.                                                                                                                                                                           Francis Bacon News

                                                                   2001-2006

        ‘Head’ was given by Bacon to the writer Daniel Farson who, ‘in the doldrums’, sold it for £2,400.

       It is likely to fetch £500,000 at auction

 London out of the frame as gallery closes

LONDON’S declining place in the international art market suffered a fresh blow yesterday when the Lefevre Gallery, which for more than a century championed and dealt in Impressionist and modern art, announced that it was to close after Easter

Martin Summers, managing director and partner in Alex Reid and Lefevre, which has run the gallery since 1926, said: “Fewer and fewer people have been coming to London to buy the kind of art we specialise in due both to the pre-eminence of New York and to the effect new EU taxes are having on the British market. “We feel that a big commercial gallery such as this with its high overheads is now a thing of the past”

Its closure follows that of other significant central London galleries — Spink/ Leger, Colnaghi and Anthony d’Offay — which have either shut or been sold in the last few months. The gallery had grown to become one of the most important in London and has been the leading dealer in Britain for works by important European artists such as Degas, Modigliani, Seurat and Dali.

The Lefevre can trace its origins to the 1880s when Vincent van Gogh helped one of its founders, Alexander Reid, by giving him some of his work. Reid had left his native Glasgow to work in Paris for Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, himself an art dealer. He shared lodgings with the painter and their friendship resulted in several gifts in the form of pictures.

Unfortunately, Reid’s family in Scotland, where the paintings were sent for safe keeping, thought them so bad that they destroyed them. However, through van Gogh, Reid made contacts with artists such as Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec which stood him in good stead.

Reid returned to Glasgow in 1888, where he dealt in paintings by Monet, Manet and Degas as well contemporary Scottish artists. Although he was active on the London market, it was not until 1926 that he set up a partnership with the rival dealer Ernest Lefevre, and opened a gallery in King Street St James’s.

Reid died in 1928 and was succeeded by his son, AJ McNeill Reid. Lefevre resigned in 1931. Nonetheless Messrs Reid and Lefevre Ltd made its mark in the art market during its first 15 years, presenting the first one-man shows in London for Seurat, Degas, Henri Rousseau, Andre Derain, Dali and Modigliani as well as the British artist L S Lowry. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud both made their first important sales through the gallery.

The gallery sold Renoir’s Le Moulin de la galette to John Whitney, an American collector, in 1929 for £30,700. The Whitney family sold it at auction in 1990 for $78-1 million, the second highest price ever. Lefevre’s attracted many of tire most serious collectors of the day — William Burrell, Samuel Courtauld, Somerset Maugham, and Mrs Chester Beatty among them — as well as many of the world’s major public museums. The closure announcement was greeted with gloom. James Roundell, a private dealer and former director of Impressionist paintings at Christie’s, said: “For much of the 20th century, Lefevre was Impressionist and modem art in London.

“It is sad to lose such a name because it has a resonance in Impressionist art circles. It carries a lot of cachet. For overseas collectors in this field, Lefevre was always the first port of call in London.”

In 1950, the gallery moved into the four slurry building at 30, Bruton Street, Mayfair, where it is today. Under the direction of Gerald Corcoran, it continued past traditions by holding the first London exhibitions of work by Bernard Buffet, Balthus and Magritte. For the last 35 years, the Lefevre has been run by Corcoran’s son Desmond, along with Mr Summers.

Together they witnessed the extraordinary growth of the art market. But recently, the going has become tough. “For my first 34 years at the gallery we were always In profit,“ said Mr Summers. “But last year we made a loss. The supply of great paintings is diminishing. We can no longer make the kind of exhibitions we would like to.

“The major auction rooms’ policy of guaranteeing owners large sums of money whether their paintings sell or not has affected our business as dealers.”

The final nail in the coffin, he said, was caused by the new VAT on all items entering Britain from outside Europe, and by droit de suite, or artist’s re-sale royalty, which will soon have to be paid to European artists or their heirs on all sales up to 75 years after the artist’s death.

RITA TUSHINGHAM

Learning curve

Rita Tushingham, 60, is best remembered tor her role in A Taste Of Honey. Today she lives in London and has two daughters, Dodonna, 37, and Aisha, 30, who both work in the film industry. Rita, who will be appearing in the forthcoming ITV Helen West drama, tells YVONNE SWANN a few of the things she has learned in life.

‘I’ve learned to listen to your instincts. I remember having dinner with my friend, the painter Francis Bacon, shortly before he died, and we discussed it then. He said, “You always come back to your first instincts in the end.” We try to be open-minded about new people or situations, even to make excuses for certain things, and that clouds our vision. We cover any misgivings up and then, when things go wrong, we say. “Oh well, that’s what I thought m the first place!” I have learned to be brave, stand back and take stock. It saves a lot of wasted time and effort. You can meet people and immediately feel at ease with them, but others make you feel less comfortable. We are given these instincts. Animals need them to survive. Perhaps we do too.’

‘Never be afraid to tell people you love them and let them praise you. When Mum and Dad came to see my work when I was young, I’d beg them not to make a fuss or praise me. Now I think it’s the loveliest thing to have my family there. If there was anything they didn’t like, they’d be sure to tell me.’  

’I have learned to accept what cannot be changed. Once you’ve done your best, there are certain events and situations you cannot do anything about, so it’s silly to get wound up about them. You have to let go and move on. You can waste so much energy being irritated by something that’s happening at work, or in your personal life. I’ve learned it’s important to try to focus your energy on the positive rather than the negative.’  

These days. I try to listen to another person’s point of view, and not to be too opinionated. We are all very opinionated when we are young. But that’s OK. If you started off knowing all these things, then you wouldn’t take a journey through life. Life itself is the best teacher you can get. Listen to other people’s pearls of wisdom, too; when I was young I’d often shrug off advice, thinking, “Oh what do they know?” When you are young, you ask  for advice and when it doesn’t agree with the decisions you’ve already made, then you are not going to take it on board. Nowadays, my close friends are very honest, and I have learned to listen to them.’  

Where’s the Bacon?

An exhibition of Fifties London art neglects some crucial figures,

notably Bacon and Freud, says Martin Gayford

Think grey. Then think spiky, bleak, organic, skeletal, angry and gloomy. Good. Now you should be ready to confront the Fifties, or at least the London art scene in that decade, as interpreted by a new show at the Barbican Gallery. Whether the Fifties — or even Fifties art in London — really were all those things is debatable. Those adjectives certainly describe the mood that starts to settle on one after a room or two of this exhibition. But then that may be the fault of the show, not the decade — which was a rich and productive one.

In the Fifties, all sorts of things were going on in British, and therefore London-based art. Angst-ridden neo-romanticism was on the way out, abstraction was creeping in, the first shoots of Pop art were appearing, and there was an epidemic of gaunt sculpture reflecting the threat of the bomb and the influence of Giacometti. The question is how to summarise all this.

This is one of those exhibitions that aims to pin down an era in a particular place, so Ha ambitions — on a reduced scale — are much the same as those of Paris: Capital of the Arts at the RA. Among them are a desire to fill in the background around major figures, spotlighting a few minor characters, and attempting to recover the odd forgotten artist from obscurity.

This, however, can have the effect of muffling the impact of the great Francis Bacon, for example, is an unavoidable artist in any assessment of British — or even world — art in the Fifties, And the exhibition at the Barbican has one stunning Bacon: Man with Dog, on loan from Buffalo in New York State. But hanging alongside this is a more dodgy Bacon from the same period, and nearby is an inferior picture by a Bacon imitator, Peter Rose Fulham. The overall effect is to underplay a painter who should be the absolute star of the show.

There are too many dowdy paintings in the exhibition, so that by the time one is half-way round, the spirits start to Slump. That is a pity, because the show has its moments. It begins wonderfully with a great David Romberg of St Paul’s looming above the bombed-out city, followed up with a couple of tremendous Leon Kossoff paintings of post-war building sites that make you fed that you are straggling in viscous London mud.

It is nice, a little further round, to find a couple of paintings by Gerald Wilde, an undassifiable romantic, almost abstract, artist (although one is a dad, and both date from the Forties). At times, the exhibition seems a bit arbitrary.

By restricting itself to London, it rules out many of the most impressive — and ungloomy — artists at work in the period: Peter Lanyon, for example, who was producing his abstract yet Turnerian paintings in St Ives. That’s fair enough. Lucian Freud, however, was among the most significant artists at work in London in the Fifties, and a real Londoner at that Yet Freud is represented by only two drawings, and those from the mid-Forties (perhaps because there is a big Freud show coming up at Tale Britain in May and loans are hard to get).

There are some interesting things among the less familiar Act qf Violence, for example, a Baconian picture by that still underrated artist Victor Willing. And things become a good deal cheerier as the Sixties come over the horizon, and we see proto-Pop art from Hockney and Blake, and abstraction from Richard Smith and Robyn Denny. The latter’s Baby Is Three (I960), by the way, is strikingly similar to the kind of very big, very simple and geometric paintings Gary Hume and Peter Halley were doing 26 yean later.

Every exhibition at the Barbican Gallery is laced with a problem, namely, the Barbican Gallery — one of the most unsympathetic spaces in London. Does this one overcome it? Not really. It is too concerned with history and not enough with visual pizzazz. But still: it has its moments, especially for those interested in the byways of the period.

‘Transition: The London Art Scene in the Furies’ is at the Barbican Gallery (020 7838 8891) until April 14

Heir’s illness ends the battle between

Bacon’s estate and his gallery

In the end it was human frailty that averted the £100m High Court battle. The estate revealed that its only beneficiary — John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist treated “like a son”— is seriously ill with lung cancer.

The estate had sued Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Mifa), based in Liechtenstein, which had vigorously defended the action.

Bacon, one of Britain’s greatest 20th-century artists, was represented by the international Marlborough gallery from 1958 until 1992 when he died in Spain from a heart attack, at the age of 82.

The estate took legal action, saying it was seeking a “proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon”.

Marlborough said it had enjoyed a “frank, close and mutually beneficial” relationship with the artist for 34 years.

A statement from the solicitors Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer yesterday said: “The trial need not now proceed. Marlborough will release to the estate all documents still in their possession that belong to Bacon or his estate. Each side will pay its own costs.”

The statement continued: "Professor Brian Clarke, the executor, was under a duty to investigate the concerns as to the relationship between Bacon and Marlborough, which he has discharged.

“It is with sadness that the estate has to announce that the sole beneficiary of the estate, John Edwards, has very recently been diagnosed as suffering from a serious form of lung cancer. This settlement has been agreed by the estate, against this background and on the basis of Professor Clarke’s assessment of the merits of the case in the light of documents and witness evidence released by Marlborough in the latter part of last year as part of the litigation process.”

Professor Clarke said: “I am glad that the litigation has settled. We are now going forward with our long-planned establishment of the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, which will be for the furtherance of the study of Francis Bacon and his work.”

Gilbert Lloyd, the son of  Marlborough’s founder, said it was pleased  to “draw a line” under the matter.

Sources involved in the settlement said: “Because of the length of time involved since Bacon died and since the litigation was begun, both sides were finding it extremely difficult to find evidence to back up their side of the claim.

“Coupled with that, when the news came that John Edwards was seriously ill it was decided that talks would begin with a view to reaching an amicable settlement. Since Mr Edwards is the sole beneficiary there seemed little point in entering into potentially acrimonious litigation. Each side will pay its own costs and both parties will walk away.”

It is understood from other sources that no money will change hands as part of the settlement. This will be seen as a vindication of the Marlborough’s claim that it had treated Bacon fairly.

On the side of Professor Clarke, it is understood there is considerable satisfaction because during the legal process a number of paintings were recovered and vast quantities of correspondence and documents relating to the life of the artist were handed over by the gallery that will interest art historians for generations to come.

   A Francis Bacon self-portrait. The artist was represented by Marlborough from 1958 until his death in 1992

               Bacon worked for 30 years at his Kensington studio

CHRISTIE’S

POST-WAR (EVENING SALE)

London, King Street Sale Date Feb 06, 2002 

 Lot Essay

How did  an illiterate East End barman become Francis Bacon’s closest friend

and heir to his £11m estate?  Mick Brown meets him

MARK BROWN   |   FEATURES   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2002

“And that," says John Edwards, pausing in front of the huge canvas at the top of the stairs in the South Kensington mews where Francis Bacon lived and painted for more than 30 years, “is me.”

Portrait of John Edwards, 1986-87, which shows a figure seated cross-legged in a chair, dressed only in a pair of white underpants, is one of the 30 or more paintings that Bacon executed of Edwards, and is widely regarded as one of the artist’s last masterpieces.

“Actually,” says Edwards, with a laugh, "some people have said I look like a monkey. But I didn’t mind. I mean, Francis was a lovely painter, wasn’t he?”

For 31 years, Bacon spent almost every day in his Reece Mews studio but, as Edwards admits, he would hardly recognise it now.

The cramped bed/sitting room, lit by four bare light bulbs, where Bacon slept and ate, is now an elegant lounge, all leather sofas and smoked glass tables. The detritus of dirty brushes, paint pots, mounds of newspapers and photographs that littered the floor of Bacon’s studio have been replaced by polished wood and splashy abstract rugs.

“Terrible mess, it was,” says Edwards. “I remember the first time I saw it, I said to Francis: how can you work in here? But he said it was how he liked it. He couldn’t be bothered to clear it up. All he wanted was to have the peace and quiet to paint."

Edwards, the son of an East End docker, was working as a barman in a Wapping pub when he first met Francis Bacon in 1976. For the next 16 years, until the painter’s death from a heart attack, he was his closest friend and confidant — as Bacon put it, the only true friend he had.

When Bacon died in April 1992, he left everything — an estate valued at some £11m, including the mews studio in South Kensington — to Edwards.

But the legacy proved to be more tangled than it initially appeared. In 1999, the Bacon estate brought a case against the Marlborough Gallery, which had represented Bacon for most of his working life, alleging that the painter had been “wrongfully exploited” in his relationship with the gallery and seeking a “proper accounting” of his affairs.

The litigation, which threatened to become one of the most acrimonious — and costly — legal battles that the art world has ever seen, was suddenly withdrawn two weeks ago, in a “drop hands settlementv, in which both sides agreed to pay their own costs. Marlborough has also agreed to release to the estate all the documentation that belonged to Bacon which is still in its possession.

The reclusive John Edwards has never before spoken publicly about Bacon and their relationship. Following the artist’s death, he moved to Florida and, for the past seven years he has lived a quiet, almost reclusive life in Thailand.

Last year, however, he was diagnosed with cancer, and returned to London for treatment.

He is 52, a genial man with dark, battered good looks, who speaks in a soft, unreconstructed Cockney accent, spotted with rhyming slang. “Don’t I know your boat-race from somewhere?” he asks. He offers Krug champagne — “it was Francis’s favourite”  — and a “lah-di-dah” (cigar).

A Bacon triptych dominates one wall. On another are grouped a framed collection of French five franc stamps bearing Edwards’s image, painted by Bacon; a child-like picture dedicated “to Francis” and signed “Ronnie Kray, Broadmoor" (“He certainly knew Ronnie”, says Edwards, carefully, “but I don’t think I’d describe them as friends”); and a scroll marking the award to Edwards of the Lord Mayor’s Medal by the city of Dublin.

This was in recognition of his donation of the contents of the Reece Mews studio to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, where it has been painstakingly reconstructed, item by item, and now stands as a permanent exhibit. Bacon, Edwards says, “would have roared with laughter”, to think of his discarded brushes and paints, his moth-eaten bedspread and rotted curtains preserved for posterity.

Edwards first met Bacon in the Colony Room, the famously raffish Soho drinking club where the painter would hold court. Edwards, at the time, was working as a barman in his brother’s East End pub, and he was friends with Muriel Belcher, who owned the Colony, and Ian Board who worked as the barman there.

A few weeks earlier, Edwards had been asked by Belcher to lay in some champagne as she intended to bring her “famous painter friend” to the East End. But they never came. When Edwards was eventually introduced to Bacon in the Colony Room, he “gave him some stick” for ordering champagne, then not bothering to turn up and drink it. “He liked the way I didn’t care about who he was supposed to be.”

So began a relationship that would last until Bacon’s death. Bacon was homosexual and the popular misconception is that Edwards was his lover. But that, he says, was never the case. Edwards is also gay and has been with the same boyfriend for 27 years. His relationship with Bacon was one of deep emotional, but never physical, friendship.

“Francis was a real, true father figure to me. I was close to my own father. But Francis gave me all the guidance I needed, and we laughed a lot. And I think he liked me because I didn’t want anything from him. With everybody else, it was ‘Francis this’ and ‘Francis that’.”

It was, on the surface, an improbable friendship. At 66, Bacon was almost 40 years Edwards’s senior. He was also Britain’s most celebrated living painter; a man of mercurial intelligence and high poetic temperament.

Edwards knew nothing about painting or books. Chronically dyslexic, he had never learnt to read or write. But his lack of a formal education, his down-to-earth unpretentiousness, was one of the things that clearly endeared him to Bacon.

Edwards recalls that, shortly after their first meeting, Bacon took him gambling at Charlie Chester’s casino, one of his regular haunts. When Edwards was handed a membership form he confessed that he could neither read nor write. “Francis said, God, that must be marvellous. Because he hated filling in forms or anything like that.”

Their life together followed a set pattern. No matter what time he’d been drinking until the night before, Bacon would rise at between six and seven o’clock and start painting. Around nine, he would telephone Edwards to say that he was ready for breakfast and Edwards would join him in Reece Mews, where Bacon would cook a fry-up. Bacon, he says, liked only egg white, Edwards only the yolk, “so it was the perfect relationship”. His nickname for the painter was “Eggs”.

Edwards would then sit with Bacon through the day while he painted — the only person the artist ever allowed to watch him at work — talking and helping him prepare his canvasses for collection.

“We’d talk about everything. He was a beautiful man; you’d be hypnotised by him. He’d talk to you and you’d just want him to talk more. Everything he talked about — his posh mates, the people he knew in the art world, it was all so clear.v

“I think,” says Edwards, “he felt very free with me, because I was a bit different from most people he knew. I wasn’t asking him about his painting or anything like that. Most people around Francis looked up to him, and he didn’t like that.

“I asked him once: what do you see in me? And he laughed and said: you’re not boring like most people.

“I remember once we were with the Duke of Devonshire, talking about all this and that, and Francis decided it was time to change the conversation, so he got me talking about running a pub and jellied eels. The nice thing about Francis was he wouldn’t let you roast.”

“John was the only person in London who treated Francis as an absolute equal,” says the architectural artist Brian Clarke, a close friend of both men and, for the past six years the executor of Bacon’s estate. “Whenever you saw John and Francis together you knew you were going to laugh a lot. John is a totally honest man. He would be very rude to Francis, which was a very enjoyable thing to see because nobody else had licence to do that. He’d give it to him straight, and Francis appreciated that. Even in the Colony Room, Francis was the king of Soho. But to John he was just ‘My Francis’.”

Clarke describes the friendship as “each looking after the other”. Bacon had a famously cavalier attitude to money. He never carried a cheque book or a credit card, but always had a wad of cash, likened by one friend to “a bog roll" from which he would peel off notes to spend on gambling, meals at Wheelers, drinks at the Colony Room, or simply to give to friends.

Edwards took it upon himself to ensure that no one was “taking liberties”.

Bacon, he says, didn’t mind being taken advantage of “up to a point”. But beyond that point, he didn’t like it.

“He said I was a good judge of people, which I am,” says Edwards. “There were always lots of people around Francis on the cadge. But they wouldn’t do it while I was around.”

When they went gambling together, Edwards would carefully pocket some of the chips to ensure that Bacon had something left over at the end of the evening. Bacon, he says, was “a clever gambler”, who “won some big lumps and lost some big lumps.

“I remember, one night, he won £15,000. I put some of it in his jacket and some in his trousers, so he wouldn’t lose it.

“The following morning, he phoned and asked if I had the money. I said no, I’d put it all in his pockets. We searched all over the flat and couldn’t find it anywhere. And then, a couple of days later, I came across it. He’d stuck it in a pair of old socks. He was so pleased, he gave me half of it.”

Edwards’s guileless good nature was recognised by others in the painter’s circle. Sonia Orwell, the widow of George, and a close friend of Bacon, offered to teach Edwards to read and write. But she fell ill before they had the chance.

Stephen Spender was another of Bacon’s friends who became deeply enamoured of Edwards.

“I think that if I knew him well I would become obsessed by him, and I can well understand loving him,” Spender wrote, in a letter to Bacon, in 1988.

“Of course, it is seriously marvellous to be untainted by what is called education. It means he moves among real things, and not newspaper things.”

“Steve was a lovely bloke,” says Edwards, affectionately.

This letter from Spender is among a significant cache of documents that have been returned to the Bacon estate during the course of the litigation, and which provide a fascinating insight into the painter’s friendships, affairs and his rackety personal life.

They include a cache of some 150 letters from such friends as Sonia Orwell, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Beard and the painter Victor Passmore, as well as numerous pleas for money from Daniel Farson, and a promise to return “the 50 quid you lent me” from Jeffrey Bernard. “Fat chance!” says Edwards with a laugh. “Jeff was terrible. I remember Francis once sitting in the Tate Gallery, signing books, and Jeff was there right beside him, trying to borrow money as he signed.”

Clarke says that Bacon’s death left Edwards “completely devastated”. For years, the painter had told Edwards that he intended to leave him everything, but he was totally unprepared for the attention the bequest brought him.

“I remember him telling me about opening the curtains at Reece Mews and seeing the mews full of photographers,” says Clarke. “To a shy person it was the ultimate nightmare.”

Edwards retired to a remote area of the Florida Keys for a year, and then to Thailand, where he lived quietly in a house on the beach, spending his days fishing and walking.

But, after five years, he realised that he had still not received a full accounting of his inheritance. He approached Clarke, who in turn introduced Edwards to his lawyer, John Eastman — the brother of the late Linda McCartney – who initiated the action against Marlborough.

Edwards is reluctant to discuss the case, except to say that he is relieved that it is now over.

“All that John wanted,”  says Clarke, "was to do right for Francis.”

“Francis left John very well looked after. And John was prepared to spend every penny he had in the prosecution of this litigation, win or lose.”

The documentation retrieved as a result of the case will form a substantial part of the material for a comprehensive catalogue raisonne of Bacon’s work that Edwards intends to commission, and will then go to the Francis Bacon archive at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

Edwards is also establishing a charitable foundation that will be devoted to the promotion and study of Bacon’s work and life.

It is for other people, he says, to make an estimation of Francis Bacon the painter. He can talk only about Bacon the man.

“I think," he says, “that a lot of people misunderstood Francis. People get this impression”.

    1986: Edwards with Bacon: ‘Francis was a real, true father figure ... he gave me all the guidance I needed ...’

Study for Portrait II — after the Life Mask of William Blake,

Here’s A Francis Bacon, And Another, And Another…

There’s a famous photograph of British artist Francis Bacon in his studio, sitting on a chair in a midst of a cluttered workspace. That image — taken by Michael Holtz — is one of 30 images of the artist to be displayed at a special exhibition in Arles, France.

The images of Bacon are to be exhibited with Bacon’s paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, a series of 12 paintings he created in homage to Van Gogh. But the black-and-white photographs of Bacon will speak as much about the artist as his work of Van Gogh.

Before Bacon died in 1992, a host of photographers had captured him in a variety of moods and poses. In fact, some say that Bacon referred to many of these photographs of himself when painting his self-portraits. Peter Beard, Harry Benson, Don McCullin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Perry Ogden and Michel Soskine were among the photographers whose images of Bacon alone, working in his studio, or with friends, will be shown at the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles from July 4 to October 6.

‘A Clear Compositional Link’: Francis Bacon’s Works on Paper

MARGARITA CAPPOCK  |  JOURNAL ARTICLE  |  IRISH ARTS REVIEW YEARBOOK  |  VOLUME 18, 2002

                   A photograph of Francis Bacon taken by his sole heir, John Edwards

                                          LOVE IN A DARK TIME

                                                Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar

If you were depressed by the joyless art of Gerhard Richter at the Museum of Modern Art, you might not think a visit with Francis Bacon would be much help. Bacon is popularly thought of as the pontiff of existential horror, his most famous image being of a screaming Pope Innocent X based on a portrait by Velázquez. What Bacon produced, however, was more a kind of black comedy; increasingly as time passed he realized it in suavely designed, vibrantly hued, generously spacious compositions.

Far from depressing, the late paintings in this show combine the sensuous and the visionary to exhilarating effect. All of the large canvases from the 1980’s feature the painter’s familiar iconography of smeary lumps of humanity – or, in one case, a dangling, plucked chicken – in empty rooms. They are like updates of Christian altar paintings. The largest work, a triptych in which a vignetted male pelvis has wounded areas circled or pointed to by a small graphic arrow, refers unmistakably to the Passion, even as the third panel with the silhouetted head of a bull adds pagan resonance.

In anyone else’s hands such imagery would be unbearably heavy. But Bacon managed his traumatic vision with a light, almost Pop-style touch. He paints the space around his deftly distorted figures with the hedonistic delight of a Color Field painter. In the triptych and two related paintings, broad fields of scrumptious Creamsicle-orange are balanced by windows of sweet sky blue. The ultimate effect is of a zany and voluptuous beauty.

KEN JOHNSON

THE Tate is accepting a gift of a Francis Bacon archive containing more than 1,000 sketches and annotated photographs, four years after it rejected the offer.

Barry Joule, the owner and a friend of the artist, has struggled for years to prove the authenticity of a collection that he says Bacon gave to him days before his death, and which, with 1,500 items, has been valued at £20 million.

The artist’s estate has declined to authenticate the archive, threatening legal action when the Barbican Centre in London exhibited it last year.

Ten years after Bacon’s death, Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, now says he will recommend to the trustees that they acquire it. The collection includes hoarded paint-splattered photographs, clippings, pages torn from magazines and books and scribbled sketches. The images range from cyclists and boxers to a portrait of Mick Jagger over which outlines of figures have been rehearsed.

Mr Joule, who was Bacon’s chauffeur and handyman, says that one of his duties was destroying works with which Bacon was not satisfied. He said that the artist handed him a bundle of papers to destroy, but, realising their importance, he had instead kept them.

A selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy art, design and photography exhibitions at New York museums and art galleries this weekend. Addresses, unless otherwise noted, are in Manhattan. Most galleries are closed on Sundays and Mondays, but hours vary and should be checked by telephone. Gallery admission is free. * denotes a highly recommended show

* FRANCIS BACON, Tony Shafrazi, 119 Wooster Street, (212) 274-9300 (through May 18).

Large canvases from the 1980’s feature Bacon’s familiar iconography of smeary lumps of humanity – or, in one case, a dangling, plucked chicken – in empty rooms. In his later years, Bacon handled his traumatic vision with a light, almost Pop-style touch and painted broad flat areas in succulent hues a Color Field painter could envy.

The effect is less of existential terror than of a zany and voluptuous beauty (Johnson).

         “The End of the Line 1953,” a painting by Francis Bacon in an exhibition

          of his work at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo.

  Philips de Pury & Luxembourg  

   Contemporary Art & 14 Duchamp Readymades

     3 West 57th Street   7pm, Monday, May 13, 2002   Sale NY865

The announcement earlier this year by Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg that it was canceling its spring Impressionist & Modern Art auction came as a great relief to Sotheby’s and Christie’s but also raised serious questions about the future of Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg. The aggressive entry of the Phillips auction house into the big leagues of fine art auctions under the guidance of Bernard Arnault’s LVMH conglomerate stole a lot of business away from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both of which were under antitrust investigations that created serious financial problems for them and made them appear to be quite vulnerable to new competition. 

One of the auction’s highlights is Lot 30, Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, a 78-by-58-inch oil on canvas by Francis Bacon (1909-1992). A classic and major Bacon, it was painted in 1964 and has an estimate of $5,000,000 to $7,000,000. It sold for $6,712,500.

The catalogue notes that Bacon’s convoluted reshaping of the human body sometimes conjures chopped-up carcasses and that in this work the woman’s body "appears played, and the passages of gray and red pigment suggest bruises and blood respectively." "Yet the morbid suggestion of raw, exposed flesh is countered by an opposing sense of the sitter’s vitality. Moraes’ voluptuous figure seems to throb and pulsate before one’s eyes, as though it were releasing a powerful visceral energy."

 Sotheby’s

  Contemporary Art

   Evening: New York  7 PM, May 15, 2002

   Sale: 7797   Lot: 41

   Study From The Human Body   Francis Bacon

  signed, titled and dated July 1981 on the reverse

  Estimate: $2,500,000-3,500,000  Unsold

The beginning of the 1980’s saw Francis Bacon embark upon a series of Studies from the Human Body, made in conjunction with a number of Self-Portraits and landscapes as well as more abstract works that depicted, for example, running water.  Seen together, these works from the early 1980’s find a number of connections, even though their subject matter is wildly different. Technical, stylistic and chromatic patterns emerge that connect the group as a whole. This connectivity is further compounded by Bacon’s visual vocabulary: light cords, screens, tables, and arrows appear throughout these works, greatly contributing to the homogeneity of the 'series' as a whole. Whilst it is not correct to position the present work as part of a series, it is rewarding to see it in the same light as a number of, seemingly, very different paintings. A continued passion for the human form, as well as a development  in the cubistic frames Bacon used that would simultaneously imprison and project his figures, come to light. An emphasis on sensuous texture, on a more sophisticated pigmented ground as well as a dryer brush work delineating a more fragmented and dislocated body seems apparent.

The present work is an outstanding example from this later series of explorations into the human male form, positioned within the fabric of Bacon’s pictorial language. The paraphrase of form here seems to step into a dark screen, as if into another dimension. The spatial dynamic of the composition is cleverly problematized here as Bacon has allowed most of the screen to almost fall out of the picture plane. The three-dimensional form indicated by the frame leg on the left is negated by the diagonal in the centre of the composition, breaking down the screen into two parts. The second 'half' then slopes away, making no solid connection with the pregnant ground Bacon has painted. The motif of the 'double-screen' may be seen as a development of Bacon’s cage-like constructions from the 1950’s that served to  encapsulate and condense the human figure, thereby exaggerating the emotions Bacon depicted. Screams became louder; cries became deeper, more angst-ridden. The present screen form is seen, in various manipulations, in other paintings, such as Study for Self-Portrait (1981, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal). The black ground framed by this screen is mirrored in Bacon’s use of opened doors leading into unknown chambers of black as clearly seen in his Triptych from 1981 inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Moreover, Bacon used the black background in his earlier triptychs, Triptych. August. (1972) and Triptych. May-June. (1973), both depicting the moment of George Dyer’s eventual demise. These pseudo-cubistic frames here serve to deliberately drain the composition of any perspectival logic: the figure shifts in and out of  the artificial spaces that lend a sense of urgency to struggle and flux. Any sense of perspective is further disturbed by Bacon’s use of the light cord in the right-hand section, and the two crimson arrows, pointing towards the figure, but for no apparent reason.

The figure seems to enter in one section and then exist from the other, and it is very noticeable that the  morphology Bacon adopts is extraordinarily elastic. There is nothing to anchor the figure to a recognizable character. His portraits of  George Dyer or John Edwards, for example, are clearly 'readable'. Here the figure is anonymous; what interests Bacon are the shapes of legs, buttocks, backs and shoulders. The fragmentation of the body is continued with other Studies of the Human Body from 1982: a male version, wearing cricket pads and a female version, based on a drawing by Ingres from the same year. Both these fleshy forms act as erotic quotations: buttocks, genitals and breasts are morphed together to create hybrid-like forms set against bright orange grounds. These forms are static, whereas, through the use of arrows,  and the ensuing sense of movement to the figure, here the form seems much more active.

Bacon’s choice of color is magnificently subtle, yet powerful upon contemplation. The sandy ground holds ochres, golds, pinks, graphites and beiges that all coalesce together to form a densely pigmented floor. The ground must therefore be connected to Bacon’s more abstract experiments with pure texture that one sees in works such as Sand Dune (1981) and Water from a  Running Tap (1982). The powdery surface seems to crystallize in front of the viewer, continuing the sense of motion inherent to the figure in the most sophisticated fashion. The robust flesh tones of the 1960’s have now been replaced with lighter mauves and lilacs, accented with passages of orange and enlivened through sweeps of white pigment that activates the form. The deeply saturated black ground further projects the figure out of the pictorial space, and provides the most glorious contrast to the ground.

Study from the Human Body is a glorious example of Bacon’s late work. It insists on a stark, down-to-earth realism that is contained with a lightness of touch rare in Bacon’s oeuvre. This work powerfully exemplifies Bacon’s aesthetic ideal: one which he called 'the brutality of fact', and one which possesses an innate grandeur that marks this painting as a wonderfully intelligent contemplation of the human body.

                 Lot 41, Study from the Human Body, Francis Bacon, 1981

Christopher Hirst looks back at his work and life

CHRISTOPHER HIRST  |  THE ARTS ESSAY   |  THE INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE |  SATURDAY MAY 18 2002  

Bruce Bernard, who died aged 72 in March 2000, was probably the greatest picture editor of the 20th century. His legendary eye was used to great effect in The Sunday Times Magazine for most of the Seventies and in The Independent Magazine from 1988 to 1992. In 1980, he produced Photodiscovery, a luscious volume of largely unknown images from the first 100 years of photography, although his best known work was the vast pictorial history, Century, which became an unexpected bestseller in the months preceding his death. “It’s amazing,” he told a friend, “after a lifetime with no money, I’m a millionaire, give or take a few hundred thousand.” (In fact, this proved to be an optimistic forecast.)

What is less well-known about Bernard is that he was a gifted photographer in his own right. When he resigned from The Sunday Times Magazine in 1980, his colleagues and associates (Bernard was responsible for giving a first break to a host of famous photographers) bought him a Nikon 35mm camera. According to his close friend, the painter Virginia Verran, he “was quite humble about his photography and didn’t want his photographer friends to feel he was muscling in”. However, in fits and starts over the next two decades, he came to specialise in portraits of the topmost echelon of British artists, all photographed in their studios.

The significance of this work to Bernard is reflected in the fact that just a week before his death from cancer, he summoned the strength to visit the studio of the painter Frank Auerbach. Auerbach looks into the lens with utmost compassion for his frail portraitist. Virginia Verran was present during the session. “Bruce was extremely weak, very poorly, but took a great, life enhancing photograph.”

Along with Auerbach, Bernard photographed Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow. There are several reasons why the results merit an exhibition – Photographs of Painters, opening on Monday – at Tate Britain. For one thing, Bernard felt a profound admiration for artists and always rated painting higher than photography. Auerbach compared Bernard’s knowledge of art to “a familiarity that a trainer would have with horses”. He produced several books exploring various themes in fine art and always regretted that he had not pursued his early ambition to be a painter. For a while he had maintained a studio, but such were Bernard's impossibly high standards that no work ever emerged from it.

Another reason is that, as a long-term habitué of Soho, Bernard had been acquainted with all his subjects (with the exception of Uglow) for decades. With typically astringent precision, he recalled that a 1944 exhibition by Lucian Freud left him “quite if not hugely impressed" and Auerbach's first one-man show, in 1956, caused him “a few worries”.

But perhaps the most significant justification for this show is that Bernard applied his own rigorous precepts as a picture editor to the images that emerged from these sessions. Like the pictures he selected for magazines and books, his photographs are unfussy, uncontrived and stress the subject, not the photographer. According to Virginia Verran, he wanted his pictures to show what his subjects, all of whom were friends, were really like.

The first artist he photographed was Francis Bacon, in 1984. Describing his two sessions at Bacon's notorious midden of a studio, Bernard said: “I tried to imagine how some of the photographers I had commissioned would have gone about it, rather than doing things with background or props.” Bacon had been a friend and drinking companion for years. In fact, celeb spotting visitors in Soho’s fleshpots sometimes mistook Bernard, who had similar swept-back hair, high forehead and circular face, for the modernist master.

Though Bacon is undemonstrative in the shots, the two sessions produced some of the most subtly telling images of this much photographed artist. Over slender legs and waist, still those of a young man, Bacon’s blossoming paunch is more or less restrained by his dinky leather blouson, which only has its bottom stud closed. Tethered by a narrow neck, the famous face balloons massively. Impassive, perhaps a little bored, Bacon’s eyes are black pits. Standing beside the splotches, daubs and dribbles on his studio door, he resembles a raptor, frightening and, given the right circumstances, merciless. Even if you didn’t know he was one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, you could guess from these astonishing photographs that this was a strange, unnerving and remarkable man.

It is debatable whether Bernard would have taken kindly to having praise heaped upon his photographs. The middle brother in a trio of wordsmiths – his elder brother is the poet Oliver Bernard, while his younger brother was the low-life connoisseur Jeffrey Bernard – he was violently opposed to glib or effusive opinion. Though he was a social man, small talk was not his strong suit. Unlike most journalists, who tend to be allergic to any silences longer than two seconds, Bernard responded to most conversational gambits with a prolonged silence while formulating his reply.

“Empires could rise and fall while you're waiting for Bruce to reply to a question,” an exasperated editor once told me. Ironically, this long pause for thought often had the effect of prompting the questioner to fill the gap with specious waffle. Sometimes Bernard would express the result of his ratiocination with considerable venom, especially after an extended spell in the pub. Occasionally, however, the response would be a surprised and delightful smile, which, as Ian Jack wrote in his Independent obituary of Bernard, “would resemble that of a very friendly moon in a children’s book”.

Bernard was characteristically modest concerning his portraits. “Photographing artists is relatively easy,” he wrote in the Independent on Sunday in 1993. “To begin with, they often have well-lit studios – and sometimes good and even marvellous pictures to help you along. The planes and angles of canvases on easels and their backs (or fronts) when leant against walls come in handy, as do pots of brushes etc.”

Though Bernard disliked photographs that aspired to the condition of art, his tremendous 1995 photograph of Michael Andrews painting the architect Colin St John Wilson is loaded with resonances. Aligned in the centre of the photograph are five heads. From left to right, they are the back of the artist’s head, the nearly completed portrait, the subject, the back of the subject’s head in a large mirror and the artist’s face also in the mirror. The distant reflection of Michael Andrews echoes the mirror image of the artist in Velázquez's Las Meninas, while the golden glow of the shaded windows and the hidden light source behind Andrews’s back prompts associations with Vermeer and De Hooch.

Other Bernard portraits are equally evocative, even when they are free of studio impedimenta. His slightly alarming shot of a tense-looking Lucian Freud reveals nothing but a glimpse of a wickerwork chair and a frond of foliage. Why is it that this image of this immensely talented artist, with an elegant silk scarf knotted round his neck, makes me think of Hannibal Lecter? In his catalogue for the Tate show, Paul Moorhouse suggests that the photograph conveys “a sense of the subject's intense, visceral presence – an echo of the ‘somewhat demonic aura’ Bernard first noticed over 50 years earlier”.

Another shot that appears at first sight to be free of artistic paraphernalia is Bernard's portrait of Euan Uglow from early February 2000 (within weeks, both photographer and subject would be dead). Then you notice a taut string in front of Uglow, which might be one of the sighting lines he sometimes included in his paintings. The artist is looking down, preoccupied by something before him. It is, at first sight, an unremarkable photograph, but Bernard thought it had caught something special. “We were sitting here," recalls Virginia Verran, “and he was staring at it and said something like, ‘Really, it’s not bad. It could be a very limited edition.’ He felt that it was a real true portrait, that it had got there in the deepest sense.”

Faced with work of such quality, the thought inevitably occurs that it was a shame Bernard did not get to grips with a camera earlier in life; but he would have none of this. “He does not regret not having a camera until he was 50," Bernard once wrote of himself. “He only wanted to be a painter.” Virginia Verran agrees. “I think he did things when he felt it was right. He didn’t have a regular paid job until he was 40. It only then emerged that he had an amazing eye and a real feeling for humanity in photographs. He wasn't just concerned with photographs that were technically brilliant or obviously eye-catching.”

Bruce Bernard's incomparable ability to select remarkable images will also be celebrated in a major show later this year at the Canon Photography Gallery in the Victoria & Albert Museum. One Hundred Photographs is a commissioned collection of 19th and 20th century images that, according to Bernard, captures “some of the magic of the medium – its uncanny life-preserving qualities and unique perceptions.” Like Photographs of Painters, and like his books Photodiscovery and Century, it promises to be an eye-opener from a man who looked harder than anyone else.

'Bruce Bernard: Photographs of Painters' is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SWI from 20 May until 26 August (020-7887 8000).

              In the studio: Bernard’s photograph of Francis Bacon (1984)

LIZ JOBEY  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2002  

Nobody who has read the various accounts of Francis Bacon’s life could have missed the figure of John Deakin, the small, drunken photographer who made some remarkable portraits of the painters, writers, models and friends who gathered round Bacon in Soho during the 1950s and 1960s, notably at Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room.

In most accounts Deakin is reviled, not for his drunkenness but for the bitchiness, scrounging and general meanness of spirit that came with it. Bacon – who, according to his friend and biographer Dan Farson, was fond of Deakin – called him "a horrible little man", though he also thought his portraits "the best since Nadar and Juliet Margaret Cameron". George Melly called him a "vicious little drunk", Jeffrey Bernard said he was "a wizened, acned dwarf of a jockey". But Bruce Bernard, Jeffrey’s brother, recognised Deakin as a member of "photography’s unhappiest minority whose members, while doubting its status as art, sometimes prove better than anyone else that there is no doubt about it".

Photography was a second best for Deakin, who had failed to find success as a painter and only took up the camera by accident in 1939 – he is said to have woken up in a Paris apartment after a party, found a camera unattended, and taken it away to try it out. His working life was haphazard – he had two brief periods under contract to Vogue, both of which ended badly, and two small exhibitions in Soho; he produced two guidebooks, one to London, the other to Rome. He more or less gave up photography in the last years of his life, and had it not been for Bruce Bernard, who rescued several boxes of photographs from under Deakin’s bed after his death in 1972, the pictures might have gone the way of his other artworks and ended up in the gutter in Berwick Street.

In 1984, Bernard made a selection of these photographs for an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum called The Salvage of a Photographer. The creased and tattered prints, many of them portraits of his Soho companions, were to establish Deakin’s posthumous reputation. In 1996, Robin Muir, who as the picture editor at Vogue in the early 1990s had found another cache of Deakin’s prints, contact sheets and negatives in the Condé Nast library - this time of the artists, writers, actors and directors Deakin had photographed for the magazine – curated a show at the National Portrait Gallery and published a book on Deakin’s work.

This was four years after Bacon’s death, and it included some of the 40 or so trampled and paint-spattered photographs that had been found in Bacon’s studio. These were photographic studies Deakin made at Bacon’s request of figures he wanted to use as references in his paintings. They included the now well-known sessions with Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne, all of whom are recognisable in Bacon’s pictures.

As well as fuelling the debate about just how much Bacon had relied on photographs, the distressed prints added the glamour of found fragments to what was by now acknowledged as Deakin’s increasingly important archive. The 1996 show concentrated on Deakin’s portraits. The large close-ups show every pore, pockmark and hair follicle; in most cases the eyes stare directly into the lens, and the face is often squared off prematurely by the frame.

They have been described as "cruel" and "brutal", but in fact seem to be more the result of Deakin’s impatience with the kind of theatrical gestures and posturing body language that so often makes a portrait false. But there was another group of pictures, found in an annexe down the back stairs of the National Portrait Gallery. These were Deakin’s street pictures, taken in London and during his many trips to Paris and Rome – the city he loved most. It is these that Muir has concentrated on in his second book.

The difficulty this presents is obvious: how to produce a second book that contains enough information to satisfy those coming to Deakin for the first time, while offering those who know his work something new? Muir has partially solved the problem by retelling the story of Deakin’s life in the text – and here there is, inevitably, a certain amount of repetition – and placing the emphasis, in the choice of pictures, on much less familiar aspects of Deakin’s work.

Of the three sections of photographs, "London" is still largely made up of Soho portraits, though ones taken at more of a distance: most are cropped just above the knee, or full-figure. There is a little series of pictures of Bacon and his lover George Dyer, posing for Deakin both singly and together, one day in Soho in the 1960s; a strong head of the writer Elizabeth Smart; and an awkward full-length picture of Muriel Belcher. There are also a few street scenes – signs, hoardings, shopfronts – in the manner of Atget, which serve as a throat-clearing exercise for what is to follow.

After London, the book really changes pace. Paris and Rome seem to have brought out a more compassionate side of Deakin. He is drawn to street people, to shopkeepers and market traders, tramps and beggars, and to the cities’ ageing fabric. Before his death he had planned a number of books: one on Paris, another on Rome, and two called "London Walls" and "Paris Walls". And here you can see why. Walls so often provided the canvas for some of his best photographs. Like Brassai, who had begun collecting pictures of graffiti in the early 1930s, Deakin was fascinated by the randomness of street art. Scribbled in chalk, the simple drawings for children’s games, the vows of love or hate and the slogans of street philosophers have a fragile, temporary quality that, on the uneven surface, gives them the emotional purchase of paintings.

Deakin liked walls on which the commerce of the city had left its mark – layers of tattered posters, or the giant letters of advertising slogans half rubbed out by the weather. In Paris he followed Atget’s example of going out each morning at dawn to photograph the empty streets. In Rome he found that the public displays of religion offered fine opportunities for pictures. He used a Rolleiflex, as Bruce Bernard pointed out, with the same ease that other street photographers used a Leica. In his portraits it enabled him to climb inside a face (some of his portraits are close enough to reveal that aqueous millimetre of flesh that lines the bottom eyelid) with what would have been intrusive intimacy if he hadn’t know his subjects so well. In his landscapes, it gives ordinary scenes a greater formality.

Deakin said of his pictures that he was "fatally drawn to the human race". He probably was a fatalist, but there can be few more life-affirming photographs than the picture of a group of mothers in Trastavere, proudly holding up their children for his inspection. In some ways it might have served Deakin well to have one book that included all sides of his work and all his best pictures. But that’s easy to say in retrospect. Somebody who probably never expected to be remembered for his photographs now has a life in two volumes.

· Liz Jobey is a deputy editor of Granta

"You run very well," said General Douglas Haig, the notoriously inarticulate first world war general, when giving a speech at an army athletics day. "You run very well indeed" – and then, disastrously: "I hope you run as well in the face of the enemy!"

General Haig, of course, will not be the last to fall prey to the error of thinking once and speaking twice. Much the same pitfall awaits any litigant who has to deal with the press regarding his case.

The decision to talk to the press is an easy one. Many claimants hope that, irrespective of their claim’s prospects of success, the adverse publicity will bring an otherwise recalcitrant defendant to his knees. Allegations made in the course of legal proceedings are covered by absolute legal privilege. It is impossible to bring an action for defamation in respect of them. What is more, without the need to call witness evidence, unless the case can be demonstrated as hopeless a claimant will be able to keep it alive until trial. Technical rights of action exist in relation to malicious prosecution of civil claims, but these arise in such limited circumstances that they are rarely pursued.

In spite of these advantages, many claimants who believe their claims will generate adverse publicity for the defendant are disappointed. In a world numbed by successive scandals, the press and public have seen and heard it all before.

Sometimes, however, the allegations are so spectacular that publicity is guaranteed for the lucky claimant. The recent litigation between the estate of Francis Bacon and Marlborough Fine Art is a case in point.

The case was begun in March 2000 by Brian Clarke, executor of the estate, against Marlborough. Press interest was high. Francis Bacon was one of the most famous painters of modern times and Marlborough is one of the best-known art dealers in the world. Marlborough, which had dealt with Bacon’s works for some 34 years, was alleged to be liable to his estate for a sum reported to be between £30m and £100m. There was even the tantalising suggestion of a missing hoard of "unaccounted for" works of art.

More sensational still were the allegations that accompanied the claim: it was said the liability arose because Marlborough had "exploited" Bacon by abusing his trust and paying him too little for his paintings. Subsequently, in summer 2001, a further claim was developed: that, for 34 years, Marlborough had not bought any paintings from Bacon at all but had simply sold them on his behalf without ever formally agreeing its fee.

Then, in November 2001, a more sinister allegation was made. Previously it had been claimed that Bacon had trusted Marlborough and that it had taken advantage of his trust. Now it was said he had distrusted Marlborough, as the gallery had blackmailed Bacon to continue to trade with it. Either one or the other must be true, the estate claimed, even if it did not know which.

The likelihood was slight that Bacon – an intelligent and sophisticated man – could have forgotten to agree Marlborough’s remuneration over 30 years or could have been exploited in this way. Similarly, the key witness to the allegation of blackmail did not support it. Nor did the action reveal the hoped-for treasure trove of unknown Bacons. However, allegations of this kind in any claim can sometimes carry a settlement value even if they are likely ultimately to fail. No bad press can ever be completely corrected. Public embarrassment often outweighs the benefits of vindication at trial. What is more, a three-month trial, even when victory is expected, involves an enormous waste of management time. It is also expensive: in the English legal system the loser pays most, but not all, of the victor’s costs. In large-scale litigation of this kind, the irrecoverable portion is often considerable.

There was, in short, ample justification for a payment to the estate to get rid of the litigation. Why then did the estate have to drop the litigation in February, recovering nothing from Marlborough other than some correspondence (which was of no commercial value and which Marlborough had said would be given to the estate in September 2001)? The estate’s legal bill must have been several million pounds.

Part of the problem may have lain in a common claimant’s error: to over-estimate his opponent’s vulnerability to publicity. Many institutions, particularly in the financial sector, are not as responsive to bad publicity as a claimant would wish. It is not that they are insensitive; it is simply that vulnerability is a luxury they can ill afford. To settle one claim to avoid bad publicity is to encourage others to be made. Conversely, to resist the claim sends a message to others to readjust their expectations of what publicity will achieve.

But this is likely to be only part of the answer. Another significant factor may lie in the handling of the press. A number of statements by Prof Clarke and his lawyers sharpened press interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the claimant’s allegations, when it would have been possible to adopt a more equivocal and muted stance. But it is one thing to expect a settlement from a defendant on the basis of bad publicity that a case may generate in future; it is quite another to present the defendant with bad publicity that the case has already generated. A defendant who knows he can avoid bad publicity by paying money has something to buy in a settlement negotiation. On the other hand, a defendant who has already received bad press has nothing to gain; the claimant has made the error of shooting the hostage before demanding the ransom.

The difficulty in the Marlborough litigation was that the publicity generated by the claim ensured that no settlement could be made. Any payment might have been taken as acknowledgment that the highly publicised allegations were true, unless it was accompanied by a public retraction and apology that would have been deeply embarrassing for the estate to give. The result was what is likely to be seen as one of the art world’s most famous litigation disasters, with the Bacon estate having had to consent to its claim being dismissed and pay its own costs, while receiving nothing worthwhile in return.

As with any misfortune, there is a lesson to be learnt. It is a common tactic for a claimant to hope that the threat of bad publicity will result in a settlement payment but real care must be taken before allowing that publicity to occur. It is true it will be unwelcome to the defendant – but it may also obstruct the claimant’s own objectives. Indeed, as in the litigation started against Marlborough, it may ultimately thwart the claimant and deprive him of any benefit from the legal costs he has incurred. It is not for the subtlety and sophistication of his manoeuvres that General Haig, who masterminded the Flanders campaign in 1917, is remembered; it is for a bruising war of attrition and a result that was almost certainly not worth the cost of achieving it.

The writer is a partner at Allen & Overy, the law firm, and was part of the team that represented Marlborough Fine Art in the litigation to which this article refers.