CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/25/2026

The complete paintings of master and madman Francis Bacon

Self-Portrait with Injured Eye (1972) is reproduced from new release Francis Bacon: Paintings, The Complete Collection—an essential volume for any fan of the notoriously hedonistic Irish-born British artist’s raw and unsettling work—featuring more than 740 color reproductions over 568 pages. One of the most important, and yet consistently disturbing artists of the twentieth century, “Bacon created paintings that throb with life’s most harrowing truths,” author Laura Scalabrella Spada writes in her Introduction: “the fragility of flesh, the howling void of existence and the strange, grotesque beauty of human suffering. His paintings do not invite contemplation. They demand confrontation, thrusting viewers into visceral worlds where the boundaries of body and psyche dissolve into a raw, primal essence.” In addition to Spada’s texts, the book is interspersed with quotes by the artist and his wide circle of esteemed friends and colleagues, including Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin and J.G. Ballard, who writes, “Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no God.”