amanda J Harrison, Martin Harrison, and Darian Leader.
“I was born at the moment of conception with a very specialised nervous system […] I’m not trying to suggest that I’m more unique than another person, I’m only suggesting that my working, as it were, the sensibility which I work by […] it’s very, very different to any artist, painter that I’ve known of this generation […] I’m not like the painters who say I’m just like an ordinary man, because I know I’m not.”
Words recovered from Bacon’s conversation with David Sylvester, 1973
Francis Bacon Retrieved: Lost Words / New Writing
Lost Words: Unpublished Bacon
Published in nine parts between 1962 and 1986, Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester remain the definitive sources on the artist. But editorial decisions applied by both men ahead of publication saw valuable material being lost– until now.
With fifteen thousand of Bacon’s previously unpublished words, exclusive revelations from his associates, compelling recent discoveries, and photographs of destroyed paintings reproduced for the first time, Francis Bacon Retrieved is a stimulating and varied collection of new thoughts on the artist.
Given their contributions to Bacon studies, it may appear ungracious to criticise aspects of the Sylvester interviews. But it is also worth remembering that the two were friends having a conversation, with Sylvester’s questions lighting the way. As a result, the material that originally made it into print is occasionally misleading, and could, in parts, be said to reflect Sylvester’s thoughts on Bacon and art more than the artist’s.
Presented thematically, rather than chronologically, Martin Harrison’s arrangement of this exhilarating new material will hopefully prove more convenient for readers, providing new insights on topics including Bacon’s early life, his subjects and influences, his shifting perceptions of his own strengths and weaknesses, and the “accidents” that led to some of his most celebrated works.
Watch our YouTube video that introduces the book (4 min 14 sec)
We created this short YouTube video to introduce the topics covered by Francis Bacon Retrieved: Lost Words / New Writing.
“Attitudes of Apes”
Exploring Bacon’s Creatures
In “Attitudes of Apes”, Amanda Harrison explores Bacon’s non-human imagery from several perspectives. Apes were in the air in the inter-war period, as T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and others explored ideas of atavism and our animal nature. Many of Bacon’s works build on these ideas, subverting familiar images and tropes and blurring the boundaries of what it is to be human. Creatures both real and mythical, sculptures, and even human entrails are imbued with a life of their own. From simians to shadows, dogs to demons, Harrison’s discursive approach sheds significant light on some long-overlooked aspects of Bacon’s imagery.
In Whose Name? Some Thoughts on Art Forgery
Thoughts on Art Forgery
Fake Bacons have been around for at least fifty years. Since his death in 1992, two bodies of counterfeit works by Barry Joule and Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino in particular have disrupted the serious study of the artist and his paintings. As numerous works continue to be submitted for authentication, author of Stealing the Mona Lisa (2002), Darian Leader’s “In Whose Name? Some Thoughts on Art Forgery” provides fascinating insights into the minds and motivations of forgers. His contribution to the book has turned out to be more timely than anticipated. As the book went to print, one London club was exhibiting the works of Ravarino as Bacons, even as the legal case against him in Italy draws to a close.
In his postscript to Leader’s essay, Martin Harrison emphasises that, when sustaining the market takes precedence over expertise and scholarship, the process of authentication can itself be abused. Bacon himself took steps to get fakes off the market. Harrison discusses how the Bacon bibliography has been sullied by two bodies of inauthentic works that may mislead the uninitiated, and stresses that any works not included in the catalogue raisonné are, by definition, not by Bacon.
The origin of painting: Bacon and Heidegger on appearance
Bacon and Heidegger
What makes a painting? Bacon came back to the “mystery of painting” again and again throughout his life, pondering how we decide that a painting is an artwork and what separates one of his paintings from say, one created by a child. Is it a question of successful illustration? Of capturing the subject’s essence? Or something else? Maria Balaska considers Bacon’s philosophy and works by reading his aims and methodology through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and other voices. In doing so, she has found many interesting parallels.
Notes on Triptych May-June 1973
Since 1973, thousands have gazed at Triptych May-June 1973. It was when shown as the finale in the recent exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at London’s National Portrait Gallery, that Amanda Harrison confirmed her theory of the presence of unidentified Egyptian imagery, until then hidden in plain sight. Highlighting the truth that Bacons must be experienced to truly be seen, Harrison explores the artist’s use of Egyptian imagery in what the Sylvester interviews reveal to be his most avowedly narrative painting.
Man in a Cap, c. 1945
One of the paintings abandoned by Bacon when he left his Cromwell Place studio in 1951, Man in a Cap (c. 1945) has only recently become available to the Estate for forensic study. Using X-ray scans to reveal what lay under the final layer of paint, the painting holds clues that strongly suggest an earlier life as a version of a panel from Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). With high-resolution photographs comparing the X-rays and pictoral sources alongside Bacon’s finished works, Martin Harrison shares some powerful observations about this painting from Bacon’s early career.
Edward Onsloe: the man in Study for Portrait, 1969
In 2025, there are only six people alive who Bacon painted. Ahead of his full interview with the Estate filmed and due for release later this spring, the wonderful Ted Westfallen (now Edward Onsloe) describes his friendship with Bacon, sparked in the Soho gambling den where he worked and where Bacon was a patron, and how he came to be the subject of Study for Portait (1969).
Contributors
Maria Balaska was a lecturer and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and at Åbo Akademi University. Her most recent books are Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit (2019) and Anxiety and Wonder: On Being Human (2024).
Amanda J. Harrison is a poet and occasional art historian. Her essay, ‘A sudden blow’ was published in Francis Bacon: Monaco et la culture française (2016) and 'Bacon and the Occult’ in Francis Bacon Studies IV (2021).
Martin Harrison was the editor of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016). He is editor of the Francis Bacon Studies series and Head of Publishing for the Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing.
Darian Leader, the eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst and author, has published many books, including Stealing the Mona Lisa (2002). He also presented the BBC 2 TV documentary about Bacon, In the Name of the Father? (1996), and contributed essays to Francis Bacon Studies I and II.
Press and Media
Please address press and media enquiries to [email protected].
The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing,
supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco,
in association with Thames & Hudson
Flexibound (softback);
158 pages;
UK RRP £28.00;
ISBN: 978-0-500-96627-3