This is a magnificently illustrated volume that showcases the unique work of Francis Bacon - one of the 20th century's most celebrated artists. The centenary of Francis Bacon's birth is being celebrated with major exhibitions at the Tate Britain, The Prado Museum in Madrid, and The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was arguably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth-century. The violent intensity with which his paintings give expression to the existential angst of his fellow human beings is virtually without parallel in the history of art. His oeuvre undoubtedly includes some of the most extraordinary and powerful paintings in modern art. Published to coincide with the centenary of the artist's birth, this magnificently illustrated volume features more than 140 stunning reproductions of Bacon's work - including his series of portraits and self-portraits, the strangely beautiful yet terrifying variations of Velazquez's "Pope Innocent X", the painfully moving "Crucifixion", his enigmatic figure studies, and twelve gatefold's of the powerful triptychs - all of which were selected for inclusion in this monograph by the artist himself before his death in 1992.

In 1932, at the peak of French colonialism, a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne established a Caribbean Surrealist Group, and published a single issue of a journal called
. Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself.
This fascinating book presents a series of key texts—most of them never before translated into English—which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are René Ménil’s subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by André Breton and André Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him on an ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent from 1931 to 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other.

In the autumn of 1924, two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille was just 27 and had recently started working at the Bibliotheque nationale. Michel Leiris, 23, was beginning his studies in ethnology. They discussed the idea of founding a movement which would displace Dada and of launching a magazine based in a brothel. Instead, within a few months, they both became members of the surrealist group. But their adherence to surrealism would not last long. In 1930 they were signatories to the infamous tract against Breton, the 'Machiavelli of Montmartre', as Leiris put it. But their own friendship would endure for more than thirty years and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962.As these letters show, their intellectual affinities were extensive and although they followed different trajectories - Leiris spending more and more time in Africa as an ethnologist, whilst Bataille remained in Paris developing the ideas on the sacred, sacrifice and eroticism for which he is best known - they continued to have a profound influence on each other. Including a number of short essays by each of them on aspects of the other's work, and excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of their correspondence throws new light on two of surrealism's most radical dissidents.

Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery.

1931. Invité par l'ethnologue Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris se joint à la mission scientifique Dakar-Djibouti, pour un voyage de 21 mois à travers l'Afrique. Il est supposé tenir le carnet de route de l'expédition mais, bien vite, ses propres impressions prennent le dessus. Avec une subjectivité revendiquée, attitude inhabituelle pour l'époque, l'auteur découvre l'Afrique coloniale avec ses mystères mais aussi ses bassesses.
Des falaises du pays dogons aux plateaux abyssins, les pays et les peuples rencontrés livrent quelques-uns de leurs secrets. Les petites et les grandes histoires du Continent noir prennent sous la plume introspective de Leiris des couleurs inattendues. Cette "aventure mentale plus encore que physique" se superpose à la vie de l'expédition : les pensées les plus intimes côtoient la description ethnographique et la chronique du quotidien. Au bout du compte, ce récit impressionniste nous convie à un parcours initiatique et laisse de l'Afrique des images paradoxalement plus réalistes que bien des descriptions "objectives".