Revisiting the art of Francis Bacon and his contemporaries

The nine items that I am submitting for a PhD by publication (two books and seven articles, amounting to some 220,000 words in total) constitute, I claim, a coherent body of research in terms of both subject-matter and of underlying art-historical methodology. The field studied is British figurative painting during the 1940s and 1950s, with particular reference to the art of Francis Bacon, who emerged as an innovative and influential figure at that time. Other British artists under scrutiny include Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. My main interest is in visual intelligence and the process of visual translation within creativity, as discussed in the accompanying, 12,000 word

reflective essay. I seek to analyse how artists feed in a highly purposeful and inventive manner off one another (Bacon and Sutherland in the 1940s), off their predecessors (such as Edgar Degas, Waiter Sickert, Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti) and, especially in the case of Bacon, off various kinds of photographic imagery, above all propaganda emanating from pre-war Nazi Germany. This approach serves to embed the interpretation of meaning and content, a crucial concern for all these artists against the backdrop of a profoundly traumatic period in world history, within the analysis of formal language and of the process whereby artists and extend and manipulate to their own ends available resources of two-dimensional imagery.