Annalyn swan biography samples

Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American writer and biographer born Works [ edit ]. References [ edit ].

Annalyn swan biography samples: By the Pulitzer prize-winning

Retrieved October 22, National Book Critics Circle. Archived from the original on October 18, The New York Times. December 11, A sweeping biography, impressively researched and absorbingly written, of the charismatic immigrant who stood at the vortex of midth-century American art. Archived from the original on September 4, Retrieved September 3, AS His time in Paris is fascinating because it was the beginning of his short-lived design career, which he completely buried later.

He would have had exposure to Gray through a woman named Madge Garland, who was best friends with that whole group of designers in Paris. Madge was the fashion editor of British Vogue for four years in the s while her lesbian partner Dorothy Todd was the top editor, and the two of them were the queen bees in the design and fashion world at that period.

In a book Garland wrote later, she mentioned a room that Bacon had designed—a room for her, actually—but no writers had discovered this connection to Garland before. MS And Bacon wanted to be connected. The remarkable thing about this, from a biographical standpoint, is that Bacon, at only eighteen years old, is already setting out on a very ambitious design career.

Madge knew Virginia Woolf, she was very much interested in modernism and in bringing modernism to London. And she fastened on Bacon and Bacon accepted her as a mentor. So this is not a young and dissolute wastrel killing time, as Bacon would have you believe, but a determined young man looking for helpers and mentors, first in Madge Garland and then, back in London, in one of the chief modernist designers at the time, Arundell Clarke.

MC We knew that Bacon designed a bit of furniture here and there, but it always seemed strange, because how does an eighteen-year-old manufacture furniture? It was never really elaborated. MS And how does an eighteen-year-old get to painting without any training? It would have been intimidating, almost absurd, for an eighteen-year-old Englishman in Paris to start painting serious pictures in Montparnasse while Picasso was just down the block.

He moves into the very powerful design world in Paris, which has English, Irish, and American figures. It becomes a natural segue. Once you gain some fluency in design and you get to know people, well, it then becomes easier to take a chance at painting to see what happens. The design is not just an interlude; it helps make possible the move into more serious painting.

Annalyn swan biography samples: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, coauthors

Francis Bacon in his early twenties. AS He probably loved making money on his own. But he was also never abandoned by his family. So again, Bacon is not the most reliable narrator. She was the first woman to take up Francis apart from his nanny, who lived with him until her death, in He knew little girls. And then he moved on to women who were somewhat older than he was, who liked to help this charming boy.

AS He had this ability to be close friends with women that gets overlooked in the Soho sacred-monster legend, which is very much a male narrative.

Annalyn swan biography samples: The first major biography of de

And when you include them, another dimension of Bacon starts unfolding before your eyes. Generally he liked strong, tough women. A bit Miss Marple. Stocky and sensible shoes. Bacon could be a bitchy gossip about his friends, including Miss Beston, but he also liked to keep his friends. One important revelation in the book is that he remained so interested, not just in rough trade and being a sexual alley cat, but in serious long-term relationships.

AS Companionship and wanting companionship, that was really true throughout his life. Both of them were sympathetic characters who were very helpful to Bacon in his waning years. So there was a cozy side too. They presented him in the round. Their relationship was tortured and sometimes violent, but also revelatory for each man. They were together for ten years, on and off.

How and why did you develop and deploy this device? MS There are a couple of reasons. And you just want to get back to the narrative. We do discuss works of art within the text, but usually quickly, and these longer breakouts are a way to put some space between the life and the art. The device suggests that you must not reduce the art to the life or the life to the art—they can live together, but with some space, some oxygen, between them.

It represents a kind of modesty about what one can and cannot finally know. Francis Bacon with his mother and sister Ianthe in South Africa, Photo: courtesy The Estate of Francis Bacon. MC So what are some of your favorite biographies? Symons went on a sort of detective mission to find out about this man named Baron Corvo. But then you can also write brilliantly, as Richard Ellmann did in his Oscar Wilde [], where everything sparkles and is witty in the way that he describes his character.

He writes in the same spirit that Wilde wrote and lived. So I look at how you can make biography not boring; you have to find a way to reveal the character by degrees. By the end of the book, what you hope is that the reader has been fascinated, loved the story, and then has a real sense of the character. MS Biography is portrait painting.

And that means you leave some things out, put other things in, juxtapose magically.

Annalyn swan biography samples: The Anglo-Irish figurative painter, who died

US Edition. Available Now Hardcover: pages of text Also in eBook format US Publisher: Knopf Over black-and-white photographs and 37 paintings and triptychs reproduced in full-color art folios. Order US. The Book. This is not a portrait of a myth. It is the story of a man. And when it comes to the figure of Francis Bacon, a biography that can make manifest this intrinsic paradox must surely count as definitive.