Deeply intimate memoir-biography of the most important artist of the twentieth century
It's a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was, before that whole world vanishes and is retold by those who were never there.
Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House where, as a young student, he persuaded the photograher John Deakin to introduce him to the famous artist. Whisked to Wheeler's, Peppiatt was immediately caught up in Bacon's whirl, and there, over oysters and white wine, the first of hundreds of conversations soared; the first steps towards a friendship with the controversial painter which would endure for thirty years.
From Bacon's first electrifying early exhibitions - notably the major impact of his 1971 Paris reprospective, the very day Bacon's lover George Dyer was found dead in their hotel room - through the chaos of drink, drugs and gambling; predatory homosexuals, furtive clubs and East End criminals - Peppiatt was exhilarated by the freedom, vitality and artistic brilliance of the man who created such provocative, alarming work, the defining images of our times.
This is the story of two lives intertwined; not a birth-to-death narrative, but a series of moments at which the intensity that Bacon radiated transformed Peppiatt's life. Intimate and revelatory, the seamier sides of Bacon and the London art scene are here in all their glory, the harshness and despair balanced by profound admiration.
