A close-up study of Francis Bacon’s paintings, magnifying details and looking at underlying themes. Francis Bacon famously resisted explaining his work, often claiming not to know what it meant. Yet this refusal has tended to discourage close looking, with critics favouring theoretical abstraction or biographical interpretation instead.

Francis Bacon: Closer sets out to reverse that tendency. Rather than reducing Bacon’s imagery to familiar tropes – violence, distortion, the ‘screaming popes’ – it explores the variety and complexity of his visual language. The book centres on detailed studies of eighty paintings, organized around motifs such as heads, mouths, wounds, pigment and abstraction, revealing the anatomical and psychological preoccupations embedded in the work.

While aimed at scholars, it will also appeal to anyone interested in how Bacon’s paintings were made and what they mean.