Description
Thirty years of friendship with the most dangerous painter in Britain. Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963, when the young art student dared to knock on the great man’s door — and Bacon, improbably, let him in. Francis Bacon in Your Blood is the memoir of that friendship: three decades of Soho nights, champagne, gambling, and conversations with a genius who painted the twentieth century’s scream.
Peppiatt writes with novelistic vividness about Bacon’s world — the Colony Room, the lovers, the cruelty and the charm — and with rare insight into the work. He was there for the triumphs and the wreckage, and he tells it all with the loyalty of a friend and the honesty of a critic. The portraits of Bacon’s circle are priceless.
For Bacon lovers, this is indispensable: the closest you will get to the man himself. Read it alongside a biography for the full, lurid, brilliant picture. Soho has never been so alive on the page.
Francis Bacon is one of the most celebrated — and feared — painters of the twentieth century. In Francis Bacon in Your Blood, art historian and curator Michael Peppiatt delivers an intimate memoir of the man behind the myth: the brilliant, volatile, endlessly fascinating Bacon he first met in London in June 1963 and knew until the artist’s death in 1992.
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nPeppiatt takes readers inside Bacon’s private world — the late-night Soho drinking clubs, the chaos of the studio, the famous interviews, and the conversations about art, life, and death that stretched across three decades. This is not a conventional biography but a firsthand portrait: vivid, honest, and often startling, written by someone who watched genius up close.
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nThe author of the acclaimed Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma and curator of major Bacon retrospectives, Peppiatt brings unmatched authority to his subject. Published by Bloomsbury in 2015, this memoir is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand one of modern art’s most powerful figures — not as an icon, but as a man.
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