Bacon Disfigured

A collection of essays that opens up new connections between Francis Bacon’s art and the ideas of key thinkers.

Francis Bacon is undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. In his paintings, Bacon radically disfigures his subjects, making them all but unrecognizable. This is no mere stylistic quirk, but the expression of a deeply held aesthetic vision. For Bacon, the essence of a subject can only be captured in the distorted recording of its appearance. His disfigurations are therefore, as he himself says, attempts to bring back the intensity of reality, to paint images that are ‘truer than the literal truth’.

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, some of today’s leading philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists go to work on Bacon. They do to the artist what the artist does to his own figures: they disfigure and distort him, twisting and turning him into something new and previously unseen. This strategy of disfiguration blasts Bacon out of his traditional contexts, opening up new connections between his art and the ideas of key thinkers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Freud, Canguilhem, Genet, Lacan, Adorno and Althusser. The results are revelatory, allowing us to transform our understanding not only of Bacon but also of modernism itself.

About the Author

Ben Ware is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College London.