Martin Harrison

• Name — Martin Harrison • Born — 1945 • Birthplace — Coventry, Warwickshire, England • Occupation — art historian, curator, editor • Years Active — 1973–present • Notable Works — * Burne-Jones (1973) • Victorian Stained Glass (1980) • Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965 (1998) • Transition: the London art scene in the fifties (2002) • Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016)

In the 1960s, Harrison worked as a photographer's assistant at Vogue. Harrison was a founding trustee of the English Stained Glass Museum, located at Ely Cathedral, and curator of its collection from 1975 to 1980. 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 authorities on the work of painter Francis Bacon, and played an instrumental role in the development of the field of Francis Bacon studies, having produced the catalogue raisonné of Bacon's works. Harrison has authored several books about the British artist's work, and on Bacon’s life and his milieu, beginning with Points of Reference in 1999. In 2016, following ten years of research, Harrison completed the catalogue raisonneé of Bacon’s paintings, published in five volumes by The Estate of Francis Bacon. Harrison has edited and curated several volumes of essays and criticism on Bacon, and since 2019 has been editor of the Francis Bacon Studies series, established that year with the release of Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology, and Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, published by the Estate in association with Thames & Hudson. Harrison's 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. Peter Conrad praised ‘the careful investigation and deft criticism’ of his In Camera: Francis Bacon, concluding that it was "an opulent, paradoxically beautiful book".

Martin Harrison is recorded as art historian, photographer, writer, editor and musician.