Exhibition catalogue to accompany Bacon/Moore: Flesh and Bone at the Ashmolean, Oxford; 12 September 2013 - 5 January 2014. 134 images not including the front and back covers.

The Foreword is by the director of the Ashmolean, Professor Christopher Brown CBE, who notes that it is 50 years since the first Moore/Bacon exhibition at the Marlborough Fine Art gallery in London, that there are no works by Bacon and only a few by Moore in the Ashmolean collection, and that the exhibtion will go on to be seen in modified form at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Richard Calvocoressi, the director of the Henry Moore Foundation writes: the 'Prologue'; the first essay of the catalogue titled 'Moore and Bacon: Affinities', and the essay starting on page 49, 'Catalogue: Henry Moore'.

In the Prologue, Calvocoressi notes the recent tradition of combined exhibitions since the Matisse/Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2002. He recalls attending a lecture by Francis Warner in 1970 on the subject 'Francis Bacon and Henry Moore' that drew comparisons and contrasts between Moore and Bacon; both lived through two World Wars, with Moore clinging 'to a belief in humanism, while Bacon epsoused a post-humanist, nihilistic world view'. The essay references Beckett's Breath and T.S. Elliot's Sweeney Agonistes.

In his essay 'Moore and Bacon: Affinities' Calvocoressi begins with a quote by Moore in 1961 about sculpture being based on the human body. There is reference to Stephen Spender being a friend to both artists and Spender's assertion that the pair have no equals in the 20th century. The impact of the 2nd World War and, in particular the blitz, is referred to.

In 'Catalogue: Henry Moore' Calvocoressi surveys a wide range of Moore's drawing and sculpture, structured around chapter headings: 'Early Sculpture', Post-War Sculpture, 'Post-War Drawings', 'Heroic Works of 1950s', 'State of Flux', 'Late Sculptures' and 'Last Drawings', in which he finds analogies between the two artists and their work.

In his essay 'Bacon and Sculpture' Martin Harrison, the editor of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné, focuses on Bacon's work, discussing Painting and Sculpture and Portaits and Sculpture. Harrison states that 'Two main criteria governed the selection of Bacon's paintings for this exhibition: the first that they shared Henry Moore's iconographic focus on the human head, or standing, seated or lying figures; the other that they should relate, generically or specifically, to sculptural forms.'

In his essay 'Catalogue Francis Bacon', Harrison charts the course of 20 of Bacon's paintings from 1933 to 1988, with a wide range of analysis and reference to influencers, including: Velazquez, Van Gogh, Rodin and Picasso, who Bacon, like Moore, Harrison asserts 'was trying to escape from the influence of' in relation specifically to Bacon's 1933 work Composition.

Francis Warner, Emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford is the author of the last essay 'The Bones and the Flesh: Henry Moore and Francis Bacon' in which he points to the differences between Moore and Bacon in terms of biographical detail, life-style, disposition and aesthetic sensibility, and yet how 'Bacon and Moore are the mirror image at the opposite end of the same spectrum' and that 'Bacon loved poetry and plays, and Moore plays and poetry'. Warner quotes two lines from W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming in honour of it being a poem often quoted by Bacon.