Tuesday, June 4th, 7:00 PM

Michael Peppiatt—Francis Bacon, A Self-Portrait in Words and Giacometti in Paris 

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, this live event will take place in person at 192 Books, 192 10th Avenue, New York City, between 21st and 22nd Street. The event is free, with no reserved seating. Seating is extremely limited and will be first come, first served. Books will be available for purchase at the store. The event will also be available virtually and will be streamed directly on PCG Studio at 7:00 PM EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived.

Michael Peppiatt—Francis Bacon, A Self-Portrait in Words, Forward by Colm Tóibín – (Thames and Hudson, 2024) and Giacometti in Paris –(Bloomsbury, 2023)

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 the author. 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.’ Michael Peppiatt explores the personal legacy of one of the 20th century’s most important painters and presents a compelling verbal self-portrait that reveals both man and artist.

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.

Michael Peppiatt is a well-known writer and curator, who began his career as an art critic in London and Paris in the 1960s. Described by the Art Newspaper as ‘the best art writer of his generation’, his books include Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma and Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. He is guest curator of the Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition Francis Bacon: Man and Beast (London, 2022).