Martin Harrison (curator)


Martin Harrison is a British curator of and writer about art and photography who is an authority on the work of Francis Bacon.

Francis Bacon

In the 1960s, Harrison worked as a photographer's assistant at Vogue. He has curated exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London, and others in Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Germany, where he co-curated a Bacon exhibition in 2006 at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. He contributed an essay to the catalogue of the Bacon centennial retrospective exhibition shown in 2008–2009 at Tate Britain, the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Harrison is one of the foremost scholars of Francis Bacon, and has published several books about his work, beginning with Points of Reference in 1999. Peter Conrad praised the careful investigation and deft criticism of his In Camera: Francis Bacon, concluding that it was "an opulent, paradoxically beautiful book". In 2013 he is continuing work with the Francis Bacon Estate editing The Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné. His writings on Bacon emphasize the importance to the artist's work of cinema and the photographs, often torn from magazines, that Bacon collected and referred to when working.

Photography

Harrison's 1998 book Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957-1965 is a broad survey, also discussing fashion photography. Its title, borrowed from Jonathan Aitken's 1967 book The Young Meteors, popularized the term, which other writers later applied to the photographers it covered without any mention of the book or its author.
Harrison encouraged Lillian Bassman to republish her fashion photography years after she had given up in disgust. He also edited Early Color, a collection of the photography of Saul Leiter, and prepared the work of Ron Traeger for exhibition.

Publications