In the spring of 1949, the press baron Viscount Rothermere gave a ball that defied Britain’s postwar decline. The men wore white tie, the women their family jewels. The Queen Mother was there, and so ...

“I have always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat,” the painter Francis Bacon said to an interviewer in 1962. He regarded meat with fellow-feeling. “If I go into a butcher’s ...

Animal cries and distorted bodies confront us at every turn in this dramatic survey of the artist’s shocking paintings Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is a frequently grim but endlessly fascinating ...

“Francis Bacon: Human Presence” at London’s National Portrait Gallery is the institution’s first exhibition of the artist’s portraits. Featuring more than fifty key paintings from across his career, ...

This episode suggests ruthless careerism, but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critics Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan write in their new biography, Francis Bacon: Revelations, the reality turned out to be ...

Francis Bacon – Man and Beast review: Post-Holocaust surrealism that still feels raw and challenging Co-curated by writer Michael Peppiatt, author of one of the more entertaining Bacon memoirs, this ...

Has the Francis Bacon cult peaked? For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Irish-born painter’s unstinting bleakness, ravaged flesh and sado-masochistic homoeroticism made him the outrage ...

WHEN, some years ago, I set out to write about Sir Francis Bacon, the undertaking loomed frighteningly large. Not only had Bacon been written about copiously for more than three hundred years, but I ...