Triptych: How to Look at Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is one of the iconic figures of modern art. Jonathan Littell, the author of the controversial novel The Kindly Ones, helps us to understand what we experience when we stand before a Bacon painting. A populist art critic in the tradition of Robert Hughes and Simon Schama, Littell reveals the life behind the art—Bacon's Irish childhood, his obsession with Velázquez, and the catastrophe of his lover George Dyer's suicide, inspiring his most famous triptych. Always in the background is the author himself: haunting a Bacon exhibition at the Prado, tracking down Bacon's sources, sitting in a café and thinking about how we see. In this gemlike meditation on one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, Littell has made art criticism a living story.