青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Since its launch in 1985, the New Basic Art Series by German art-book publisher Taschen has garnered fans among art lovers the world over. Each installment brings scholarly yet accessible text and attractive plates together into a compact volume that offers a quick grounding on its featured artist. The series encompasses some 200 titles (and counting) and is available in more than twenty languages.

Seigensha is proud to bring this bestselling series to Japanese readers. Our second set of titles, out in April 2026: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Francis Bacon.

Gouging Out What Lies Deep Beneath
The art of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is rife with unsettling imagery—with grotesque forms that speak of the agony and anguish of human existence even as they incisively characterize their subject. His works are also considered among the earliest express treatments of homosexuality in painting. From Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) to Reclining Woman (1961) and Triptych March 1974, seventy-eight masterful and often shocking works trace the career of this largely self-trained visionary who rose to contentious fame in the immediate post–World War II years. The volume is all the more valuable for being the only Japanese-language compendium of Bacon’s singular artistic world currently in print.