Look Again: Death

Art about death can make us feel more alive. In this Look Again book, artist and writer Sean Burns contemplates the nature of death and its tangled relationships with life and love as depicted in art.

Death haunts art. It lurks in the shadows of Edward Collier’s Still Life as a reminder of our fragile mortality. It conquers all in Francis Bacon’s Triptych and Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out. But how has death emerged as such a persistent theme in art history? From intimate responses to meditations on the fleeting transience of life, Sean Burns explores how a breadth of historical and contemporary artists in Britain’s national collection have immortalised death in art.

The Look Again series are short books from Tate Publishing. Created to open up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, they explore what art can tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again.

About the author

Sean Burns is an artist and writer. He is the director of the film Dorothy Towers and the co-founder of QSP, an independent publishing imprint. He lives in London, where he is an assistant editor of Frieze.

• Dimensions 17.8 x 10.8 cm
• Material FSC certified paper
• ISBN 9781849768658