The New Yorker: Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty

“[Stevens and Swan] won a Pulitzer for their 2004 biography of Willem de Kooning, and the new book is a comparable achievement…. It is enormously detailed; we get the details, and the details’ details.... Stevens and Swan are very good storytellers. Also, the book is warmed by the writers’ clear affection for Bacon. They enjoy his boozy nights with him, they laugh at his jokes, and they admire his bloody-mindedness. They do not believe everything he said, and they let us know this, but they are always in his corner, and they stress virtues of his that we wouldn’t have known to look for: his gregariousness, his love of fun, his erudition, his extreme generosity. However many people were at the table, he always picked up the tab.”

Joan Acocella, "Books: Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty." The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. This review appears in the May 24, 2021 print edition as "Books: "Art Made Flesh: The life of Francis Bacon."