Francis Bacon / Pablo Picasso — Bacon Picasso (Flammarion, 2005, Oversized Art Book)

Description

Few artistic lineages in the twentieth century are as charged as the dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Picasso’s radical reinvention of form and subject matter in the early decades of the century set the tone for nearly all that followed. For Bacon, encountering Picasso’s work in 1927 at Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris proved to be an epiphany: it unlocked his devotion to painting and gave him a vocabulary of distortion, violence, and raw physicality that he would carry into the postwar years. This artistic inheritance bridged the modernism of Picasso with the existential intensity of Bacon, tethering early-century innovation to the late-century confrontation with mortality, identity, and desire. Their connection demonstrates how the bold ruptures of Cubism and Surrealism reverberated into the era of postwar anxiety, each painter reshaping the language of the figure to suit his time.

Bacon Picasso explores this connection in depth, presenting over 250 pages of text and images. The book traces themes such as the crucifixion, the embrace, and the scream, placing works by the two painters side by side to illuminate the resonance and divergence between them. With contributions drawn from Bacon’s previously unpublished archives and from major international collections, the volume is both a scholarly resource and a visually arresting art book. It stands as a substantial reference on how Picasso’s example catalyzed Bacon’s artistic evolution.

A visually commanding and intellectually rigorous study linking two titans of modern art — a key volume for collectors of Bacon, Picasso, and twentieth-century painting.