Three Studies, painted in 1980 when Bacon was 71, is expected to fetch up to £5.5m when it is auctioned at Christie's in London 22 June.

The triptych has never been seen before by the public.

It was painted at a time when Bacon became concerned for his own mortality as he entered old age.

Several of his friends had also died in the past decade, which increased his fear - his partner George Dyer committed suicide in 1970.

Private sale

A portrait of him by Bacon fetched £4.9m at auction last year.

Dublin-born Bacon often dealt with themes of death and decay in his work and is probably most famous for his portraits.

Bacon kept hold of Three Studies for two years before selling it himself rather than through his gallery.

He once said: "I don't know that I should talk about a triptych in my case."

"Of course, there are three canvases, and you can link that to a long-standing tradition. The primitives often used the triptych format, but as far as my work is concerned, a triptych corresponds more to the idea of a succession of images on film."

The triptych is being sold as part of Christie's Post-war and Contemporary Art Sale.

 By Linda Sandler   Bloomberg  May 26, 2006

May 26 (Bloomberg) - Francis Bacon's studies for a self- portrait, hidden in a private collection for more than two decades, will go on sale for as much as 5.5 million pounds ($10.3 million) in London on June 22.

Christie's International is betting that the 1980 triptych painting, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, will set a record for Dublin-born Bacon, who is the U.K.'s most-expensive contemporary artist. The seller is an unnamed collector who bought the work from Bacon in 1982, London-based Christie's said in a statement. The artist died in 1992.

Auction houses are driving valuations higher, after taking in $900 million at their New York sales this month - the combined total for Sotheby's, Christie's International and Phillips de Pury & Co. On May 9, an Andy Warhol painting of a soup can went for 20 percent less than Christie's top estimate, indicating collectors may be resisting the run-up.

The discounted soup can was bought by the billionaire collector Eli Broad.

Christie's and Sotheby's Holdings Inc. are preparing to put on view art for their London June sales, which last year took in 160 million pounds. Christie's contemporary auction this year may raise about 21 million pounds, the auction house said.

Bacon's Study for a Pope I set a record of $10.1 million at Christie's New York in 2005, including commission, according to sale tracker Artnet AG. 

Francis Bacon embalmed

Richard Calvocoressi 

The Times Literary Supplement, March 29, 2006

Margarita Cappock
FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO
239pp. Merrell. £35 (US $59.95).
1 85894 276 4

The dismantling in 1998 of Francis Bacon’s London studio, wall by paint-spattered wall and object by distressed object, and its painstaking reconstruction in the Dublin City Gallery, ranks as one of the more extraordinary conservation projects of modern times. What Bacon would have made of the prospect of thousands of visitors every year gazing through internal windows in the Dublin museum at the hermetically sealed dust and intimate chaos of 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, is not hard to guess. He was a ruthless editor of his own work, destroying half-finished, and even finished, pictures, concealing as many of his sources as he revealed, and suppressing books and catalogues about himself that he did not approve of. It is said that on one occasion he even burned two sackfuls of crumpled photographs and press cuttings from his studio floor, in order to deprive a hopeful Tate Gallery of a potentially invaluable addition to its archive. In fact, as Margarita Cappock admits in this useful and beautifully illustrated book, colour photographs of Bacon’s studio taken in 1974 show it to have been even more congested than it was at his death: “. . . for all the sources that have survived, a great many must have mouldered away”.

It is nevertheless due to Dublin that we know considerably more about Bacon’s voracious but eclectic interests than before. The illustrated database compiled by Dr Cappock and her team at the City Gallery catalogues no fewer than 7,500 objects found in Bacon’s studio, including illustrated publications, photographs, press cuttings, notes, drawings, artist’s materials – among them several pairs of Marks and Spencer corduroy trousers used to apply paint – and slashed canvases. This remarkable research tool has already, in the four years since the studio opened, begun to change the face of Bacon scholarship. For instance, we now know that Bacon, contrary to what he maintained, sometimes made rough preliminary sketches, suggesting, as Cappock observes, that he “was much more premeditated in his approach to painting than he cared to admit”.

Dr Cappock herself adds to our understanding of Bacon’s complex relationship to photography. Some 1,400 photographs were found in Bacon’s studio, a considerable number of them portraits by the photographer John Deakin, including 129 alone of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. (The series of Lucian Freud on a bed may have been taken by Walker Evans, not Deakin.) Cappock argues that these photos, many of which were commissioned by Bacon, functioned as more than mere aides-memoire. Bacon stopped working from life in the early 1960s and relied increasingly on memory, or so he implied, when painting portraits of his friends. Deakin’s photos, writes Cappock, “were not just a means to reality; they often were the reality”. She coins the memorable phrase “destruction as a form of enquiry” to describe Bacon’s deliberate intervention in the surface of the prints – cuts, tears, creases, folds and paint marks.

Bacon’s aggressive manipulation of the photographic image for his own imaginative ends placed him in the role of editor rather than that of passive consumer. Sometimes disparate fragments would be joined by safety pins or paper clips; at other times Bacon would mount particularly telling details on to card. He even, on occasion, took photographs himself – most notably of his long-term companion and heir John Edwards, which informed a handful of comparatively benign late portraits. But it is in his painterly transformations of Deakin’s photographs that Bacon’s true originality lies, reinventing the human figure for an apparently post-humanist world. These records of his subjects’ appearance were recalled long after their deaths. Dyer’s features, for instance, dominated Bacon’s painting for some years following his suicide in 1971. And Bacon would sometimes transpose gestures or expressions captured by Deakin’s incisive lens from one subject to another.

Various photographs of Bacon himself were found in the studio, including several by Deakin, which the artist made use of for his own self-portraits. The automatic photo booth, where Bacon, frequently drunk, could experiment with different poses and indulge in the performative side of his character, was another catalyst. The potential of the multiple photo-strip to suggest a view of human personality as changeable and contingent would have appealed to Bacon’s sense of people in a state of flux. From the early 1960s he produced several small triptychs which show contrasting aspects of the same head.

Analysing the numerous books, magazines, loose leaves, newspapers and press cuttings recovered from the studio floor, Cappock identifies the principal themes that fascinated Bacon. Warfare, crime and political leaders supplied images of violence and power. Medicine, sport, wildlife and human locomotion – Bacon left four copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion – nourished his visceral and erotic iconography of the body. Humans and animals in extreme situations or moving at high speed provided the basis for many of his anatomical distortions, while Bacon’s interest in detailed photographs of injuries and skin disorders from medical textbooks influenced his palette as well as his depiction of flesh. Cappock speculates that the increasingly pathological view of human flesh in Bacon’s late work may also reflect the artist’s own physical decline.

The French publication on diseases of the mouth, which, Bacon told David Sylvester, was the origin of his obsession with the open mouth, was not found in the studio; but a fragment of a hand-coloured illustration of gum disease, almost certainly torn from it, was. Two copies of another book whose influence Bacon openly acknowledged, K. C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, were also found. But the most curious discovery made by Cappock and her colleagues was a well-thumbed and paint-smeared copy of a 1920 book on mediums, ectoplasms and other psychic phenomena by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, which Bacon never mentioned to anyone. As Martin Harrison in his recently published study of Bacon and photography has demonstrated, faked spiritualist photographs made a decisive impact on Bacon’s painting from an early stage.

That there is still more to be learned about Bacon is evident from this book, comprehensive though it tries to be. Faced with so much material, it has clearly not been possible for Margarita Cappock in the time available to follow up every lead. However, it would not have required much detective work to spot that the “Leaf from an unidentified book with black-and-white stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin . . . Date unknown”, has been torn from Roger Manvell’s 1944 book Film. This seminal little paperback includes five pages of stills from the famous Odessa Steps sequence that so haunted Bacon. Further research needs to be done on Bacon’s relation to the silent cinema, with its expressive facial close-ups. It is also tempting to look at Bacon against the backdrop of European avant-garde portrait photography, which, after the mass slaughter of the First World War, lost faith in the ideal of an integrated human face – and perhaps, by extension, in the notion of human identity as something immutable.

Colin Gleadell reports on contemporary auctions

The Daily Telegraph  16th May 2006

Before the sales, there was concern that competition between Sotheby's and Christie's had led each to extend financial guarantees of more than £26 million to owners to persuade them to sell. It was a risky policy that could have backfired.

Indeed, a poor Francis Bacon, over-estimated at £4 million to £6 million, failed to sell at Christie's.

         Man Carrying a Child  1956   Francis Bacon

BALLET TAKES YOU UP CLOSE TO MODERN DANCE IN A SMALL HOUSE                 

DANCE   SHERRY DAWN KNETTLE    VUE Weekly, Canada, 27 April, 2006.

Edmonton's independent arts and entertainment weekly magazine

Fri, Apr 28 (8 pm)
Up Close
By Alberta Ballet
Timms Centre for the Arts
(87 AVEnue & 112 Street), $30

POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART (EVENING SALE), Sale 1658
May 09, 2006, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

                         Man Carrying a Child  1956  Francis Bacon

Lot Number: 59

Creator: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Lot Title: Man Carrying a Child

Estimate: 8,000,000 - 12,000,000 U.S. dollars  Unsold

On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.

Pre-lot Text: Property from a Private American Collection

Lot Description:

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Man Carrying a Child
oil on canvas
77¾ x 55½ in. (197.5 x 141 cm.)
Painted in 1956.

Provenance:
Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Mrs. Brenda Bomford, Aldbourne
Marlborough Fine Arts Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature:

The Listener, LXV, February 1961, p. 360
X, II, no. 1, March 1961, pp. 24-25
S. Spender, "Francis Bacon", Quadrum, XI, December 1961, p. 49 (illustrated).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996, p. 250, (illustrated).
D. Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 86-87, no. 65 (illustrated).

Exhibited:

Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Three Masters of Modern British Painting: Sir Matthew Smith, Victor Pasmore, and Francis Bacon, 1958, no. 46.
London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, June-July 1959, no. 9.
Nottingham University, Francis Bacon, February-March 1961, no. 17.
Mannheim Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, July-August 1962, no. 44.
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, September-October 1962, p. 47 (illustrated).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Francis Bacon, October-November 1962, no. 42.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, January-February 1963, no. 38.
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Painterly Visions, 1985.

Lot Notes:

Enshrouded in darkness and framed by the strange gossamer threads of an invisible or transparent cage, this full-length portrait of a man in a jellaba stepping out across a hexagonal patch of warm sun-drenched landscape, is both a rare and unique work deriving from the time that Bacon spent in Tangiers. It is one of only two works in the artist's oeuvre to overtly refer to Morocco and to the important time that Bacon spent there on frequent visits in the mid-1950s. The other work is Bacon's 1963 painting Landscape near Malabata in which he commemorated his former lover Peter Lacy by painting a dark and enigmatic portrait of the Moroccan landscape in which Lacy had chosen to be buried. Situated just outside Tangiers where Bacon used to visit Lacy, this richly colored landscape, had also made a brief appearance in Bacon's 1957 painting Van Gogh in a Landscape. This earlier painting was one of an important and memorable series of 'Van Gogh' paintings depicting the lone figure of an artist walking in a Mediterranean landscape which to some extent also seems to have been born out of Bacon's experiences in Morocco. Rooted in the harsh sunlight, brilliant color and rich textures of Tangiers and (rarely for this time) depicting a lone figure striding across a landscape, Man Carrying a Child is an alternate and more ominous working of a similar theme. Painted immediately after his return from Morocco in the previous year to this series it is a work that clearly informed Bacon's Van Gogh paintings and bears an especially close resemblance to the1957 painting Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II.

According to Ronald Alley, the rare subject of Man Carrying a Child - a full-length walking figure - was inspired by one of the Moroccans that Bacon had met in Tangiers. It was apparently a subject that Bacon had, along with many others, first attempted to paint while staying in Tangiers but had ultimately found himself unable to complete satisfactorily. Man Carrying a Child was painted entirely in his Battersea studio when Bacon took up the subject again on his return to London in the autumn of 1956.

The summer of 1956 that Bacon spent in Morocco was the first of several visits to Tangiers that Bacon would make during the 1950s. Bacon was ostensibly travelling there to visit his lover Peter Lacy. Lacy was Bacon's first great love and his features haunt the figures of most of the artist's paintings from these years. Indeed, even though the central figure in Man Carrying a Child was clearly not based on Lacy but on a Moroccan man Bacon knew in Tangier, aspects of Lacy's features also dominate the face of the man carrying the child in this work too.

Older than Bacon and an ex-Spitfire pilot from the war, Peter Lacy had seemingly sought some kind of an 'escape' in Morocco that was to end with him seemingly becoming set on drinking himself to death. Lacy was by all accounts an excellent pianist and by 1956 had managed tie himself down to eking out a meagre existence in a Handful of Dust - like situation playing piano in a small-time Tangier bar known as Dean's Bar. Heavily in debt to the bar's owner, Lacy was obliged to 'tinkle the ivories' for the owner on a near permanent basis in order to pay off an amount that never seemed to decrease. Often playing eighteen hour stints, Lacy would play and drink himself into a stupor, his alcoholic consumption often matching or exceeding any reduction in his debt that he produced at the piano. Bacon's arrival in the summer of 1956 led to the first of many volatile episodes between the two men that would recur with increasing violence with each of Bacon's subsequent visits to Tangiers.

Tangiers at this time was the home of a vibrant bohemian homosexual scene. The widespread tolerance of the Moroccan authorities towards drugs, prostitution and sexual promiscuity had led to the town becoming a magnet for many artists and writers. Included among the more permanent residents of the city were the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky, the resident English writer Paul Bowles and the American Beat writer William Burroughs who was completing his first infamous novel of heroin addiction, The Naked Lunch in Tangiers. Set against this background of intoxication and of Beats, boys and promiscuity, Bacon and Lacy's tempestuous relationship grew dangerously explosive.

In the summer of 1956 Bacon had written back from Tangiers to his dealer Erica Bronsen that his visit to Morocco had proved inspirational and that his work was taking a new turn. Certainly, the light and rich colors that he found in Morocco can be seen creeping into several of Bacon's works from late 1956 and early 1957 not least the series of Van Gogh paintings from the following year. But what is not certain is how well Bacon was able to work in Morocco itself. Notoriously reliant on his London studio throughout his life, Bacon wrote to Erica Bronsen that in Tangiers, he had already finished four paintings, exclaiming that, "I think they are the best things I have done. I am doing two series, one of the Pope with Owls quite different from the others and a serial portrait of a person in a room. I am very excited about it. I hope to come back with about 20 or 25 paintings early in October... I feel full of work and believe I may do a few really good paintings now" (Letter to Erica Brausen, 1956, cited in Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London, 1996, p. 172).

In spite of all his talk about how well things were going in Tangiers, his letters to Erica Bronsen also preceded other letters asking for more funds to prolong his stay. Bacon is known to have begun several paintings in Tangiers but only one - the aforementioned Pope with Owls - made it back to London. In a fit of jealous rage one night, Peter Lacy was said to have slashed and destroyed the rest of Bacon's Moroccan paintings, much to the artist's amusement. Bacon too is known to have destroyed several of his own works and to have left other unfinished canvases permanently abandoned in Tangiers. Years later in discussion with David Sylvester Bacon admitted "I did paint a certain amount there (Morocco) but not at all successfully. I think perhaps the light was too strong" (cited in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact , Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 190).

With its richly patterned and textured ground and, for Bacon, its surprisingly vivid colour, Man Carrying Child evidently owes something to kind of orientalising influence that North Africa had provided for earlier modern painters such as Paul Klee, August Macke and Henri Matisse. But though Bacon's time in Tangiers evidently played some part in determining the colour and light of some of his paintings over the next few years, it played another altogether more important role. Despite all its apparent gaiety and decadence, Bacon's experiences in Morocco and the painful split from Peter Lacy that his visits there also signaled, reconfirmed in him his dark existential view of life and his sense of the ultimate isolation of modern man.

The ambiguous setting of this work serves to further enhance an uncanny sense of isolation and alienation. The scene is only illuminated by a strange hexagonal patch of floor that seems to extend into the distance as if reflecting the light from a skylight or a floor from a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. A similar shape to those used in Bacon's earlier paintings of a Dog in 1952 and of the Sphinx in 1953, this richly coloured and patterned floor forms a strangely modern stage-like pedestal for the standing figure above it. This sense of artifice and disturbing unreality is further enforced by the wire-like threads of a cage seeming to frame or encase the figure and his shadow, imprisoning his life as if this deceptively free and nurturing man too were merely an insect pinned in a case. The cage, a familiar motif from Bacon's portraits of screaming Popes made throughout this period, is here used as if to capture and frame the St Christopher - like actions of a man that Bacon had perhaps seen crossing the marketplace in Tangiers in just such a fashion. Trapped and frozen in a state of motion like a fleeting snap shot-like image from his memory or one of the Muybridge photographs that he so often consulted, the painting shows a vivid, intimate and intensely human aspect of life as but a fleeting shadow on an empty artificial stage.

Bacon work installed in new Hugh Lane

RTE Ireland   23 March 2006

One of Francis Bacon's unfinished works became the first painting to be hung in the new extension to Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, today.

The gallery, which was first opened in 1903, has been closed for the past two years, in order to complete an extension which has doubled the size of the premises.

The first painting to be hung in the new extension was 'Seated Figure on a Dappled Carpet', which is one of six unfinished paintings by Francis Bacon that have been acquired by the gallery.

The paintings, which reveal more about the artist's unorthodox techniques, relate to his famous studio which is also housed in the gallery.

Finishing touches are currently being added to the extension but the exhibition will open to the public on 5 May.

A portrait of Bacon

ABC News    By Emma Rodgers in Adelaide.    Saturday, March 11th 2006. 

 

The aim of the play is to create a portrait of the artist and his muse that is as startling as one of Bacon's own portraits. What I've endeavoured to do in staging it, is to be true to that idea with without attempting too much literal evocation of the paintings...I've attempted to avoid it becoming a biographical interpretation.

That's what director Jim Sharman says about Three Furies and not only was it startling, it was nightmarish, bleak and constantly on a knife edge of comedy and tragedy.

The play, written by Stephen Sewell, explores the painter/model relationship between Francis Bacon and George Dyer, a petty East End criminal and Bacon's lover for several years.

The production also features several cabaret-style songs, sung brilliantly by the third fury, Tisiphone (Paul Capsis) who torments Bacon over his treatment of George.

I was somewhat sceptical of going into a production which attempts to not only reflect on a "flamboyant artist's life", but to do it through song.

However the use of music, with an accompanying double bass player, pianist and percussionist on stage, mixed with tumultuous scenes between Francis and George gave an emotional insight into Bacon's life and motivations.

Socratis Otto who plays George, looked everything like the wannabe East End gangster in the Kray-style suits, struggling to be more than a thief through his involvement with Bacon.

The production is fast and clever, full of witty one liners delivered by Simon Burke as Bacon, ("champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!") and has you laughing, although sometimes you don't know why as you're watching torturous scenes as George pleads with Francis to be allowed to be seen with him at his Grand Palais retrospective.

The set is at times glamorous and at other times reminiscent of a Bacon's slaughterhouse-style paintings as a hideous animal carcass slides in and out of view.

The Adelaide Festival of Arts' final performance of Three Furies is tonight and a Bacon triptych is also on display at the Art Gallery of SA.

By Tim Lloyd   Adelaide, Australia  06 March 2006

SIMON Burke is reclining in a pile of cushions in the Persian Garden. It's in the middle of the day and the Adelaide Festival's nightclub venue, strewn with masses of Persian carpets and cushions and cute little ottomans, is empty. But the palm trees are shady, the Torrens is rippling to a gently cooling breeze, and the drunken, tortured genius of British artist Francis Bacon seems a long way away.

Simon Burke, best known as a lively musical theatre star, is deeply ensconced in one of the 20th century's most complex artistic characters, playing the role of Francis Bacon.

"I knew absolutely nothing about him, and I don't think I had even seen any paintings of his," confesses Burke.

It was July, 2004, and Burke was staying here for the 2004 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, when he first read the script of Three Furies.

"It's kind of cool that I was here then, and two years later I am here doing it," he says.

Burke tells the story of being gently admonished by director Jim Sharman for having been in Adelaide for 24 hours and not having seen Australia's key painting by Bacon, Triptych (1970). The painting has been moved from the National Gallery of Australia to the Art Gallery of South Australia for the Festival.

"I did something that was typically Francis Bacon," says Burke. "I caught a cab from the hotel and kept it waiting for 20 minutes while I went in and sat with the Triptych. It did wonders for me. I had seen his work before in New York and London, but now knowing him and feeling him made it extraordinary."

Amazingly for an actor who has had such a long and distinguished career in the theatre, Burke has never before performed in a play by leading Australian playwright Stephen Sewell, or been directed by the almost legendary Sharman. Given its international relevance, Three Furies could conceivably go on to tour the world, and thus totally transform the career of the actor with it.

Indeed, the production, which was a joint initiative with the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, has already been seen in Sydney, Auckland, Perth and now Adelaide.

Burke says there has been considerable interest in the production internationally.

"It's a phenomenal piece of writing and there is quite extreme technical and emotional and physical challenges to the role, but to me it's the most intellectually stimulating thing that I have done as an actor," he says.

"It's very rare that your mind gets used as an actor. We use our emotions and our instinct and our technique, all of which are put to the test in this performance, but this adds the mind. It's because a combination of the genius of Francis Bacon together with Stephen Sewell and Jim Sharman is a pretty scary collection of people. The play kind of uses Bacon as a symbol for all artists.

"I think Jim and Stephen both identify themselves in the character I am playing - what does it cost you personally as an artist and what do you have to destroy in order to do it. It's a pretty heavy subject, and I myself identify with it as well, although I try not to identify too much with it because it's dark."

Burke sees Bacon as someone who single-handedly changed the way people looked at things. "I think what Jim Sharman attempts to do with this production is to get that same sensation people had when they saw Bacon's works in the 1940s and 50s. It's something that cuts through and shows you reality in a quite different way," he explains.

"I feel it almost costs me to do this what it may have cost Bacon to paint or Jim to direct or Stephen to write. It's not that you don't invest in everything as a performer but this demands a lot of you. By the end of it, I'm spent. The only downside to a role like this is that you stay in your room all day with the curtains drawn. That's what I did in Perth.

"But I love Adelaide so much and I am a great fan of Brett (Sheehy) and I think he has done such an astounding job here that I will try to get out." Burke's parting quip is "I'll be rolling around drunk somewhere". Bacon, the legendary drinker, should forgive him that.

 Three Furies, reviewed next page, plays at the Playhouse until March 11.

A Symphony in Three Movements

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
Published February 26, 2006

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As you see, we've entered the 21st century,'' Stefan Sanderling said, gesturing to the wall behind him where a slide of information on Mark-Anthony Turnage was projected.

Sanderling, music director of the Florida Orchestra, was starting his preconcert talk in typically breezy fashion. He had enlisted visual aids to make his case for Turnage, anticipating that the British composer's angular, angry music would be a tough sell to the audience.

About 100 people turned out for the talk, sitting on folding chairs in a hall adjacent to the sanctuary of Pasadena Community Church in St. Petersburg. The orchestra is playing there while its usual venue in the city, Mahaffey Theater, undergoes renovation.

The program was appealing: Turnage's Three Screaming Popes, a jazzy walk on the wild side for an orchestra that doesn't get to play much contemporary music; William Schuman's tuneful slice of Americana, New England Triptych; and one of the greatest symphonies ever written, Beethoven's mighty opus to a hero, Symphony No. 3, the Eroica.

In Three Screaming Popes, Turnage's 1989 homage to Francis Bacon's lurid, angst-ridden paintings based on Velásquez's portraits of Pope Innocent X, the instrumental forces were as big as a Mahler symphony, with extra brass and winds, saxophones, electric keyboard and much percussion, even a police whistle. With strains of Gershwin and Copland running through the mix, the orchestra sounded like some kind of crazed dance band. A series of bloodcurdling "screams'' came at the end.

The crowd barely stirred after this cacophony. At each performance of the Turnage, the response was tepid, and in some cases, downright hostile. A man gave von Dassow a thumbs-down signal at Pasadena. A couple in front of me at Morsani walked out.

New music had gotten another indifferent - at best - reception, one of those perennial episodes in the life of an orchestra, many of whose younger musicians are closer in sensibility to the rowdy riffs of Turnage than the country dance rhythms of Beethoven.

Market news: confident buyers set the pace The Daily Telegraph  14/02/2006   Colin Gleadell rounds up all the latest news from the contemporary market   An intoxicating mixture of cash-rich individuals, some genuine masterpieces and a rash of headstrong bidding ensured that contemporary art remained the most buoyant sector of the art market last week when Sotheby's and Christie's achieved record sales levels in London. Of the 124 lots offered in the main evening sales, 118 were sold, 74 for prices well above saleroom expectations. Sixteen artists' records were broken and £67.4 million changed hands. The comparable figure last February was £39.8 million. Christie's began with a selection of paintings from the estate of the Marlborough Gallery's director, Valerie Beston, and everything went through the roof. A glittering landscape by Frank Auerbach fetched a record £433,600, four times Christie's estimate, from New York gallery Acquavella. A Francis Bacon self-portrait sold for £5.16 million, nearly three times the estimate. The prices were the more exceptional because these were all small paintings. The highest price for a small Bacon was previously £1.4 million.   Irving Penn's portrait of Francis Bacon And a ghostly Francis Bacon, Two Figures at a Window (1953), took £2.3 million - three times the price it made in 1999. Auction records were broken for Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, and Keith Tyson. The sales ended where they had begun - with the remains of the Valerie Beston estate at Christie's. But anyone looking for a bargain was disappointed. A photograph of Bacon by Irving Penn, torn and splattered with paint, sold for £187,200 - 10 times its estimate - to a private UK collector. A portrait of Bacon by Michael Clark sold for 50 times its estimate at £50,400. These are puzzling times for saleroom experts. As Cheyenne Westphal of Sotheby's said: "Our estimates are no longer relevant. The new buyers are so confident, they make their own values."

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

No More Francis Bacon

by Bill Bonner

We didn't think we could stand seeing it again. Now we don't have to.

Christie's auction house on Old Brompton Road, South Kensington, has had a portrait in the window for the last few weeks – Francis Bacon's 1969 'Self Portrait.'  Every time we walked to the tube station we had to pass the hideous thing – with its huge bent nose and its corrupted mug. It looked like the face of man who had shot hit own grandmother or drowned his dog.

Who would want to own such a painting? It was so depressing it would have made us want to blow our own brains out.

Apparently, it had that effect on several other people. A friend of the artist (a burglar whom he caught in his apartment and to whom he became attached) committed suicide, and Bacon himself tried to destroy most of his own paintings.

But such is the strength of the boom in London's financial industry ...such is the bubble in "assets," and such is the soft-headedness of "art" buyers that the revolting thing was sold for more than twice the amount expected. It went for 5.2 million pounds (about $9 million).

We pity the poor sap that bought it. It is not an "asset" at all – but a wretched liability. The buyer could hang it on his living room wall, but then he and his loved ones would be forced to gaze on it day after day. Better yet, he could hide it away, and then at least he'd be performing a public service. In either case, he would have to hope that an even bigger fool would come along in a couple years to take it off his hands.

Copyright © 2006 Bill Bonner bent nose and its corrupted mug. It looked like the face of man who had shot hit own grandmother or drowned his dog

Happy as Larry

ArtForum  London 10.02.06

Record-breaking auction prices are the norm today, so the fact that Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale achieved the highest ever UK total for such an event Wednesday evening is not really big news. The auction room was more crowded than usual, with elderly and the self-important attendees complaining like only the rich can about the lack of seats. The pre-sale babble was louder and the ringtones were more diverse. Most importantly, it was just a little harder to resist being seduced by the tantalizing hum of acquisition and profit. The art market, as one insider noted, is "hot but solid with lots of depth."

Christie's UK doesn't use paddles so the bidding took the form of hand flicking, pen wagging, bid-card waving, reserved nods, and insistent eye contact. I sat next to a notoriously grumpy Swiss dealer, who grunted, sometimes even shouted his bids, and not far from a female British consultant who did a lot of insistent finger snapping. Amy Cappellazzo, International Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, joked, "I've always suspected that people's bidding strategies are connected to their sexual performance. Some bidders are not afraid to let the auctioneer know what they want. They're shameless in their desires and transparent about their needs." Presumably, other bidders like to keep you guessing, so discrete that they're either alluring or plain frustrating. Art consultant Sandy Heller saw it another way: "I need to be shy with my clients' money. I want the auctioneer to think that every bid is my last bid. The key thing to avoid is regret. You really don't want to take the wrong girl home—particularly for the wrong price."

The crowd was keen for the first four lots of British paintings, but the energy in the room really shifted with Lot 5, a 1969 Francis Bacon self-portrait from the collection of the artist's devoted spinster friend, Miss Valerie Beston. Sitting in the fifth row in a pale-blue shirt and dark grey blazer was expansionist dealer Larry Gagosian. Although not known first and foremost as a Bacon man, Larry has exhibited him in the past and, given his evident interest in the Lot, he must have inventory back at the gallery whose collective worth would be bolstered by a high price. When the bidding started out slowly, he wore a slight frown. His head swiveled with the bids, trying to keep track of who was doing what, and he looked concerned. He may have made a bid at around £2 million in his casual "why not" arm-swinging style, but I couldn't be sure from where I was sitting. When the bidding hit £3 million, his face started to relax, then at £3.5m, it cracked into a broad smile. At £3.7m, he started to look like a big kid, and his eyes kept shifting up to the currency converter to confirm the dollar value of what he was hearing. With each increment, Larry's eyes expressed increasing wonder. When the painting finally sold for a whopping £4,600,000 hammer (£5,160,000 including the buyer's premium), the audience applauded and Larry had a good belly laugh.

And that was the highlight of the sale. 

—Sarah Thornton

Christie's Packs in U.S. Dealers, Sets 10 Records (Update3)

By Linda Sandler   Bloomberg  9th February, 2006

Bacon's 'Self-Portrait' Goes for $9 Million at Christie's Sale

To contact the reporter on this story:
Linda Sandler in London at  lsandler@bloomberg.net.News 

News-Antique.com        9th  February, 2006

London – The highest ever total for a Post-War and Contemporary art sale in Europe was achieved at Christie’s this evening when 58 works of art realised £37,038,000 ($64,557,234 /£53,853,252).

The record sale was 94% sold by lot and 99% sold by value. 10 new world auction records were set and 10 works of art sold for over $1 million (8 for over £1 million). Buyer activity in the sale was 66% European, 30% American, 2% Asian and 2% Middle East.

“Christie’s, the global market leaders in sales of Post-War and Contemporary art, continues to dictate the pace of this auction market category,” said Fernando Mignoni, Director and Head of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art department in London. “Christie’s sale demonstrates not only the current, unprecedented strength of this field but also how international the market has become. Increasing numbers of new collectors for both Post-War and Contemporary Art have resulted in prices growing considerably year on year. As well as the new stars continuing to emerge among the younger generation of artists, strong results were also achieved for classic Post-War art; in particular the Warhol market is unparalleled and rising. It was also the night of the London school with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon again leading the prices. This was a great night for the London and European art market.”

The two top lots of the evening were both by Francis Bacon. The raw and powerful Self-Portrait, 1969, more than trebled pre-sale expectation selling for £5,160,000 ($8,993,880 /£7,502,640). The condition, the impeccable provenance and the haunting appeal contributed to this superb result. An example of Bacon’s celebrated ‘Pope’ series, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, 1959, realized £5,160,000 ($8,993,880/£7,502,640).

Driven by the arts

By Thor Kah Hoong

Malaysia Star, Malaysia - 6 February, 2006.

Rectifying an oversight last week: Wishing readers a flea-free new year ... except for those who enjoy a good scratch. 

It’s a clichéd annual ritual to observe how deserted the capital city is on a long week of leave. And it was. For one week driving was not a simmering stew of resentment and rage while bumpers inched forward in a mockery of movement. 

For one week, I lazed and devoured a dozen DVDs. Didn’t have much time (or mood) for reading. Just managed to finish Daniel Farson’s memoir The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (Century), and re-read a few of The Paris Review interviews. 

I found this bit from E.L.Doctorow amusing and wise. It’s one answer to the question about what writing taps into: 

“I subscribe to what Henry James tries to indicate when he gives the wonderful example of a young woman who has led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of that, said James, if she’s a novelist she’s capable of going home and writing a perfectly accurate novel about army life. I’ve always subscribed to that idea. We’re supposed to be able to get into other skins. We’re supposed to be able to render experiences not our own and warrant times and places we haven’t seen ... Writing teachers invariably tell students. Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing.”  

Writing is knowing. I think this thought, the knowledge/wisdom that is derived from the process of creation, applies to all creative arts. I’m reminded of the artist Franc Kline who noted: “Well, look, if I paint what you know, then that will simply bore you, the repetition from me to you. If I paint what I know, it will be boring to myself. Therefore, I paint what I don’t know.” 

While talking about a coincidence of thought, the following from the interview with William Faulkner struck me as resonant, to some extent, of Francis Bacon (the 20th century Anglo-Irish artist, not the 17th century philosopher/statesman): 

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and every body to get the work done. 

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he’s a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is wroth any number of old ladies.” 

Compare Faulkner’s sentiment (a bit hyperbolic) with Farson’s comment on Bacon: 

“He betrayed many of his close friends, especially if they were rival artists, and some did not forgive him. He was totally amoral. He had little time for weakness in others and no patience with human foibles or small vanities.” 

One must resist an easy acceptance of bad behaviour. I certainly don’t believe an artist, no matter how brilliant, is licensed to be an a*****e. The calling doesn’t justify his behaviour; just possibly explains it. 

Yet we are, I am anyway, drawn to such electric personalities, charged with an energy that the rest of us are fearful of (yet fascinated by, in a ghoulish curiosity). 

Expanding on a note earlier in this column, Francis Bacon’s father did claim to have been descended from the 1st Viscount St Albans, the man described by Alexander Pope as “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” 

The philosopher was also a pederast who died in debt, a pedigree that his namesake was proud of. 

Of course, one must never take the pronouncements of artists as gospel, the whole truth. There is always an element of a pose – in prose and in person. Nobody is as he claims to be – not Doctorow with his seeming put-down of life and experience, not Faulkner with his mum-bashing. 

My own romantic bias is that the artists speak true, whether consciously or not, in their works. 

And in Bacon’s works, what you have is power and prison together, an individual detained in a cage, a grungy room, barely lit, suggestions of torture, screaming. In many cases, screaming – like Munch’s stolen, still missing masterpiece. In Bacon’s paintings, Munch’s inspiration was layered with the help of a manual on oral diseases, mucous-wet, inflamed, pus-filled.  

The subject is getting a bit yucky. I think I’d better torture you next week with the rest of my thoughts on Bacon (or Eggs as he was known to his friends).  

Thor Kah Hoong is a lecturer, actor and bookstore owner (Skoob Books, Old Town Petaling Jaya; 03-77702500).

The Daily Telegraph  31/01/2006 Arts: Market New   Colin Gleadell    Works by School of London artists Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach worth £20 million are up for pre-sale viewing at Sotheby's and Christie's in London this weekend. The five works by Freud span nearly 60 years and are estimated to fetch up to £8 million. A dozen small paintings, drawings and etchings by Auerbach dating from 1954 to 1994 could fetch over £1 million. Most belonged to the late Valerie Beston, a director of the Marlborough Gallery, whose previously unknown collection is being sold by Christie's. The jewel of the collection is a small self-portrait by Francis Bacon, estimated at £1.4 million to £1.8 million. But the highest-value painting in the sales is the £5 million ascribed by Christie's to Bacon's 1959 painting, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (below).   Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez Christie's has not disclosed the identity of the seller, but the painting is known to belong to Madame Georges Marci, an art dealer based in Switzerland and Monte Carlo. Christie's is so confident of its value that it has guaranteed Madame Marci an undisclosed sum whether the painting sells or not.

Hockney? He's such rubbish, Bacon said By Dalya Alberge The Times January 30, 2006 Tapes reveal the late artist's scorn for his rival's 'dreary' work

PAINTINGS by David Hockney have been damned from the grave by Francis Bacon as “such rubbish”. Bacon’s criticisms can be heard in private recordings that have been revealed to The Times before their publication this year. In a conversation taped on a summer’s day in 1982, Bacon can be heard unequivocably dismissing Hockney’s paintings. Having just visited the Tate, he complains about the gallery’s incongruous juxtaposition of one of his own favourite works, his huge and powerful Triptych — August 1972, with Hockney’s well-known painting My Parents. Bacon says on the tape: “They are such rubbish, those Hockneys . . . I mean that awful one of his mother and father — so depressing, it really is, the dreary side of north England.” He was referring to Hockney’s 1977 painting, in which the Bradford-born artist depicts his mother being attentive and graceful, while his father reads. The Tate bought it in 1981, a year after buying Bacon’s Triptych, in which two solitary figures frame a couple engaged in a struggle that seems both violent and sexual. It was Bacon’s haunting farewell to his friend George Dyer, who had committed suicide. Bacon objected to the displaying of the works together, saying that the Hockney “doesn’t mean anything to me — I don’t know why I should have been put in the room with David Hockney . . . I don’t care for him and he doesn’t care for me”. The comments are particularly controversial because Bacon and Hockney are so widely revered and the criticisms have emerged only after Bacon’s death. Bacon is admired for iconic paintings that convey brutality and pain. His masterpieces include his screaming popes in which Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was converted into a nightmarish depiction of hysterical terror. Hockney’s best-known paintings include A Bigger Splash (1967), which shows a splash made by an unseen diver in a brilliant-blue swimming pool. Bacon’s view of Hockney was preserved in 16 hours of interviews with Barry Joule, a Canadian friend and neighbour in South Kensington for 14 years. Mr Joule, 51, who will publish the tape’s contents in a book, Francis Bacon — Verbatim, said Bacon knew that they would one day be made public. “He trusted me,” Mr Joule said. “The book will be Francis absolutely verbatim — not a single word altered — his views on a huge range of topics . . . art, people, you name it. “Francis put a stranglehold copyright on me . . . for 12 years after his death. That is up now and my book will set many a Francis Bacon record straight.” The two men met in 1978, forming a friendship that would last until the artist’s death in 1992. They would sit down together to make the recordings, chatting until they ran out of tape. The artist gave his friend works that included 1,200 sketches, which Mr Joule donated to the Tate in 2004. Estimated to be worth £20 million, it was one of the most generous donations in the Tate’s history. He will donate all his tapes to the Tate after the book’s publication. Mr Joule also has a large number of unpublished photographs of Bacon, which he will feature in the book. One of them is the subject of a legal action against the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in Paris, headquarters of the French museums, over an alleged breach of copyright. Mr Joule claims that the organisation reproduced one of the pictures without his permission. On being told of the tapes, Hockney’s dealer, David Juda, said: “Bacon is a great artist. I’m sure David would think Bacon is a great artist . . . I cannot believe that deep down in his latter years he [Bacon] didn’t respect Hockney.”

Valerie at the gallery

She was prim, proper and fiercely private; the gallery administrator who quietly controlled the creative chaos surrounding artists such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. But, as her estate goes under the hammer at Christie's, Harriet Lane reveals the passions that lurked beneath the calm exterior of Miss Valerie Beston 

    The Observer Magazine, Sunday January 29, 2006


     

      French leave: Miss Beston with Francis Bacon on

      the steps of the Grand Palais, Paris, 1971.

Inspired by Francis Bacon, Miles Davis and all that jazz...

 KENNETH WALTON   News

 Monday 30th January, 2006

 

MARK-Anthony Turnage is the last person you'd associate with soppy, romantic gestures. He is, after all, the ultimate rude boy of classical music whose late-1980s opera Greek, complete with post-punk rock influences and enough offensive language to cause severe apoplexy among the prim Kensington set, was nothing less than a direct assault on the "stifling, snotty atmosphere" of traditional opera-house culture.

His hatred of Thatcherism manifested itself in probably the most aggressive of musical voices to emerge at the time; a language singed with brassy abrasion and, as an extension of that, his 1996 jazz collaboration Blood on the Floor laid bare, in uncompromising musical terms, the destructive realities of a drug culture that had led to the death of his own brother, Andrew.

Turnage, in response to a commission from the prestigious Ensemble Modern, originally wrote the earlier work as "a sour ten-minute opener", its title inspired by a Francis Bacon painting. Bacon had already been the inspiration behind his grizzly 1989 orchestral work, Three Screaming Popes. "I felt drawn to the sensibility of his paintings, their bleakness and colour," he says. But no sooner had Blood on the Floor received its successful premiere in 1993, than Turnage was under pressure from the Frankfurt-based Ensemble to expand it into a full-length concert work. Enter saxophonist Robertson, jazz drummer Peter Erskine and Scofield, whose input transformed the work into a nine-movement suite fusing hard-core jazz with Turnage's gutsy orchestral style.

It also forged an artistic collaboration that, to this day, fills the composer with awe. "Scofield could work with anyone he wants," says Turnage. "After these gigs, he's off to work with the great Vince Mendoza, for goodness sake!"

But the respect was mutual. As a thank-you for working on the extended Blood on the Floor, Turnage hit upon the idea of arranging one of Scofield's compositions for orchestra, to be performed as a tailor-made encore at the 1996 premiere. Inadvertently, he had planted the seed for a collaboration that would meet the requirements of a subsequent commission from Frankfurt Radio, designed to pull together the resources of its house symphony orchestra and big band. Scorched was the funky and dramatic result.

As with Blood on the Floor, it features jazz combo and orchestra, thus the notable presence alongside Scofield in these Scottish performances of Partitucci, Erskine and Robertson, who takes the saxophone lead in the earlier work. The outcome of such a collaboration is not, as you might expect, some anaemic exercise in fusing diverse musical genres. If anything, Scorched super-sensitises each of the individual styles - Turnage's orchestral re-workings of Scofield are unmistakably his, visceral, pungent and explosive; pure jazz surfaces when the trio emerges alone, underpinned by Scofield's typically angular and sardonic influence. Yet the overall impact is one of cohesion.

Such ambivalence sits comfortably with Turnage. "I'm often pigeon-holed as someone who straddles the division between jazz and classical styles," he says. "Personally, I don't see the division. Look at my CD collection and you'll find Scofield next to Shostakovich."

And as for the love songs, Turnage may have mellowed in his personal life, but musically he's still a loose canon.

• The BBC SSO performs Blood on the Floor at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, 4 February, 9pm. The SCO performs Scorched at the same venue, 10 February, 8pm; and the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 9 February, 7:30pm. Scofield, Partitucci and Erskine will be appearing in an exclusive jazz programme of their own at Perth Concert Hall on 7 February.

Cate takes a backstage role to honour theatre stars

The Arts, Matthew Westwood

The Australian, January 17, 2006

A HALO of television lights surrounded Cate Blanchett as she arrived in a Sydney bar last night, a room already full of theatre luminaries.

Blanchett, wearing a black velvet dress with applique ribbons, was a guest presenter at the Sydney Theatre Awards.

She presented awards for best play for Stephen Sewell's Three Furies, best actor David Field and best actress Caroline O'Connor.

Accepting the award for her role as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow, O'Connor expressed her surprise at the absurdity of putting her makeup on in the toilets and then standing on stage next to Blanchett.

"I love theatre - anything can happen," O'Connor said. "It's crazy."

Among the guests crowded into the subterranean Statement bar at the State Theatre were actors Simon Burke, John Stanton, Jacki Weaver and Julie Hamilton. Three Furies, Sewell's vivid and confronting portrait of painter Francis Bacon, won three awards including best main stage production.

  Sotheby's

    CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING

                  Two Figures at a Window  1953

LOT 19

FRANCIS BACON  1909-1992
TWO FIGURES AT A WINDOW 1953

Estimate:

1,800,000 - 2,500,000 GBP

Lot Sold:  Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium:  

2,584,000 GBP

SESSION 1 | 09 Feb 06 7:00 PM.

   Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

    King's Street, London   February 8th 2006

                        Self Portrait  1969  Francis Bacon 

Sale Title:

POST WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING SALE pounds

Sale Date: Feb 08, 2006

Location: London, King's Street

Lot Number:  5

Creator: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Lot Title: Self-Portrait

Estimate: 1,400,000 - 1,800,000 British pounds

Sold: 5,160,000 British pounds

Salesroom Notice:

Please note this work has been request for the forthcoming Francis Bacon exhibition Paintings from the 50s which will take place at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich from October to December 2006 and will later travel to Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Pre-lot Text:

THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE MISS VALERIE BESTON: ARTISTS FROM THE LONDON SCHOOL

Lot Description:

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Self-Portrait
signed, dedicated and dated 'Self-Portrait 1969 Francis Bacon To V with all very best wishes Francis' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
13½ x 11¼in. (34.3 x 28.6cm.)
Painted in 1969T

Provenance: A gift from the artist to Miss Beston

Literature:

J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, no. 89 (illustrated p. 182).
L. Trucchi, Francis Bacon, Milan 1975, pl. 136.
M. Leiris, Francis Bacon, full face and in profile, London 1983, no. 68 (illustrated in colour).
H. Davies and S. Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, no. 1 (illustrated on the cover and on p. 6).
W. Schmied, Francis Bacon Commitment and Conflict, Munich and New York 1996, no. 31 (illustrated in colour, unpaged); fig. 117 (illustrated, p. 100).
F. Bores and M. Kundera, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1997 (illustrated, p. 106).

Exhibited: 

London, Arts Council of Great Britain, The Human Clay, 1976, no. 9.
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Francis Bacon, October-January 1972, no. 90 (illustrated, p. 131). This exhibition later travelled to Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, March-May 1972.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Recent Paintings 1968-1974, March-June 1975, no. 4.
Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Francis Bacon, April-May 1978, no. 1. This exhibition later travelled to Barcelona, Fundaciò Joan Miro, June-July 1978.
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon. Paintings 1945-1982, June-August 1983, no. 24 (illustrated, p. 52). This exhibition later travelled to Kyoto, The National Museum of Modern Art, September-October 1983; Aichi, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery, November 1983.
Paris, Galerie Maeght Lelong, Francis Bacon. Peintures récentes, January-February 1984, no. 2 (illustrated, p. 33).
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-August 1985, no. 66 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, October 1985-January 1986; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, February-March 1986.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon a loan exhibition in Celebration of his 80th Birthday, October-November 1989, no. 8 (illustrated in colour, p. 23).
London, The Barbican Art Gallery, The pursuit of the real, May-July 1990.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Small Portrait Studies, October-December 1993, no. 19 (illustrated in colour).
Saint-Paul, Foundation Maeght, Bacon- Freud Expression, July-October 1995, no. 18 (illustrated in colour, p. 71).

Lot Notes:

Inspired by the example of his great art historical heroes, Velázquez, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Bacon believed that in the self-portrait an artist could take more liberties and risks with the image - with its distortion from illustrative reality and in its conveyance of feeling - than in any other medium. In the same way that he worked from photographs rather than directly from sitters because, photography's 'slight remove from fact' could, 'return' him 'onto the fact more violently', Bacon found that the self-investigative peculiarities of self-portraiture were highly suited to the fierce scrutiny of his art.

'The obsession' he once remarked, is 'how like can I make this thing in the most irrational way? So that you're not only remaking the look of the image, you're re-making all the areas of feeling which you yourself have apprehensions of. You want to open up so many levels of feeling...It's wrong to say it can't be done in pure illustration, in purely figurative terms, because of course it has been done. It has been done in Velázquez...[and]...if you take the great late self-portraits of Rembrandt, you will find that the whole contour of the face changes time after time; it's a totally different face although it has what is called a look of Rembrandt, and by this difference it involves you in different areas of feeling...With Velázquez its more controlled and, of course, I believe more miraculous. Because one wants to do this thing of walking along a precipice, and in Velázquez it's a very, very, extraordinary thing that he has been able to keep it so near to what we call illustration and at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest and deepest things that man can feel'. (Francis Bacon in a 1975 Interview with David Sylvester, reproduced in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, pp. 26-28).

Bacon's own attempts to 'walk upon this precipice' first came about in the late 1960s. Barring a few rare attempts at self-portraiture in the 1950s, Bacon began systematically to paint portraits of his own head only towards the end of the 1960s. This 1969 painting is one of the first of his single-head portraits from this time. Far from being rooted in any sense of vanity, these paintings reflect how Bacon brought to the painting of his own self-image the same objective curiosity about the human condition that Rembrandt brought to his self-portraiture. 'I loathe my own face' Bacon told David Sylvester, 'but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It is true to say...One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work'. This is what one does oneself' (ibid p.130-133).

While in the mid-1970s Bacon's slightly self-pitying lament that he had no-one else to paint may have had a ring of truth to it, this was certainly not the case in the late 1960s when he was painting many of his most celebrated portraits of George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, Michel Leiris and Lucian Freud. Bacon's turning to investigate his own unique animal presence and self image at this time perhaps reflects a degree of introspection and more certainly a heightened existential awareness and increased psychological intensity in his work. For, inevitably, with his fundamental belief in life as an accident, for Bacon, self-portraiture was intrinsically connected to his keen awareness of passing of time and the presence of death within everything in life including his own. For him, as it was for Rembrandt, the device of the self-portrait was a powerful means with which to speak about the fascinating but ultimately meaningless existential nature of the human condition. And, excepting his earlier series of expressionist self-identifications as a working artist in the guise of Vincent Van Gogh, Bacon's self-portraits are predominantly objective and dispassionate portrayals of himself as a seemingly ordinary and unremarkable man.

Bacon was also undoubtedly conscious of the precedents among the Old Masters when he began the process of exploring the contours and idiosyncratic features of his face in the late '60s. Not only did he bring a fierce objectivity to the depiction of his own striking and owl-like face, but he also carefully laid the groundwork for these images with a remarkable degree of preparation. According to the writer and art historian John Richardson, before embarking on a self-portrait Bacon would let his stubble grow for three of four days and then rehearse the angular and distortive brushstrokes using make-up on his face in front of the mirror. ' Those strange revolving brushstrokes, that are so familiar from his pictures, ' Richardson recalled, 'would be rehearsed with Max Factor pancake make-up. He had a series of these Max Factor pots and he would take one and do a sort of smear across his face, and these are the smears that you see on so many of the faces of those early paintings.' (J. Richardson quoted in Francis Bacon: taking Reality by Surprise, C. Domino, London 1996).

In this raw and powerful self-portrait, Bacon's recognisable but seemingly beaten-up or swollen features stare directly out of the painting with an unconcerned air of nonchalance that borders on disdain. It is the portrait of a man deeply aware of but ultimately indifferent to the peculiarities of his own features. Seeming to trap something of the animated essence of life into the semi-chaotic, half-chance driven application of his paint with its bizarre splashes. smears and rubs of purple, orange and white Bacon articulates a brutish and vital physicality. In doing so he expresses less the effects of the passing of time upon his features as in the manner of Rembrandt's self-portraits for example, but rather the energy and effect of inner emotion on the material exterior of his face. Distortion, exaggeration, accident and craft combine to create an undeniably animated material presence in the paint. Through this magic, what Bacon referred to as 'the mystery of fact' when talking of his favourite Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en Provence - the magic of seeming to animate what is essentially inanimate dead material - something of the essential nature of the human condition is also approximated.

'I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks' Bacon asserted,' and you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration' (ibid p. 59). In this self-portrait from 1969 Bacon presents a disturbingly honest psychological portrait of himself as but another human ape. What underlies and perhaps undermines the apparent existential objectivity of this image is that the painting itself is the product of this 'mystery of fact'. This seemingly animated image of the living artist has apparently been brought into existence by a certain kind of magic or alchemy involving a fusion of controlled chance and the artist's skill. In doing this the painting seems to probe the mystery and apparent meaningless of life, as Bacon himself did and to infuse it with a life and perhaps meaning of its own. In this it is a visual echo of Bacon's philosophical view of life as 'meaningless but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless, really' (ibid p.133).

As a token of some kind of meaning however, presumably friendship and gratitude, this self-portrait was given by Bacon to Valerie Beston soon after he completed it. On its reverse it bears the dedication, 'To V. with all very best wishes Francis.'

    Day in pictures  BBC News  8 February 2006

Francis Bacon's painting entitled 'Study from Portrait of Pope

Innocent X by Velazquez' is up for auction today in London.

   Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

    King's Street, London   February 8th 2006

        Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez   Francis Bacon 

Sale Title: POST WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING SALE pounds

Sale Date: Feb 08, 2006

Location: London, King's Street

Creator: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Lot Number: 36

Lot Title: Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez

Estimate: 5,000,000 - 7,000,00 British pounds

Sold: 5,160,000 British pounds

Pre-lot Text: Property from a Distinguished Collection

Lot Description:

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez
titled 'Study from Portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
60 1/8 x 47in. (152.5 x 119.5cm.)
Painted in 1959

Provenance:  

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Lady Elizabeth Montagu, London.
Christopher Selmes, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1971.

Literature:

Studio, CLX, London, July 1960, (illustrated, p. 29).
R. Alley and J. Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pp. 124-126, no. 156 (illustrated, unpaged).

Exhibited: 

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1959-1960, March-April 1960, no. 10 (illustrated).
London, The Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-July 1962, no. 74 (illustrated). This exhibition later travelled to Mannheim, Kunsthalle, July-August 1962, no. 62; Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, September-October 1962, no. 66; Zurich, Kunsthaus, October-November 1962, no. 61 and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, January-February 1963, no. 54.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, L'Anima e il Volo Ritratto e Fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon, October 1998-March 1999, no. 352.
Valencia, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Lo Sagrado y lo Profano, December 2003-March 2004, no. 25 (illustrated in colour, p. 80).
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol, Francis Bacon: Le sacré et le profane, April-August 2004.

Lot Notes:

Francis Bacon believed that Velázquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X was the greatest portrait in the world. It is a sign of his constant thirst for rebellion and his iconoclastic desire to shatter the illusions of the world around him that he repeatedly assaulted Velazquez' original, painting his own tormented visions of the same subject: 'I was haunted by that work, by the reproductions that I saw of it. It's such an extraordinary portrait that I wanted to do something based on it... I was quite overcome by it and I felt compelled to do what I did. I felt overwhelmed by that image' (F. Bacon quoted in interview with M. Archimbaud, reproduced in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, W. Seipel (ed.), et al., exh. cat., Vienna and Basel 2004, p. 377). Painted in 1959, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez marks a triumphant return to that theme after a few years absence. In this painting, Bacon has now synthesised a far more assured and painterly means of depiction and applied it to one of his most iconic themes. This picture is a milestone in the development of what would come to be recognised as his signature style: Bacon has distorted and disturbed the features of the Pope, creating a direct image that provokes an almost physical reaction in the viewer - it goes 'from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain' (F. Bacon, quoted in F. Giacobetti, 'Exclusive Interview with Francis Bacon: I painted to be loved', The Art Newspaper, June 2003). It is a reflection of Bacon's own high opinion of this painting that it is only the second of all the Pope pictures whose title fully and directly refers to the Velázquez original, the other being the one in the Des Moines Art Center.

Bacon felt personally impelled to depict the Popes. The Velázquez portrait clearly struck a deep chord with him: 'I think it is one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made, and I became obsessed with it. I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velásquez Pope, because it just haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even in me' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, p. 24). Bacon made a concerted effort to buy copy after copy of the Velázquez, many of which were found in his studio, some juxtaposed with pictures of death and Nazis, yet when he had the chance to view the original in Rome, he chose not to do so. Instead, he deliberately limited his knowledge of the work to the small reproductions that he so compulsively acquired. Bacon felt himself almost unwillingly drawn to the picture, to the subject's quiet authority and to the authority of Velázquez' masterly handling. Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is an attack on those authorities, and others besides. It is an attack on religion, on Catholicism, on power, on his father, on the Old Masters and even on Bacon's own limitations.

Bacon's attack on the Velázquez appears more subtle here than in other paintings of the same subject in that there is no scream. The Pope appears tense and terrified, glancing sideways out into the world of the viewer as though discerning a threat. He is not racked with the overt, tortured pain of some of the earlier versions; instead, there is a quieter and all the more poignant angst clearly visible in the subject's face. When Innocent X was painted in Velázquez' time, The Pope was considered all-powerful and infallible. The original portrait shows a face twisted with condescension, with the 'wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command' reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias. Bacon had been influenced not only by Velázquez' painting, but also by a photograph of Pope Pius XII being carried in a procession on a raised platform, a sedia gestatoria. This almost anachronistic image of the Pope still being venerated, dressed and carried around even in the Twentieth Century struck Bacon forcefully: 'It is true, of course, the Pope is unique. He's put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he's as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 26).

Bacon was fascinated by this strange paradoxical position, by this presence of a man revered as so much more than a man. The Popes are wholly infused with the sense of tragedy and, by extension, of hubris that he had pointed out to Sylvester. In Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, he has removed the veneer of extra powers and mystique that surrounds the pontiff, creating a direct assault on his papal authority. Yet in Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, the figure appears weak and vulnerable, under imminent attack. He is an imposter, under threat of discovery, dressed in false garbs and painfully aware of the redundancy of his powers and position in the modern world. At the same time, stripping the Pope of his authority in this way allows Bacon all the more dramatically to capture his haunting perception of the human condition, of our everyday vulnerability, of the fragility of life. The fact that it is the anguished gaze of a Pope - and not just of a man - that we see here heightens the sense of existential revelation that makes his greatest paintings so powerful.

Bacon was being ingenuous when he stated that, 'In the Popes it doesn't come from anything to do with religion; it comes from an obsession with the photographs that I know of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 24). While it is true that he was obsessed with the image, he was also deeply interested in the role of religion, and more importantly of its absence in the modern age of existentialism. The old assurances have been stripped away by a century of insane wars, of mechanisation and crucially of scientific advances. It was this central understanding of man's position in the scheme of things that made a difference between the age in which Velázquez was painting and Bacon was. For Bacon this difference, this destabilised cosmogony with its religious centre torn out, had changed the entire nature and purpose of art in the same way that it had changed man's own perception of his existence:

'I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that, even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a peculiar way they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out for him. Now, of course, man can only attempt to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves, by prolonging possibly his life through the doctors' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, pp. 28-29).

Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is a painting of precisely this process. We see the Pope denuded of his assurances, of his certainty of divine powers and divine salvation. Stripped of the old certainties of life, we perceive instead the ugly realities of existence. In Bacon's Pope, we see a key player, or victim, transported from Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty'. It is for this reason that in some of Bacon's other depictions of the Pope, they are shown screaming. They have been forced into revelation, have been robbed of the comforting curtain of their beliefs, and are left instead to face the ordeal of being 'an accident... a completely futile being'. In this sense, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez harnesses the existential angst of modern existence. There may be no scream, yet still we bear witness to what Bacon referred to as 'The whole coagulation of pain, despair...' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 106).

When discussing the Popes with Bacon, David Sylvester pointed out that they could be an attack on his father, the Italian word for Pope being Papa. This adds to the idea of personal anguish fuelling the painting. Another target of Bacon's attack, though, was Velázquez himself. For in imitating his work, Bacon was also laying siege to his superiority. The strange abuse of what he considered the greatest portrait in the world reveals a paradoxical mixture of reverence and irreverence. This is at once a homage and an insult. Just as Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Bacon has taken a timeless masterpiece and twisted it to his own purposes. In this, he is in part flexing his own new-found artistic muscles. For Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is filled with a new painterly quality that had only begun to feature in Bacon's works over the previous couple of years. It was during this time that he had been creating pictures that were after, or tributes to, Van Gogh. And it was through his interest in Van Gogh, in expressionistic brushwork, and above all in Soutine that he began to adapt a new means of painting. Gone are the thin and stretched oils of his earlier works, replaced instead by the sumptuous, liquid-like swirls that make up the muddied pool of Innocent X's face. Where Bacon's figures had seemed skeleton-like and emaciated in earlier years, there is now a meatiness, an interest in flesh, that heightens the sense of mortality and of decay in the Pope's face.

The theme of Velázquez' portrait had first appeared in 1949, in Head VI, which fused the features of the Pope with those of the shot woman in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Other such cross-germinations and changes feature in almost all the Popes. By contrast, the vortex-like rendering of the face in Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is the only significant divergence from the original. In fact, of all the oils that Bacon created on this theme, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez remains the truest to its source. The features of the Pope, despite being distorted and smeared, remain highly recognisable, down even to the sideways glance. Bacon has changed the colour of the background, replacing the plush claret-coloured velvet of the original with the green that would form the backgrounds of almost all his paintings of this period. In Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, this restraint in dealing with the Velázquez shows a Bacon more at ease with painting, at ease with the legacy of his predecessor. It also places the meat-like, distorted features of the Pope firmly at the centre of the work. In this simple way, Innocent X's shimmering face is the indisputable focus of the entire painting, allowing Bacon to explore what he termed, 'sophisticated simplicity...You have to abbreviate into intensity' (F. Bacon, 1982-84, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, p. 176).

b

 into intensity' (F. Bacon, 1982-84, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact:

MISS B’S PRIVATE COLLECTION

The private and personal collection of the late Miss Valerie Beston, loyal

assistant to artists of the ‘London School’, to be sold at Christie’s London in

February 2006

London – Christie's is pleased to announce the sale of The Collection of the Late Miss Valerie Beston: Artists from the London School will take place in London on 8 and 10 February 2006. Miss Beston was known throughout the London art world as the person who loyally supported and nurtured many of the leading artists working in London during her extraordinary fifty year career.

  Totally discreet and loyal, she preferred to remain in the background. This highly personal collection is almost entirely comprised of works given to her by her artist friends in the ‘London School’ and ranges from important oil paintings and prints by artists including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach to photographs, prints, signed posters and other ephemera. Many bear personal dedications and words of gratitude and appreciation. The Collection lends a fascinating and personal insight into the artistic environment in London during the 50s, 60s and beyond. Six of the most important paintings will be included in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale at King Street on 8 February 2006 with the rest of the Collection being offered in a single-owner sale at South Kensington on 10 February 2006.

  The Collection is led by Francis Bacon’s raw and powerful Self Portrait of 1969 (estimate: £1,400,000- 1,800,000). Here, Bacon’s recognisable but seemingly beaten-up and swollen features stare directly out of the painting with an air of nonchalance that borders on disdain. Bizarre splashes, smears and rubs of purple, orange and white paint articulate a brutish and vital physicality. It is a portrait of a man aware of but ultimately indifferent to the peculiarities of his own features. This painting is one of the first of Bacon’s single-head portraits, as he turned to investigate his own image, possibly reflecting a degree of introspection, and more certainly a heightened existential awareness and increased psychological intensity in his work. To Bacon, his self-portraits were essentially connected to his awareness of the passing of time and the presence of death within life including his own.

  This painting was a gift from the artist to his ‘dear Miss B’, his friend, confidante and personal assistant, in appreciation of her friendship and loyalty. This exceptional relationship between Bacon and Miss Beston has been well documented, and lasted for more than thirty years ending with his death in 1992. She organised his life – from paying off his Harrods account, organising his rent, and paying utility bills to arranging for pictures to be taken straight from his studio to his gallery by the Marlborough driver, “as soon as the paint was dry”. It is well-documented that Francis Bacon destroyed many of his paintings before they saw the light of day; Miss Beston saw it as part of her role to rescue what she could before that happened.

  Frank Auerbach was another artist in the Marlborough Gallery stable whom Miss Beston was to nurture during her career. Included in her collection are eight powerful oils together with a number of drawings, painted over a period of over twenty years; one a gift from Auerbach to Miss Beston. Auerbach’s masterly painting style is clearly shown in Head of Julia, painted in 1983 (estimate: £100,000-150,000), where his desire to capture the essence and reality of his subject can be seen in the powerful surface layers of paint. Julia asleep (estimate: £70,000-90,000) is an earlier work of the same sitter, painted in 1978/79. Landscapes by Auerbach also feature including Tree on Primrose Hill (estimate: £70,000-100,000 and Study for Primrose Hill, executed in 1986 (estimate: £2,000-3,000).

  An important work by Michael Andrews, Study of a Head for Lights (estimate: £40,000-60,000) is also part of Miss Beston’s Collection. Regarded as one of Britain’s leading post-war painters, Andrews had an instinct for capturing the mood of the period especially during the 1960s party scene. Miss Beston’s Collection is rich in other important artists of the period including works by Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Michael Clark and Stephen Conroy together with photographs by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon among others. In addition, there are many wonderful prints and posters with personal dedications by the artist themselves, including ten examples by Frank Auerbach, seventeen by Francis Bacon together with other works by Craigie Aitchison, Victor Pasmore, Alexander Calder, Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Joe Tilson and Henry Moore.

BESTON COLLECTION, Sale 7331
February 10, 2006, London, King Street-South Kensington Offsite sale

The Collection of the Late Miss Valerie Beston - Artists from the London School

Creator: Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon, 1960

Estimate: 800 - 1,200 British pounds

Sold: 38,400 British pounds

Lot Description: Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)
Francis Bacon, 1960
each with credit stamp, and individually numbered in ink "554/13", "554/27" and "554/32" (on the reverse)
three gelatin silver prints
varying sizes from 7½ x 7¼in. (19 x 18.2cm.) to 9½ x 9½in. (24.2 x 24.2cm.) (3)

Creator: Carlos Freire (b. 1945)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon in his studio in London

Estimate: 100 - 200 British pounds

Sold: 6,600 British pounds

Lot Description: Carlos Freire (b. 1945)
Francis Bacon in his studio in London; Francis Bacon in Soho; and Francis Bacon in a bar 1977
each signed, two annotated in pencil 'Londres 1977' and each with copyright credit stamp (on the reverse)
3 gelatin silver prints varying sizes from 9½ x 14in. (24.2 x 35.5) to 10¼ x 15½in. (26 x 39.4cm.) or the reverse (3)

Creator: Carlos Freire (b. 1945)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon in Soho

Estimate: 100 - 200 British pounds

Sold: 6,600 British pounds

 Lot Description: Carlos Freire (b. 1945)
Francis Bacon in his studio in London; Francis Bacon in Soho; and Francis Bacon in a bar 1977
each signed, two annotated in pencil 'Londres 1977' and each with copyright credit stamp (on the reverse)
3 gelatin silver prints varying sizes from 9½ x 14in. (24.2 x 35.5) to 10¼ x 15½in. (26 x 39.4cm.) or the reverse (3)

Creator: David Montgomery (b. 1937)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon, 1989

Estimate: 100 - 200 British pounds

Sold: 1,560 British pounds

Lot Description: David Montgomery (b. 1937)
Francis Bacon, 1989
signed and dated in ink 'David Montgomery 1989' (in the margin)
chromogenic print 15½ x 15½in. (39.5 x 39.5cm.)

Literature: Francis Bacon, Loan Exhibition in Celebration of his 80th Birthday, exh. cat., Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London 1989 (illustrated as frontispiece).

Creator: Jorge S. Lewinski (b. 1921)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon, circa 1960s

Estimate: 400 - 600 British pounds

Sold: 2,880 British pounds

Lot Description: Jorge S. Lewinski (b. 1921)
Francis Bacon, circa 1960s
one titled in ink, each with copyright/credit stamp (on the reverse)
fifteen gelatin silver prints
each approx.: 9½ x 7¾in. (24 x 20cm.) (15)

Creator: Irving Penn (b. 1917)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon, 1962

 Estimate: 15,000 - 20,000 British pounds

Sold: 187,000 British pounds

Lot Description: Irving Penn (b. 1917)
Francis Bacon, 1962
gelatin silver print mounted on card with paint from Francis Bacon's studio
16¾ x 15in. (42.5 x 38cm.)

Literature: I. Penn, Irving Penn: Passage, London 1991 (illustrated, p. 136).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Museo d'Arte Moderna, Lugano 1993 (illustrated, p. 14).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996 (illustrated, p. 36).

Creator: John Deakin (1912-1972)

Lot Title: Francis Bacon, 1968

Estimate: 1,500 - 2,000 British pounds

Sold:  7,800 British pounds

Lot Description: John Deakin (1912-1972)
Francis Bacon, 1968
signed and dated in ink under type written credit and date label (on the reverse)
gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 7½in. (19.6 x 19cm.)

Creator: Michael Clark (b. 1954)

Lot Title: Portrait of Francis Bacon

Estimate: 1,000 - 1,500 British pounds

Sold:  50,400 British pounds

Lot Description: Michael Clark (b. 1954)
Portrait of Francis Bacon
oil on canvas
19¾ x 15¾in. (50.2 x 40cm.)
Painted in 1983-1984

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Miss Beston.

Creator: John Timbers (b. 1933)

Lot Title: Muriel Belcher and Ian Board, circa 1970s

Estimate: 200 - 300 British pounds  Unsold

Lot Description: John Timbers (b. 1933)
Muriel Belcher and Ian Board, circa 1970s
numbered in pencil "4648 I 2 a" in credit stamp (on the reverse)
gelatin silver print painted probably by Francis Bacon
13¾ x 9¼in. (34.8 x 23.4cm.)

LONDON Francis Bacon made about 45 studies of the 17th-century Spaniard Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. Christie's International will auction one of them in London next month.

The painting done in 1959 by the British artist shows a stumpy-armed pope with a twisted face, draped in a reddish-black shawl and enthroned in a green chair. The seller is a European collector who has owned the picture since the 1970s, a Christie's specialist, Pilar Ordovas, said. The painting is expected to sell for about £5 million, or $8.8 million.

Christie's, which is owned by the French billionaire François Pinault, and the publicly traded Sotheby's Holdings are gathering art for their February sales in London. The Bacon picture is the top-priced lot so far for Christie's evening sale of postwar art, which the auction house expects to take in about £18 million for collectors cashing in on the boom.

The sale may provide a clue to price trends for postwar and contemporary art. Last year, Christie's took in £24.5 million from its evening sale, with Lucian Freud's "Red-Haired Man on a Chair" going for a record £4.2 million, and almost 60 percent of the works selling for more than the top estimates.

Bacon, who died in 1992, is among the top-priced British painters, along with Freud and Damien Hirst.

Christie's set a record for Bacon in November, when it sold another of the pope studies in New York for $10.1 million. "Bacon is totally international," Ordovas said. His work appeals to both museums and to wealthy individuals, she said.

Bacon's most famous studies in the series show a screaming pope sitting in a chair, twisted with pain. The Christie's picture is much more static; the artist usually worked from postcards and photographs.

The Christie's catalogue says the current owner bought the picture in London and that the three previous owners were based in London. Christie's will take Bacon's pope study on a tour to San Francisco and Palm Beach, Florida, to show it to collectors there.  

Bacon's papal portrait expected to fetch £5m

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent

The Guardian, Saturday January 7, 2006



He may be not so much a screaming pope as a scowling one. But the painting none the less represents one of Francis Bacon's most famous subjects, Velázquez's 1649 portrait of Innocent X, which he painted over and over again, most famously depicting the pontiff's mouth locked wide open in furious agony.  A relatively early version, from 1959, is to be auctioned next month at Christie's in London, and is estimated to fetch at least £5m.

The auctioneers forecast that the painting could break price records for a Bacon, set last November when a later work, Study for Pope I, fetched $10.1m (£5.7m) in New York.

Bacon revered Velázquez, once saying that the artist "found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator".

He said he was "haunted" by the portrait of Innocent X, describing it as "one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made".

The Velázquez itself hangs in the pontiff's family home, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in Rome. Nevertheless, Bacon always claimed he had never seen the original.

The work to be auctioned, which has been in a European collection since the 1970s, is a one-off, according to Pilar Ordovás, a Christie's expert in postwar art.

The artist was born of English parents in Dublin in 1909, and died in Madrid in 1992.

Sandy Fawkes: Obituary

The Daily Telegraph     
Filed: 30/12/2005

Sandy Fawkes, who died on December 26 aged 75, was found as a baby in the Grand Union Canal and later narrowly escaped death at the hands of a serial killer; she seemed a fixture in the public houses of Soho, but found time to follow careers as a journalist and author.

For her last 30 years Sandy Fawkes was a familiar sight in the Coach and Horses and in the French pub in Soho, consuming simply astonishing amounts of whisky. When she was among generous company, the barman would change her glass for a more capacious one as the gills mounted up. She wore clothes that had been in the height of fashion in the 1970s, for, since she ate little, she had kept her figure. She habitually wore a fur hat that made it look as if a cat was curled up on her head.

The force of character that had once brought her success in journalism she now used in getting a stool at the bar, no mean feat in Soho pubs in the 1980s more crowded than any cocktail party. Each night a tragicomedy was played out among the regulars at these smoky bars. The conversation was often hair-raisingly rude, and the clash of characters generated extremely funny incidents, but death lay not far below the surface.

In an Arena documentary for BBC2 (1986), Jeffrey Bernard, The Spectator's Low Life columnist, was filmed conversing in the morning with the angular landlord of the Coach and Horses, Norman Balon. "Anything much happen last night?" Balon asked him. "Nothing special," Bernard replied, "Sandy Fawkes was pissed."

The surprising thing was not so much that Sandy Fawkes often appeared drunk, but that she survived so long, even retaining a series of boyfriends. She never showed resentment, during the many hours she sat at the same bar as Jeffrey Bernard, at his frequent disparaging references to her in his Spectator column. She had even more awkward customers to deal with each day. "She reminds me of my mother," one regular, a former guardsman, Bill Moore, remarked one night, "I hate her." He kicked out towards her, but missed.

Before 1988, Soho pubs closed at 3pm, and committed drinkers adjourned to afternoon drinking clubs. Off the Charing Cross Road, where Sandy Fawkes had a flat, there was a leprous cellar, with damp forcing its way through the plaster, called the Kismet Club. Its nicknames included "The Iron Lung" and "Death in the Afternoon". One passing visitor asked what the strange smell was there. "Failure," came the reply.

One afternoon in the 1980s, after a lunchtime during which Graham Mason, the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses, had abused her at length for being "an ugly, horribly drunk old woman", Sandy Fawkes found herself in the Kismet, familiar territory. Within minutes she was in violent argument with a podgy man wearing teeshirt and a gold chain. "I never did like you, you fat queen," she began, at loud volume, "just because you've got money." It was a mere point of punctuation in a long Soho day. No wonder that any time after half past five, when the pubs reopened, it generally felt like 10.30 at night.

One close friend for 30 years was Daniel Farson, the television journalist, chronicler of Soho and spectacular drunk. He would suddenly turn from an intelligent conversationalist into a growling monster. "I loathe you," he would shout suddenly between fat, quivering cheeks. Sandy Fawkes would go to stay with him in Devon, where he enjoyed comparative calm, though barred from local pubs. Then for some years they would go without speaking. She was hurt when shortly before his death, on the morning of the Princess of Wales's funeral, while she sat in the French pub, he stood in the Coach and Horses imitating her tears at the occasion.

Sandy Fawkes did go through periods of abstinence, in 1987 doing without drink for more than three months. She had once written a book called Health for Hooligans (with illustrations by William Rushton), and knew what drink did to people. Oddly enough she did not begin smoking till into her forties, making up for it then with constantly lit Gitanes, each with its lipstick-mark, elegantly held between nail-varnished fingers. When she kept a cigarette in her mouth, the smoke would drift between the hairs of her fur hat, dyeing them a deeper bronze.

Her life was physically and emotionally exhausting, for all her courage and tenaciousness. One night in the Coach and Horses, 20 years before she died, she found that all her teeth ached, that whisky was not stopping it, that the memories of her child who had died in infancy and her own childhood were preying on her mind. She was very drunk and after a while the only words she uttered were: "I'm scared."

Sandy Fawkes was born on June 30 1929. She never knew her parents, but before her marriage settled on the name Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle. After her rescue from the canal she was sent to a series of foster parents. Some abused her. She was not able to write about this until the case of Maria Colwell, who died aged seven in 1973, encouraged newspapers to publish accounts of similar mistreatment of children.

A bright, artistic child, she won a place at Camberwell School of Art. There she was encouraged by John Minton, a gifted teacher who was to kill himself at 40. It was he who introduced her to Soho, where she tasted her first alcoholic drink - gin and orange cordial - in the York Minster, Dean Street, known as the French Pub. "Perhaps I should have signed the pledge that day," she remarked years later, "but I would have missed out on so much fun and so many friendships. Disasters too."

On the same day, she remembered, "I caught my one and only glimpse of Dylan Thomas sitting slumped on the bench that used to run under the windows."

When her children grew up, Sandy Fawkes missed making a home, though she delighted in grandchildren. In the end, the French Pub, even after the retirement of its stylish and cheque-cashing landlord Gaston Berlemont, was to be a second home to her. She wrote a short history of the pub, The French (1993), and in her last years its kindly bar staff would fetch prescriptions for her, and her morning copy of The Daily Telegraph.

Through John Minton, a trad jazz fan, she had met in the late 1940s Wally Fawkes, a clarinettist. In 1949 he began his celebrated cartoon strip Flook in the Daily Mail; that year too Sandy and he married. Their house in Hampstead became known for its lively parties. They had four children, three girls and a boy; the early death of a daughter caused her lasting sorrow.

From the 1960s Sandy Fawkes returned to her drawing-board, making fashion drawings for Vanity Fair and then the Daily Sketch, for which she became fashion editor, a job she briefly retained when it merged with the Daily Mail in 1971. She became a feature writer for the Daily Express and was proud of covering the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

In the United States in November 1974, after an unsuccessful trial period with the National Enquirer, she met a man in his late twenties in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia. He looked like "a cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal", she thought. They began an affair, and she joined him on a leisurely drive down the coast to Florida. She knew him as Daryl Golden. In reality he was Paul Knowles, who killed at least 18 people. The day before Sandy Fawkes met him, Knowles had killed two people, one of them a 15-year-old girl he had raped.

The car they drove in had been stolen from a man missing for four months. Even the smart clothes Knowles wore were those of a murdered man. "He told me he was going to be killed soon, but had made some tapes which would make a world news story," she recalled. "After a week, I just had a feeling I wanted to get away from him."

Knowles had set off on his trail of killings only that May. It ended with his arrest within days of their parting. A month later he was shot dead by police.

She wondered ever after what it was that had prevented Knowles from murdering her too. Her escape from his company did not end her troubles, for the police took a dim view of her sexual liaison with a murderer. Could it be that she was guilty of some of the murders too, they asked? "Police in Macon, Georgia, make Rod Steiger look like a fairy," she said.

She found it took a year to recover from the incident. But it struck deep at her insecurity. In 1974 she published her account of the incident as Killing Time. It was always going to be turned into a film, bringing her lots of money. But it never was. The book, however, was republished in 2004 as Natural Born Killer: In Love and on the Road With a Serial Killer.

Her other books included Nothing But, a ghosted memoir of Christine Keeler. "Christine was quite an odd woman," she was to recall. "About two years after I wrote the book, she rang me and told me I'd ruined her life." In 1990 she wrote Elena: a Life in Soho, the biography of the celebrated maitre d' of L'Escargot (now at l'Etoile).

In 1998 Sandy Fawkes had a small part in John Maybury's film about Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil. She figures on the credits as "Person in the Colony Room Club". She had indeed known Bacon and drunk with him in the Colony Room Club, but she had not frequented it for some years, after a row with someone. The club was recreated on the film set, and when Derek Jacobi, as Bacon, walked on set, Sandy, with essential supplies of whisky to hand, burst into tears.

Sandy Fawkes was depicted in several episodes of the brilliant strip The Regulars, drawn by Michael Heath in Private Eye. She also figures in an atmospheric full-page colour drawing by Heath for Punch (March 13, 1984), showing Bill Mitchell playing spoof, surrounded by regulars and crooks. Sandy Fawkes in the foreground is anchored on a stool, quietly pouring whisky down her throat.

Sounds strange? Not as strange as it was.

Shenstone began making art as a child. 'Drawing to me was like eating, sleeping, going to the toilet,' she says. But it was a private passion. She showed her work only to her architect father - he specialised in gothic churches - and never imagined it could be a career. That was to be the stage. She had the talent. 'I won awards,' she says. Soon she was landing the roles a pretty ingenue will get, such as a landlady's daughter in Doctor in the House. She played Solveig in Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Constansia in Man of the World. But she was also painting. Large abstract canvases got her into Chelsea School of Art in 1976. There was a tug of war between acting and art. Art won.

'I turned down a thing Antonioni offered me,' she says. 'And I turned down Tony Richardson's I, Claudius. I knew that if I did something like that I would be tied up in the whole razzmatazz. A bit of me wanted that ... the theatre is fantastic. When you are in a production, whether it's theatre, film or whatever, and it all comes together, there's nothing like it. But nine times out of 10 you're not playing the part you really want. The life is a compromise most of the time. I am a very solitary person and making my own work had become the path I needed to take. I was more and more obsessed with painting. So I had to say no to these parts. I wasn't going to be tempted by anything!'

But Antonioni made art. 'I would have loved to have done it, and I deeply regret that I didn't. Anyway, I stopped.'

After Chelsea, she went to the Royal College of Art.

'Then the Royal Shakespeare asked me to do a production, Chekhov's Ivanov. I rehearsed through the summer, then started at the Royal College. I was working there all day, jumping on my bike and going to the Aldwych in the evening. It was the best time of my life. I was doing my two loves.'

That was that for showbiz. But Shenstone had learned how the human face transmits emotion and decided she had to draw from life. She pressured the Royal College to let her draw from a professional model, but this was even less modish in the late-Seventies than it is today, and they only caved in in her third year. 'So I drew every skeleton in the Natural History Museum. I was drawing the Assyrian friezes in the British Museum.' Students got into London Zoo free, she found. 'I particularly loved drawing ring-tailed lemurs.'

Then, in 1979, her art took an unexpected turn. The Assyrian friezes made her want to make human faces in relief. But in what material? Shenstone had spent some months at Yale, looking at Oldenberg and Rauschenberg, and had become intrigued by their use of fabric and sewing. The Egyptian rooms in the British Museum also came to mind. 'There was a case with little mummified animals I adored. There was one with two little birds and there was a kitten. They were bound in bandages with the face sewn on top. The other thing that I was looking at was the Turin Shroud. The idea of an image that was part of the cloth, not painted on top of it, but actually existed inside of the material ... All of these were making me feel that I could make a face out of cloth. I didn't know how I'd do it. But I'd do it.'

She called her first cloth head Janet. Why Janet?

'I finished it about 4am in the morning. And when I say "finished" - the thing suddenly comes alive. I remember going to the other end of the room and looking at it and feeling concrete in my stomach. I recognised it. It was totally bizarre because it was a lady I didn't know well. I still don't even know her surname. My mother's twin sister worked in a dress shop and this lady was the manageress. I thought, "Oh my God! It's Janet!"'

Janet has shortish, curly brown hair, a prominent nose, an open mouth baring tongue and teeth, and she seems to be laughing, but it might be a jeer or a scream. It is, I should add, a risky piece of work. You won't see many cloth pieces in Chelsea, Williamsburg, Cork Street, Hoxton or the other enclaves of High Art, and artists who do work with it tend to use it as a 'degraded' material, like Mike Kelley; or as a commentary on women's work, like Rosemarie Trockel; or as both, like Tracey Emin. Janet was something else - unabashedly expressive, and 'craftsy'. Shenstone hung her and 11 other cloth heads along with some 60 drawings at her degree show at the Royal College in 1979.

'I had a side wall. I had to fight for the space like a tiger. I had a fist fight with another student. Because they think I'm skinny, and a little girl, and they can tread all over me. No way!' She was there at nine every morning. On day three, a tutor rushed over.

'He hands me this minute little piece of paper with some numbers in pencil. He says, "You are to ring this number at exactly 11 o'clock this morning." I said, "What is this?" He said, "You had a very distinguished visitor." I said, "Is this some kind of joke?" "No," he said. "This is genuine. Just ring the number."'

Francis Bacon answered her call.

'Francis arrived about eight o'clock in the morning purely to collect some cases of wine, because he got it cheap through the senior common room. He was waiting for them to bring it down and looking around and he saw my wall of heads.'

Hence the number, the call.

'I adore your work,' he told her.

'I said, "My gosh! Well, I think you're the best artist alive in the world today."

'He said, "Great minds think alike! I love Janet. Will you let me buy it?"

'I said, "There's nobody I would rather have a piece of my work." So Francis bought Janet. I still hadn't met him.'

A couple of years later Shenstone was offered a solo show at the inauguration of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. It was to be opened by the Queen.

'I completely panicked,' she says. 'I rang Francis and said, "I need every piece of work I've ever done. Can I borrow Janet?"

'He said, "Well, I'm loath to part with it. But if you need it, have it. Anyway, she's got to be in it."'

The show was up for six weeks. Shenstone sent the piece back. Bacon telephoned.

'I am so thrilled to have this piece of work back,' he told her. 'And I have been thinking, would you do my portrait?'

A cloth head.

'I said, "Oh God! I don't know whether I can."'

She had never made a formal portrait. She would just play with cloth until things came out right.

'He said, "Will you try?"

'I said, "OK, I'll have a go. But I'm a bit scared."

'He said, "We'll just see what happens."'

The first sitting was in Bacon's studio at Reece Mews, South Kensington. 'I went round on my bike and tied it up to a lamp-post. He peered down at me and said, "Come on up." I went up these steps. It was like going up in a boat. He was peering through this hole in the floor. This was the famous studio that's now in D