Michael has brought together the most notable remarks that Francis Bacon made to him during their thirty year long friendship.
The sayings assembled for the first time in Only Too Much is Enough form a brilliant accompaniment to Bacon’s paintings, conveying as they do not only a sceptical and sometimes disquieting outlook on human relationships, but also keen insights into the creative process.
For more details and to order a copy, visit here:
https://eris.press/Only-Too-Much-is-Enough
Michael has just written a substantial essay on the new phenomenon of ‘World Art’ to coincide with an exhibition of 27 established and up-and-coming artists from all points on the globe that opened in Singapore in January 2014. You can order the book HERE.
Michael has been interviewed about his involvement in this event, as well as about his career and his current projects. You can read transcripts of two of the interviews HERE and HERE.
Michael being interviewed by Jill Lloyd
Michael Peppiatt talks about Nicolas de Staël during a recent exhibition of his paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York. Watch it HERE.
Michael is currently curating a full-scale retrospective of the work of Joan Miró (working title: Joan Miró: A Painter among Poets), opening in January 2015 at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg and travelling to the Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf.
The recently rediscovered full and unedited version of Michael’s interview with Francis Bacon in 1987 – the first part in Bacon’s studio in London and the second in the Art International offices in Paris – can now be heard HERE.
To coincide with the opening of his recent Alberto Giacometti exhibition in Hamburg in January 2013, Michael Peppiatt gave the following keynote lecture at the Bucerius Kunst Forum on Giacometti’s crucial friendships with the leading poets and philosophers of post-war Paris, in particular André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. Listen to the lecture HERE.
Michael Peppiatt’s latest book “Interviews with Artists (1966–2012)” published by Yale University Press is out now. If you would like to read Michael’s account of how the book was written please click HERE.
Talking to Today programme’s Justin Webb, Michael recalls many incidents from forty years of interviewing artists, including getting drunk with Francis Bacon in an “epic fashion”. Listen to the interview HERE.
“Since 1963 – the year he met Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj to persuade them to contribute to his student magazine – Michael Peppiatt has been writing about art and interviewing artists. Now, he has selected 40 of his best interviews, some previously unpublished, for a new book, as an exhibition of works by some of his subjects opens in London.”–The Financial Times
“Hidden away in a New Collection of Michael Peppiatt’s Interviews with Artists, I spied Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai and Hans Namuth. Peppiatt is a soft but probing interlocutor, and his enthusiasm for his subject gleams from every page.”—Lucy Davies, The Sunday Telegraph
“The interviews are gathered from a variety of sources. One or two, previously unpublished, emerge pristine from Peppiatt’s archive; others appeared in English or American publications, or had to be translated from their original French. The book is full of nuggets such as Balthus musing on why so many people go to exhibitions: “One would think they were trying to fill some kind of terrible inner emptiness.” Or Dubuffet in 1977: “The trouble is that… artists have become more concerned with presenting their work than creating it.” Peppiatt is arguably the finest art writer of his generation, as this elegantly composed selection of his work amply demonstrates.”—Andrew Lambirth, The Art Newspaper
“Chronologically, the first interview in the collection took place in 1966 in the ‘splendidly vaulted, frescoed rooms’ of the Villa Medici in Rome, where Balthus was director at the time. Balthus was at once a fabulously gifted painter and a social charlatan, claiming a largely bogus aristocratic lineage that included Lord Byron. Young as Peppiatt was at the time, he spotted the fantasy yet good-naturedly joined in, speculating as to which tartan the Byronic connection would permit the artist to wear: ‘With his love of dressing up, Balthus warmed visibly to the idea of kilt and sporran’.”—John Banville, The Irish Times
“The art of the critic-interviewer is, like that of the psychoanalyst, to draw poi-gnant attention to what it is that the interviewee cannot express. The limitations imposed on Peppiatt are those of language itself, and they serve him well, causing him to nudge each of his subjects to the point where words fail them, to where the picture, the sculpture, the building or the photograph becomes the only means of expression.”—Talitha Stevenson, The Observer
“A sharp-eyed observer of the international art scene since the mid-1960s, Michael Peppiatt has spent his professional life with many of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. His close friendships and frequent studio visits with Dubuffet, Sonia Delaunay, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Balthus, Oldenburg, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson, among many others, have produced an incredible archive of interviews…from which the author has selected forty-five of the most noteworthy and fascinating for this deeply engaging book.”
“Many of the conversations published here have a spark and intimacy that allow unexpected insights into the lives and work of some of the 20th century’s greatest artists.”—Apollo (Off the Shelf)
Read an excerpt from “Interviews with Artists (1966–2012)” in the Financial Times HERE
Read the Observer review of “Interviews with Artists (1966–2012)” HERE
Michael discusses a rarely-seen Francis Bacon ‘Pope’ with Oliver Barker at Sotheby’s.