THE TIMES AND WATERSTONES BEST ART BOOK OF 2023 'Intimate and insightful . . . reads like a novel by Samuel Beckett' Paul Theroux A portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest sculptors from one of our most eminent art historians Today the work of Alberto Giacometti is world-famous and his sculptures sell for record-breaking prices. But from his early days as an unknown outsider to the end of a dramatic international career, Giacometti lived in the same hovel of a studio in Paris. It was Paris that made him, and he in turn immortalised the city through his art. Arriving in Paris from the Swiss Alps in 1922, Giacometti was shaped not only by his relationships with remarkable artists and writers – from Picasso, Breton and Dalí to Sartre, Beauvoir and Beckett – but by the everyday life, pre-war and post-war, of Paris itself. His distinctive figures emerged from the city's unique atmosphere: the crumbling grey stone of its humbler streets and the café-terraces buzzing with radical ideas and racy gossip. In Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, who spent thirty years documenting the Parisian art world and mixing with many of the people Giacometti knew, brilliantly charts the course of the artist's life and work. From falling in and out with the Surrealists to years of artistic anguish, from devotion to his mother to intense friendships, tragic love affairs and a fraught marriage, this is an intimate portrait of an outstanding artist in exceptional times.

It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes... Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine that he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos that Bacon created around him, Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.

Engaging encounters, personal anecdotes, and jargon-free critical insights into some of the liveliest creative minds in modern art, by an international art-world insider. Praised by The Art Newspaper as “the best art writer of his generation,” Michael Peppiatt has encountered many European modern artists over more than fifty years. This selection of some of his best biographical writing covers a wide spectrum of modern art, from Van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard, to conversations with painter Sonia Delaunay, artist and photographer Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s lover in the 1930s and 1940s, and Francis Bacon, perhaps the most famous of the many artists with whom Peppiatt has formed personal friendships. Michael Peppiatt’s lively, engaging writing introduces us to many notable art-world personalities, such as the Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies, whom he visits in his studio, and moments of disillusion, such as his meeting with the self-mythologizing artist Balthus. Art criticism blends with anecdote: Peppiatt recalls riding with Lucian Freud in his Bentley, drinking with Bacon in Soho, and many more revealing moments. This collection of Peppiatt’s most perceptive texts includes encounters with underrecognized artists, such as Dachau survivor Zoran Mušic, or Montenegrin artist Dado, whose retrospective Peppiatt curated at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Remarkably varied in their scope and lucidly written for a general reader, these selected essays not only provide us with perceptive commentary and acute critical judgment, they also give a unique personal insight into some of the greatest creative minds of the modern era. This book is a must-read for all lovers of modernism and post-war paintingin particular.

Michael Peppiatt's biography has long been viewed by Bacon scholars as the definitive life of a fascinatingly flawed figure. —Alex Larman, The Guardian (Praise for Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma) The best art memoir published in years. —Spectator Peppiatt offers a window into the experiences and emotional intelligence of this great artist. —New Statesman Fascinating and engaging. —Lynn Barber, Sunday Times (Praise for Francis Bacon in Your Blood) While working on ‘Bacon–Giacometti’, a major exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2018, the curator, writer, and art historian Michael Peppiatt carried out extensive research on the relationship between the two artists. “At one point I felt I could almost hear the two of them talking”, he revealed. For Peppiatt, the dialogue between Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti has been ‘turning slowly’ in his mind ever since Bacon told him in detail about his encounters with the Swiss artist, while the latter was in London in 1965 to supervise the preparations for his major exhibition at the Tate. This book, written in the form of a play, is about an imagined encounter between the two men. On the evening imagined by Peppiatt, Bacon and Giacometti enjoy a lavish dinner at Wheeler’s fish restaurant, then go on to the Colony Room—Bacon’s favourite club in Soho—to pursue their freely flowing conversation about life, art, and their mutual friends. After a while, the club begins to empty out, but the two artists, sensing that they may never have another occasion to talk, order more champagne...

A new collection of key texts from a leading critic of modern art The critic Michael Peppiatt has been described by Art Newspaper as “the best art writer of his generation.” For more than 50 years, he has written trenchant and lively dispatches from the center of the international art world. In this new volume of key works, Peppiatt gives his unique insight into the making, collection, display, and interpretation of modern art. Covering the whole spectrum of modern art—from pioneers such as Gustav Klimt and Chaim Soutine, to collectors and dealers who played a pivotal role in the modern art world, to artists such as Francis Bacon, Bill Jacklin, and Frank Auerbach, with whom he had close relationships—Peppiatt interweaves personal anecdote with critical judgment. Each text is accompanied by a new short introduction, written in Peppiatt’s signature vivid and jargon-free style, in which he contextualizes his writings and reflects on significant moments in a lifetime of artistic engagement. This volume will provide readers with an exhilarating tour of 20th-century art.

The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris – a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: 'You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you'. This, then, is one man's not uncritical love letter to Paris. Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt's relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a plucky young art critic. Having survived the tumultuous riots of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, recalling encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life – from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Peppiatt also takes us into the secret places that fascinate him most in this ancient capital, where memories are etched into every magnificent palace and humble cobblestone. On the historic streets of Paris, where all life is on show and every human drama played out, Michael Peppiatt is the wittiest and wickedest of observers, capturing the essence of the city and its glittering cultural achievements.

A collection of forty interviews by Michael Peppiatt with artists from 1966 to 2012.

A new selection of letters, statements, and interviews reveals the preoccupations, thoughts, and ideas of Francis Bacon, one of the twentieth century’s most influential and important artists. The documents selected for Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words illustrate Bacon’s sharp wit and ability to express complex ideas in highly personal, memorable language. Included here are not only letters to friends, patrons, and fellow artists, but also intriguing notes and lists of paintings. They often come with a sketch as an aide-mémoire or an injunction to himself as he worked in the studio, and many have only come to light since his death. Bacon's letters mirror and reveal his dominant preoccupations at different points throughout his long career. Most of Bacon's letters have never been published and include several that he wrote to author Michael Peppiatt. Particularly intriguing is the record of a dream that he jotted down, outlining impossibly beautiful paintings he had conjured up in his sleep. Together with photographs, archive material, and works by the artist are numerous reproductions of Bacon's characteristic handwriting, from the briefest jottings and notes to more extensive letters and statements. Bacon frequently came up with memorable epithets and definitions. He delighted in doing with words what he set out to do in painting: "I like phrases that cut me." Peppiatt explores the personal legacy of one of the twentieth century's most important painters and presents a compelling verbal self-portrait that reveals both man and artist.

Published in 1996, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was the first in-depth study of the artist's life. It has not been superseded. In this substantially revised, updated edition - to coincide with the artist's centenary, which will be celebrated from autumn 2008 through summer 2009 - Peppiatt will incorporate confidential material Bacon gave him, which he did not include in the first edition. This valuable, first-hand information comes from the hundreds of conversations Bacon had with Peppiatt, often late into the night, over thirty years, particularly during the periods Bacon spent living and working in Paris. It includes insights into Bacon's intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and his general view of life, as well as his acerbic comments on his contemporaries. Peppiatt will draw on some of the fascinating information that has become available in the fifteen years since the artist died. Once jealously guarded by the artist himself, the contents of Bacon's studio can now be freely consulted; Peppiatt has had privileged access to these archives, and he will show how a number of recent discoveries - including wholly unexpected source material - have radically changed the way we look at Bacon's work. Similarly, his recent research into the artist's background - his tortured affair with the sadistic Peter Lacy in Tangier, for instance, and the baffling circumstances of his death in Madrid - will shed light on unexplored areas of Bacon's life and work. Peppiatt will also unveil new information from several people who knew Bacon intimately and who have never gone on record previously.