Sado-masochism and stolen shoe polish: Francis Bacon's legacy revisited
Art historian John Richardson's revelations on the troubled artist he knew as a young man
Francis Bacon's was a life lived to extravagant extremes. His drunken excesses in the Colony Room Club in Soho; his carnivalesque, ruinous generosity; the formative occasion on which, as a teenager, his father found him wearing his mother's underwear and beat the living daylights out of him – all this is almost as celebrated as his riotously tortured paintings.
From: Books: Books + News | guardian.co.uk
Sunday, 22 November, 2009
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