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Francis Bacon in Your Blood Michael Peppiatt

Francis Bacon in Your Blood By Michael Peppiatt

Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt


$10.00
Condition - Very Good
7 in stock

Francis Bacon in Your Blood Summary

Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes... Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos Bacon created around him Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.

Francis Bacon in Your Blood Reviews

Michael Peppiatt takes us on an intoxicating tour of the painter's louchest, and most productive, years -- Susie Rushton * Vogue *
This fine portrait of the artist is both gossipy and poignant ... [and] one of the best art books I have read, by turns atmospheric and waspishly gossipy but also profound and poignant. -- Michael Prodger * The Times *
A vivid new memoir by the artist's protege is set to be a classic ... highly entertaining ... the narrative comes hurtling off the page with a palpable sense of release and apparently guileless, even artless, candour.The cavalcade of bohemian celebrities goes on and on ... captivating...a classic, not only of art writing, but of personal memoir * Sunday Telegraph *
Peppiatt offers a window into the experiences and emotional intelligence of this great artist * New Statesman *
An affecting personal narrative about his friendship with the great painter * Publisher's Weekly *
Peppiatt shows a deft hand in crafting an enthralling, delightful story of two very different men * Kirkus *
A remarkable book ... it captures what it was like to be in the presence of this brilliant, camp, reckless, waspish, drunken, generous, shameless character. Michael Peppiatt brings him back to life and somehow carries off the near-impossible trick of echoing the repetitive nature of his drunken talk ... while somehow preserving his electricity and effervescence -- Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday *
Every page is fresh, immediate, and flashing with glimpses into Bacon's complicated psyche and Peppiatt's own conundrums. While Peppiatt still struggles to understand the deep-seated masochism that covertly shaped Bacon's dramatic life and ferocious art, he celebrates with ever-replenished wonder the timeless artist's creativity, freedom and energy and total individuality. -- Donna Seaman * Booklist *
Francis Bacon's views on art, death and his bohemian circle make revealing reading in this enjoyable memoir * Independent *
Francis Bacon in Your Blood is not a biography of Bacon, nor is meant to be: it is a memoir of the life that ensued when the 53-year-old Bacon befriended Peppiatt, then aged 21 ... The perspective Peppiatt gradually gains is crucial. Beneath the bluster, dissimulation, megalomaniacal kindness and maniacally controlling way, Bacon's living brilliantly his gilded gutter life, is revealed to be a sustaining fiction for a talented, broken man ... Peppiatt undercuts just enough to be heartbreaking rather than destructive ... It's a brilliant portrait that Peppiatt lets Bacon paint ... Entertaining, calculated and acerbic, Michael Peppiatt really does seem to have a bit of Bacon in his blood * Spectator *
How an interview with the painter turned into weeks of prodigious drinking and a lifelong friendship ... fascinating [and] engaging -- Lynn Barber * Sunday Times *
In a face-paced narrative peopled by such luminaries as Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire, Peppiatt offers a deeply personal insight into the character of an individual who was by turn grand and petty, tender and treacherous * Town and Country *
Well placed for the task, having been a friend of the artist for some thirty years; and his book is all the more moving because it explains why a full account of Bacon's work and personality was impossible * Literary Review *
Part diary, part art history, part love letter, his memoir captures what it was like to know this brilliant, camp genius ... an excellent glimpse into a vanished London bohemia -- Rebecca Wallersteiner * The Lady *
An intimate documentation of one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. The Bacon that emerges from Peppiatt's pen is as complex a person as one could meet ... Personable, immediate and engaging ... Peppiatt resembles the fictional Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a humble and self-deprecating narrator, who serves as a bridge between an everyday world and the blazing comet that was Francis Bacon * Irish Examiner *
The best art memoir published in years. Much more enjoyable informal than the author's definitive biography of Bacon, it is personal, subjective and sufficiently scurrilous to check the young Peppiatt's hero-worship of his subject' * Spectator *
There is a certain grisly satisfaction in watching an artist behave as one expects an artist to. Francis Bacon ... always delivered and just how richly is recorded by Peppiatt ... A wonderfully vivid account -- Art Book of the Year * Sunday Times *
This fine memoir is more insightful than gossipy, and as a subject Bacon is just about unbeatable * New York Times *
Peppiatt's new book is an intimate memoir of two intense and interlaced lives, his own and Bacon's, which augments rather than duplicates his previous efforts ... Punchy, gutsy, jumpy ... Full of gossip, binges, nausea, bruises, stained sheets, punchlines and death wishes -- Richard Davenport-Hines * Times Literary Supplement *
This intimate portrait is essential reading for anyone interested in Bacon's disturbing talent * Daily Mail *
The gossipy and insightful story of how two lives became entwined * Choice *
Peppiatt's portrait of this mercurial figure is utterly mesmerising * Mail on Sunday *

About Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt studied at the University of Cambridge, where he began his career as an art writer by writing exhibition reviews for the Observer. In an international career as a writer and curator, he has curated numerous exhibitions of Francis Bacon's and other artists' work and been published in Realites magazine, Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News and Art International, which he bought and relaunched in 1985. He is also the author of the definitive Bacon biography, the 1997 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. In 2005 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Cambridge for his published work in the field of twentieth-century art. He is a member of the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2010 he joined the international board of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

Additional information

GOR006947132
9781408856246
1408856247
Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
20150827
416
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Francis Bacon in Your Blood