Since his death in April 12 Francis Bacon has been acclaimed as one of the very greatest of modern painters. Yet most analyses of Bacon actually neutralize his work by discussing it as an existential expression and as the horrifying communication of an isolated individual—which simply transfers the pain in the paintings back to Bacon himself. This study is the first attempt to account for the pain of the viewer.

It is also, most challengingly, an explanation of what Bacon’s art tells us about ourselves as individuals. For, during this very personal investigation, the author comes to realize that the effect of Bacon’s work is founded upon the way that each of us carves our identity, our “self,” from the inchoate evidence of our senses, using the conventions of representation as tools. It is in his warping of these conventions of the senses, rather than in the superficial distortion of his images, that Bacon most radically confronts “art,” and ourselves as individuals.

This double volume includes: The value of forgery, Jonathan Hay; Affective operations of art and literature, Ernst van Alphen; Betty’s Turn, Stephen Melville; Richard Serra in Germany, Magdalena Nieslony; Beheadings and massacres, Federico Navarrete; Pliny the Elder and the identity of Roman art, Francesco de Angelis; Between nature and artifice, Francesca Dell’Acqua; Narrative cartographies, Gerald Guest; The artist and the icon, Alexander Nagel; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; Portable ruins, Alina Payne; Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its archi-text, Nebahat Avcioglu; The iconicity of Islamic calligraphy in Turkey, Irvin Cemil Schick; The Buddha’s house, Kazi Khalid Ashraf; A flash of recognition into how not to be governed, Natasha Eaton; Hasegawa’s fairy tales, Christine Guth; The paradox of the ethnographic-superaltern, Anna Brzyski, and contributions to “Lectures, Documents and Discussions” by Karen Kurczyncki, Mary Dumett, Emmanuel Alloa, Francesco Pellizzi, and Boris Groys.