Incunabula

Incunabula reproduces the working material Francis Bacon kept locked away in his London studio: torn photographs, magazine pages, film stills, and book plates that he tore, folded, and stained before turning them into paint. The book gives the clearest evidence yet of how directly Bacon's imagery depended on found sources rather than observation from life.

Drawn from thousands of items recovered from 7 Reece Mews after Bacon's death and now held at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the volume reproduces over two hundred of these source documents in full-page plates. Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels group the material by subject: photographs of the body and of sculpture, stills from Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, and news images of violence that recur across Bacon's paintings. Barbara Dawson contributes a foreword, and Harrison's essay traces how each category of image entered Bacon's studio practice.

Harrison, editor of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné, and Daniels, an art historian who worked with the Bacon estate, treat the studio itself as an archive of the artist's private research. Read against Bacon's finished canvases, Incunabula shows him less as an inventor of images than as an obsessive editor of the ones already in circulation.