“It was Bacon’s secret that he was not just a radical master of the 20th-century stage who exulted in the dark arts,” Stevens and Swan write. The authors, so frank on de Kooning’s private life, turn prim and almost anthropological when it comes to Bacon — and not even on the rough stuff. It is the most comprehensive and detailed account of the life, and one that topples central pillars of the Bacon myth. Bacon cultivated the notion that he’d wandered into painting after a gloriously dissipated youth. (As raffish as he was known to be, Bacon lived with his childhood nanny long into adulthood.

Source: International New York Times March 23, 2021 19:41 UTC