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“... had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now become completely ...”

“... In the preface to his new edition of montaged interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester draws our attention to what has become the last section of the fifth interview. Altogether, there are seven interviews but Sylvester considers the end of the fifth to be the most illuminating passage in the book: ‘I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance … I think perhaps I am unique in that way; and perhaps it’s a vanity to say such a thing ...”

“... The period​ in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion ...”

“... knowledge or knowing, by dint of sensing the world. The recent translation of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation ought to revivify debates about aesthetics, but it’s likely to meet with the same response from English speakers as previous translations of Deleuze’s extraordinary oeuvre: bewilderment. This response would ...”

“... Francis Bacon has had a variety of reputations, which have tended to go up and down in a random or independent sort of way. At the moment he is generally regarded as a master of English rhetoric, an unsuccessful reformer of natural philosophy, and a cold fish. Julian Martin has tried to put him together, not by a lumping biography, but by finding the crux ...”

“... Francis Bacon liked to rail against illustration. ‘If you know how to record it you illustrate it,’ he’d cry. As for ‘illustrational paint’, ughh – the thought of that would set the jowls shuddering. ‘Illustration’ wasn’t just to be despised on its own account, it was a word to be smeared across whatever he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries ...”

“... historian, theorist of experimental inquiry and prophet of organised scientific research, Francis Bacon combined soaring intellectual ambition with a relentless quest for worldly advancement. The scholar who sought to reclassify the whole of human knowledge and lay the foundations for the systematic conquest of nature was also the careerist who ...”

“... That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s would-be nemesis, Francis Bacon, of whom the historian A.L. Morton wrote in The English Utopia:There is perhaps no great English writer whose personality is less attractive than Bacon’s, and all the elaborate apologias of his many ...”

“... be put out of Harry’s mind ... There was also the recurring discomfort of undue homage paid to Francis Bacon – a gathering menace. If Harry Bretton has survived in the limbo where fictional characters live ever after he will find Bacon as menacing as ever. He has not petered out, and even his critics admit his ...”

“... of the artist in London, which is entirely concerned with social life, mostly social life with Francis Bacon. It seems designed to suggest that Giacometti was fascinated by Bacon’s homosexuality in a significant way. But first comes a pen portrait of Bacon: Good-looking and ...”

“... underdrawing and several revisions to the contour of the cheek are visible in the famous Head of Francis Bacon, and one can clearly see how the tiny lines animating the grey shadows on the face are not drawn with the point of a brush but are pushed through the paint by stiff bristles revealing the paler paint below. This is a way of painting frequently ...”

“... and deference to French and American art that mark much British work of the period. Only Francis Bacon shows the body disrupted and distorted as she does.Cordell’s work, and what one critic called her ‘legendary panache’, should have ensured her a place at the forefront of British art. She was praised by critics and had successful ...”

“... together but working alone.Of all 20th-century London artists’ houses 7 Reece Mews, where Francis Bacon lived and worked for 30 years, is the most notorious. The room which served as a studio has now been reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin; a photographic record made after ...”

“... in a double damask napkin. On the other hand, while all the artists worshipped the success of Francis Bacon, it mattered not at all that he did not frequent Odin’s. He preferred Muriel’s and could keep it, though Peter was presented with a serigraph from Richard Hamilton which is a Bacon copy. In other respects ...”

“... studio. This use of what is intimate and close-by as subject matter has contemporary resonances (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) and historical ones (from Chardin’s studio-bound way of working to Cézanne’s Provençal landscape beat, and the dusty, unchanging workspaces of Giacometti and Morandi). The dedication of life to work suggests that art is a ...”