William Feaver writes:

Martin Harrison, the editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonné currently in preparation, has produced a scrapbook of illustrational materials from Bacon’s studio floor, among them dog-eared pages torn from magazines, newspaper cuttings with rusty paper clips still attached, images from Duchamp and Velázquez, images of dodgy seances, beefcake bikers, cricketers a-swipe, scrapping street urchins, teeth ’n’ smiles from medical textbooks, golf grips and swastikas and doors kicked in. Many of these items – admirably reproduced – will be familiar to those who know Bacon’s work. Eadweard Muybridge’s jumpers and divers, body parts of Henrietta Moraes and so on, are laid out as evidence that ‘inventing it’ was never as classy an activity as Bacon maintained, given that these were the images – illustrations really – that served him so famously well. Graphic images, photographs especially, were a godsend for someone requiring ready astonishment and ready-sorted tones.

(LRB 26 February 2009)

Thames and Hudson | hardback 224 pp. |ISBN: 9780500093443