Bringing home Bacon: the dark, twisted paintings of out Irish artist Francis Bacon hang in museums around the world, but it's the art he left at home that gets the attention in a fascinating new book.

Destroying your own works of art might be a practice best suited to the privacy of your own home--and that's exactly what famed British painter Francis Bacon did. His London studio, which was found filled with 100 slashed canvases after his death in 1992, is exhaustively documented in Margarita Cappock's new photo book, Francis Bacon's Studio (Merrell, $59.95). After his death, Bacon's partner, John Edwards, donated the artist's studio intact to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Clutter and all, it has been on display to the public since 2001. This handsome book, filled with color photos, vividly conveys the turbulent process behind Bacon's contorted canvases. Cappock, the head of the Bacon collection, provides discussion of the over 7,500 objects Bacon left in his chaotic and cluttered studio, including books, photographs, and even handwritten notes by the artist himself. "He rarely painted from life," Cappock tells The Advocate. "[His studio]'s heaps of torn photographs, fragments of illustrations, and artists catalogs provided nearly all of his graphic sources."

with reporting by Angie J. Han