Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma.

This biography has a lot going for it: an urbane, insightful author and a famously flamboyant, risque subject who simultaneously is and isn't one of the signal forces in twentieth-century art. Michael Peppiatt, to his credit, does not fully conceal a certain ambivalence about the masochistic and controlling Francis Bacon, who lost two lovers to suicide - each just before the opening of a major exhibition - and kept house with his old nanny until he was forty-two, nor about the sometimes contrived-seeming terribilita of the Baconian oeuvre. The leitmotiv of Dorian Gray, invoked either to emphasize the artist's remarkably enduring if rather pickled boyishness or to conjure up the splenetic wonders of the portraits, serves Peppiatt well on both scores.

Even Bacon's detractors might agree that the artist at his best succeeded brilliantly in realizing his goal of getting pictures "to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime." There has been much less consensus, however, about the passing importance of that accomplishment, never mind its profound resonance. Peppiatt does not exactly bring the gavel down on this issue. Instead, he plea-bargains, in a sense, emphasizing the single-mindedness of an artist who so powerfully declared his loyalty to the human figure during the postwar decades - a period Peppiatt himself seems to identify almost exclusively with abstraction. (The cameo appearences in this book of the painter Lucian Freud, one of Bacon's frequent sitters, do little to cloud his view.)

Certainly, Bacon was a bit of a one-note trombonist. The mood of existential futility and ferocity so thoroughly associated with his work was pretty well in place from the very start, around 1930, which is when the artist, barely in his early twenties, gave up a promising first career as a self-styled interior decorator and furniture designer. (He largely stopped painting for nearly a decade soon after he began, however, and for the most part acknowledged only work dating from this second beginning, right before World War II.) Bacon seems, in general, to have been one of those people who were hatched fully formed. At fifteen or so, he was already well into women's underwear, a lifelong preference that in the short run proved to be a fast one-way ticket out of the house of his sclerotically hotheaded father. Once he returned to London from more than a year's sojourn abroad - on the loose in Weimar Berlin and prewar Paris, between the ages of seventeen and nineteen - he remained as out as out can be. There is indeed a hint of irony lurking about the notion that a man who spent hardly any time at all finding himself could be responsible - along with, say, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus - for some of the most widely recognizable symbols of postwar angst and doubt.

At times, Bacon's trademark flick-of-the-wrist-and-blur-of-the-brush facial distortions seem merely to be tricks, effective formal gimmicks, with a dash of Surrealist horror a la early Bunuel, derived from Picasso's Marie-Therese portraits, de Kooning's liberated licks of paint, and from the artist's longstanding skill at applying makeup to his own face. Many of his figure-ground relationships, in turn, seem to have evolved out of the combined principles of Muybridge's photographic studies of wrestlers and of AbEx gravitas as delivered by painters such as Motherwell, Newman, and Rothko. Yet we learn that the erstwhile decorator dismissed abstraction as "decorative" pattern-making and was witheringly snooty about its practitioners, referring to Pollock as "that old lacemaker" and comparing de Kooning's "Woman" paintings to "playing cards." According to Peppiatt, however, Bacon "also understood that taking a figurative image to the verge - but just short - of abstraction gave it a mysterious and compelling tension."

Something about the central emotion conveyed - the career-long fixation on themes of nihilism, carnal decay, and the primal sexual combat of males - screams adolescence. So did the artist's cloaked and cultivated aura - he played down his more or less upper-class background and was attracted to working-class men - and his society-flouting, sex-rebel stance. It appears that I am not alone in having first discovered and embraced this artist while still in my teens. By the '70s, Bacon had become a cult hero second only to Warhol among alienated youth all over Europe and the United States, but nowhere more than in Paris, where, as Peppiatt informs us, "These groupie-like followers had been building up . . . ever since Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais," in 1971. (Bernardo Bertolucci - that connoisseur of raffish chic - also saw the exhibition, just before he started shooting Last Tango in Paris, and "was so impressed by the paintings that he went back to the Grand Palais to look at them with his leading man, Marlon Brando." Thus, the film not only features Bacon images in its opening credits, but has a main character directly inspired by the classic Baconian physiognomy - "faces," as the director put it, "eaten up by something that comes from within.")

For a show at Galerie Maeght Lelong more than a decade later, in 1984, the groupies "turned out again in almost unmanageable force, with a strong punk addition that made them look more threatening. . . . His status was neatly confirmed when the words 'ONLY FRANCIS BACON IS MORE WONDERFUL THAN YOU' appeared on the graffiti-covered house where Serge Gainsbourg, the anarchist poet-cum-singer, lived."

Peppiatt met Bacon in Paris in 1963, while on assignment for a Cambridge University student magazine, and remained a friend until the artist's death in 1992. He is a remarkably unobtrusive observer. Although writing intimately and knowledgeably about an artist whose importance and popularity are inextricable from the '70s zeitgeist of sexual, especially homosexual, liberation - Bacon, in this respect, plays Lucifer to Hockney's happy angel - Peppiatt reveals nothing, even through his dedications, about himself. What he does offer are wonderful, pithy descriptions of louche as well as luxurious living in Berlin and Paris during the late '20s, the time of Bacon's defining wanderjahren; of Bacon's bizarre London menage, which for many years consisted of the artist, his older lover, and the memorable Nanny Lightfood, who did a bit of shoplifting for the household and had a vociferously expressed penchant for capital punishment (she wanted to see the duchess of Windsor hanged); and best of all, of that indiscriminate deployer of the pronoun "she," the artist. Bacon can be heard loud and clear in this keenly pitched book. No mean feat for a dead queen.

Lisa Liebmann writes frequently for Artforum.