Francis Bacon

We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong

16 November 2024 9:00 am

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they…

The hellraisers of Hoxton: Art, by Peter Carty, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

The pretensions of the Young British Artists are lampooned in Carty’s debut novel – but there’s still something irresistible about the 1990s London it recreates

The big picture: two books on artists and their lives

23 September 2023 9:00 am

Essays by Michael Peppiatt on the artists who quicken his heart, and encounters between Richard Cork and his favourites, including Jasper Johns, Henry Moore and Gilbert & George

Shakespeare sceptics are the new literary heroes

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Determined sceptics will always find reasons to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship, but who cares in the end, Emma Smith wonders

The well of happiness – and despair: Queer St Ives reviewed

23 July 2022 9:00 am

In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…

Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican's Postwar Modern reviewed

19 March 2022 9:00 am

Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…

Part-gothic horror, part-Acorn Antiques: Louise Bourgeois, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

19 February 2022 9:00 am

Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…

Feral showstoppers and some of the greatest paintings of the 20th century: Francis Bacon at the RA reviewed

29 January 2022 9:00 am

Francis Bacon sensed our inner beastliness and painted it with astonishing power, says Martin Gayford

What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?

29 January 2022 9:00 am

The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what…

Sinatra, Bacon and a YouTube star: Edinburgh Fringe Festival round-up

14 August 2021 9:00 am

Sinatra: Raw (Pleasance, until 15 August) takes us inside the mind of the 20th century’s greatest crooner. The performer, Richard…

Dark masterpiece: ‘Two Figures’, 1953, by Francis Bacon

There is a jewel of a painting at Gagosian’s Francis Bacon show

15 June 2019 9:00 am

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is…

The first great English artist – the life and art of Nicholas Hilliard

23 February 2019 9:00 am

When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large…

Immaterial world: ‘The Table’, 1925, by Pierre Bonnard

Was Pierre Bonnard any good?

26 January 2019 9:00 am

An attendant at an art gallery in France once apprehended a little old vandal, or so the story goes. He…

Francis Bacon in front of his triptych at the Galerie Claude Bernard in the Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1977

France gets a taste for Bacon

12 January 2019 9:00 am

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…

The drinkers of the Coach and Horses in Michael Heath’s ‘The Regulars’ cartoon strip. Christopher Howse sits at the right end of the bar

Remembering Soho: A conversation on debauchery, drunks and Francis Bacon

1 September 2018 9:00 am

Christopher Howse has just written a book about Soho. He drank there regularly with Michael Heath, The Spectator’s cartoon editor,…

‘Melanie and Me Swimming’, 1978–9, by Michael Andrews

Magnificent paintings – oddly curated: All Too Human reviewed

10 March 2018 9:00 am

In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art:…

Beyond Timbuktu

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…

Walter Crane and James Silvester Sparrow, detail of Psalm 148, window (1896), Holy Trinity Church, Hull, Yorkshire. From Arts & Crafts Stained Glass, by Peter Cormack (Yale)

From cave painting to Maggi Hambling: the best Christmas art books

28 November 2015 9:00 am

It’s been a memorably productive year for art books (I have published a couple myself), but certain volumes stand out.…

Francis Bacon in Paris in 1984

Bacon on the side: the great painter’s drinking partner tells all

5 September 2015 9:00 am

When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established,…

Catherine Lampert, 1986

Frank Auerbach: frightened of heights, dogs, driving, swimming — but finding courage through painting

6 June 2015 9:00 am

With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of…

Art has ceased to be beautiful or interesting — but we are more obsequious than ever to artists

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by…

‘Two Figures in a Room’, 1959, by Francis Bacon

The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

28 February 2015 9:00 am

They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage.…

Why it’s time to revive the commonplace book

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Among the gifts that have come my way this Christmas season, none has given me pleasure more immediate or more…

‘14.11.65’ by John Hoyland

Is John Hoyland the new Turner?

27 September 2014 9:00 am

What happens to an artist’s reputation when he dies? Traditionally, there was a period of cooling off when the reputation,…

‘Storm on Yarmouth Beach’, 1831, by Cotman

There are too few masterpieces in Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia

4 January 2014 9:00 am

Andrew Lambirth on the Sainsbury Centre’s latest exhibition