The Brutality of Fact

An acknowledged classic of its kind, this book, when it was first published, inspired Stephen Spender to assert that it 'may well have as great an influence on painting during the last quarter of the present century as the critical writings of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had on poetry during the 1920s and 1930s'. And Graham Greene wrote: '...An exciting document which can rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin.'

This Book of extraordinarily revealing interviews with Francis Bacon by the distinguished art critic David Sylvester, conducted over a period of twenty-five years, has now been sustantially expanded and updated. With a brilliant use of language, Bacon talks about his aims as a painter, the ways in which he works, and his life, responding with vivacity and candour to Sylvester's searching questions. Bacon's obsessive effort to record and re-create human form, his practice of making variations on old masters' paintings and on photographs, his dependence on chance, his views about the way in which his work has been interpreted, are only some of the subjects investigated in depth during these encounters.

In one of the new interviews Bacon tries to define what kind of realism could still be valid for the painter in a time dominated by mechanical means of recording reality. In talking about Picasso as a realist, Bacon alights on the notion of 'the brutality of fact', which now provides the title of this book. In the final interview Bacon talks freely about his early life, about how and where he has worked, and about his convictions as to the essential things that go to make an artist.

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