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Francis Bacon News

2001-2006
Twisted Sister
G NEWS | FOR
UK’S GAY MEN AND LESBIANS TODAY | FRIDAY,
17 AUGUST, 2001
Francis Bacon was one of those brave artists who dared to use the raw materials
the twisted and beautiful dark parts of his imagination. Consequently his
paintings of fractured faces and dissolving flesh haunt and cause parts of our
own, usually dominant, conscience to stir.
The new exhibition of his work, at Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries, comprises
paintings and drawings loaned from the Tate and other UK Galleries, and has as
its focal point three triptychs painted in 1944, 72 and 88. The savage
imagery depicted in the earliest, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, sparked outrage when it was first displayed after the Second World
War.
The exhibition runs until September 23 at Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. Tel:
0114 278 2600
Burn, Bacon, Burn
Art Review: Letters
Art Review, September 2001
Art critic William Feaver (“Should it stay or should it go?” Art Review, May
2001) is right to argue that we should torch Francis Bacon’s studio and its
contents.
Reconstructing Bacon’s studio in Dublin is like displaying Tut’s
Tomb sans cadaver. Bacon would have despised the idea of turning his chaotic
studio into a peeping Tom’s cabinet of curiosities.
In accordance with Bacon’s wishes: “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and
throw me in the gutter.” (Bacon in conversation with Ian Board from The
Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson) – it would have been
more appropriate for the Dubliners to have placed empty champagne bottles,
oyster shells, gambling chips, £50 notes and Bacon’s bones in a black plastic
rubbish bag.
However, even in this respect, Bacon’s last wishes were thwarted because he was
cremated.
Alex Russell, London
Peter Pollock: Obituary
WILLIS HALL | NEWS
|
OBITUARIES | THE
INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY,
12 SEPTEMBER 2001
Peter William Pollock, restaurateur: born London 19 November 1919; died Tangier
28 July 2001.
Peter Pollock was a friend and supporter of Francis Bacon who in his fifties
moved to Morocco and bought a restaurant, the Pergola, which became famed for
serving the finest plate of swordfish and chips on the North African coast.
Thirty-five of the art-works given him by Bacon formed, with four drawings given
to Sir Stephen Spender, the bulk of the Tate Gallery’s exhibition "Francis
Bacon: works on paper and paintings" earlier this year.
Born in 1919, Pollock was part-heir to the Accles & Pollock empire – a
Midlands-based and highly successful light engineering company co-founded in
1901 by his grandfather Thomas Pollock. In the 1950s the names Accles & Pollock
were juxtaposed nationwide on massive hoardings, suggesting all manner of
interesting spoonerisms – an innovative form of advertising considered quite
racy in its day.
Spurning a possible "reserved occupation" career in light engineering, the young
Peter Pollock was an eager volunteer for military service at the start of the
Second World War. He gained a commission in the Gordon Highlanders and served,
as a captain, both in North Africa and in Italy, where he was taken prisoner.
After demob, and despite his spending four humdrum years in a German POW camp,
the idea of a career in Midlands light engineering seemed no more exciting to
Pollock than it had done at the start of hostilities. Instead, he bought a farm
in Flaunden, Hertfordshire, and took up the life of a gentleman farmer,
combining a dairy herd with pig-farming, greyhound breeding and, in the lazy
summer afternoons, idling through the leafy Hertfordshire lanes in his vintage
Rolls.
Continually frustrated at what he considered to be his own lack of creative
achievement, Pollock had an unquenchable passion both for the arts and the
company of artists. Sundays provided open house at the Flaunden farm for
painters, writers, actors and actresses.
A constant visitor was the then little-recognised painter Francis Bacon. Lacking
a home of his own, Bacon enjoyed a come-and-go-as-he-pleased existence, both at
the Flaunden farm and at a flat, overlooking Battersea Park in London, which
Pollock also owned. Pollock allowed the young Bacon a rent-free life over the
years 1955-61– a kindness which the painter acknowledged by leaving behind the
occasional picture in unspoken payment.
Another young man whom Pollock took pity on and befriended – and who was
destined to become his lifetime companion – was Paul Danquah. Danquah’s father,
J.B. Danquah, had been a minister in Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana, but a
change in regimes had resulted in his temporary imprisonment. Paul Danquah, at
that time studying for the Bar at the Inner Temple, was left unfunded. Pollock’s
generosity enabled Danquah to complete and pass his Bar studies – but the young
Danquah, inspired perhaps by Pollock’s artistic leanings, was temporarily to
abandon his legal career when he was cast opposite Rita Tushingham in the Tony
Richardson directed film of Shelagh Delaney’s stage success A Taste of Honey (1961).
(He was also to have parts in the Morecambe and Wise vehicle That Riviera
Touch, 1966, and, as "2nd Exquisite", in the satire Smashing Time, 1967,
written by George Melly.)
The fast life at Flaunden, slow greyhounds and an over-generous nature finally
resulted in Pollock’s selling up the farmstead and moving on. It was in the
Colony Club in Soho, presided over by the redoubtable Muriel Belcher, that, with
his artistic friends including Bacon and John Minton, Pollock had first heard
tales of the exciting and exotic life that beckoned in Morocco. Upping sticks in
the late 1970s, Pollock and Danquah set up home in Tangier, where notoriety was
fast making Morocco fashionable.
Pollock acquired the Pergola, a bar and restaurant on the Tangier seafront,
where word of the new owner’s culinary skills soon spread. The "Flaunden set" of
friends remained ever-faithful and followed Pollock and Danquah out to Tangier
at holiday-times. John Lahr’s 1978 biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears,
includes a photograph of the playwright with the Kenneths Halliwell and Williams
enjoying themselves at the Pergola. Pollock’s expertise in the kitchen was
overshadowed only by his generosity of spirit. "No, my dear, I absolutely insist
– this one’s on me" might provide a fitting memorial.
Peter Pollock suffered a severe stroke in 1999, which left him an invalid. A
second stroke, in July, ended his life.
The extent of Francis Bacon’s gratitude for his mentor’s hospitality came to
light only a couple of years ago, when a suitcase, which had gathered dust for
decades underneath a bed in a spare room at the Pollock and Danquah home in
Tangier, was found to contain a hoard of the painter’s early work. It was Peter
Pollock’s innate patriotism which ensured that those paintings were acquired by
the Tate Gallery, rather than offered on the open market.

Francis Bacon with Peter Pollock in Tangier in the 1950s
Francis
Bacon with Peter Pollock in Tangier in the 1950s
Wouldn’t Want to Live There, Though
BY ELISSA MEYERS | BOOKS
IN BRIEF | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | SUNDAY,
SEPTEMBER 16, 2001
The British painter Francis
Bacon (1909-92) is best known for expressionistic triptychs and portraits of
himself, screaming popes, absent friends and vanished lovers.
In 7
REECE MEWS: Francis Bacon’s Studio (Thames
and Hudson, $24.95),+a series of photographs of the studio where Bacon lived
and worked for the last 30 years of his life, Perry Ogden has produced what
feels like a landscape of Bacon’s interior - a catalogue of the modern
artist’s psyche. Crumpled photographs and letters splashed in paint flood
the room.
Frayed boxes long since
emptied of bottles of port and Champagne disgorge newspapers and pages
ripped from magazines onto the floor. Hundreds of dirty paintbrushes, dried
in their butter bean and orange juice cans, perch next to books on Seurat
and Velázquez.
The corduroy rags Bacon
sometimes used to paint textures drape on top of paint-encrusted trays.
Books on skin disorders and forensics sprawl across the floor. A bare bulb
hangs next to its nooselike toggle string, an image familiar from several
Bacon portraits. Canvases stacked in one corner reveal only their white or
splattered backs; several slashed canvases lie scattered with the other
detritus on the floor.
The slightly sinister aura
seems appropriate, given that Bacon’s estate has been involved in lawsuits
charging art world skulduggery, and leads one to wonder if Bacon really did
leave his studio just like this. Is there any way to know? John Edwards,
Bacon’s sole heir, says in the book’s foreword that the studio was left
untouched from Bacon’s death until 1998, when it was removed to Dublin,
Bacon’s birthplace.
Turn the page and any
doubts evaporate: Bacon the artist re-emerges in the light, colour and
composition of the unfinished work left on the easel at his death. In
Ogden’s photos, one almost smells the sulfuric remnants of Bacon’s
imagination.
Fifty years of hurt
They called it the battle for
realism, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
James Hyman follows British
art’s trail of violence from the tormented Bacon to the butcher Hirst
JAMES HYMAN | ARTS | THE
GUARDIAN | SATURDAY,
SEPTEMBER 22, 2001
Why is it that the greatest art is also sometimes the most horrific? For every
Vermeer interior, serenely suspended in time, there are hundreds of bloody
crucifixions, violent rapes and terrible massacres. In Britain, horror was at
the heart of two of the most important exhibitions of the past half-century. In
1949 the now defunct Hanover Gallery in London was filled with painting after
painting of unremitting pain, in an exhibition that announced the arrival of
Francis Bacon and heralded one of the most extraordinary success stories in
20th-century art. Despite the revulsion, Bacon would soon be feted as the most
important British artist of the postwar period, and go on to exhibit at the
Venice biennale. Soon, too, his paintings would be hung in elegant drawing
rooms, and his personal torment celebrated as an artistic revelation of the
human condition.
It was to be 40 years before another exhibition, Modern Medicine, even
approached that visceral impact of Bacon’s first one-man show. The venue was
Building One, a rundown Bermondsey warehouse reminiscent of the sets for Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. And the artist was Damien Hirst, who showed a
rotting cow’s head infested with maggots and surrounded by flies that were being
zapped by an insect-o-cutor.
It is no coincidence that two of the most important artists since the second
world war should both dramatise extremes of violence in an attempt to heighten
our awareness of our own mortality. In fact, you could argue that the most
important British art of the past 50 years has been preoccupied with the
subject. It all started after the second world war – with what, at the time, was
called the battle for realism. This all but forgotten struggle was one of the
key moments in the history of British art.
At first glance, the situations then and now could hardly be more different. The
inhumanity of the war years had cast a dark shadow over our lives. The world was
polarised between Moscow and Washington, and Britain was struggling to establish
a role for itself in a new world order. Yet it was from such infertile soil that
the seeds grew for some of the seminal works and international success that
British art has since enjoyed. For this was the moment, in the late 1940s, when
a School of London was proposed for the first time, a challenge to the
predominance of the Ecole de Paris and the New York School.
It was a challenge that saw British art elevated to a new status through the
reputations gained by artists such as Bacon, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. Their
work was at the centre of a battle fought between two competing visions of
realism: social or socialist realism, and modernist realism. Leading the two
sides were two of the 20th century’s greatest art critics: David Sylvester, the
insider par excellence, and John Berger, a combative outsider.
Each critic had a hero. For Sylvester it was Bacon, for Berger it was Italian
Renato Guttuso. Today, Berger’s realism is almost invisible in our museums, but
at the time was at the very forefront of British art. His was a realism
concerned with finding, as Walter Sickert advocated, "poetry in the everyday",
and was filled with such everyday subjects as Lowry’s matchstick men and the
domestic scenes of the kitchen-sink painters.
In contrast, Sylvester’s realism addressed the human condition. It was fuelled
by existentialism and inspired by Giacometti. The artist was a loner, a solitary
genius revealing important truths – and from this side of the battle emerged the
victors, from Bacon and Freud to Kossoff and Auerbach.
Half a century later it is difficult to capture the heat of this battle, its
importance as a riposte to American abstract expressionism, and its role in
intellectualising postwar British culture. It is difficult, too, to grasp the
passionate conviction with which it was fought, a conviction fuelled by the
belief that art really mattered.
Today, when so much art has become entertainment, serving a public hungry for
sensation, and when the notion of high culture is attacked so routinely, it may
seem misplaced to recall the high seriousness of that battle. Yet behind the
headline-grabbing of Tracey Emin, or any of a dozen other young British artists,
the indebtedness of today’s leading artists to these postwar pioneers seems
clear.
Rachel Whiteread’s most powerful recent commission is her eerie Holocaust
Memorial for the Judenplatz in Vienna. The Chapman brothers’ most profound
tableau, Hell (2000), also depicts the Holocaust. Anya Gallaccio’s moving
installation, a floor of 10,000 dying roses entitled Red on Green (1992),
poetically traces death on a mass scale. For all the differences in medium,
Hirst’s boxed and butchered animals are surely the descendants of Bacon’s
paintings of man as meat, and Whiteread’s impassive monuments the equivalents of
Giacometti’s stoic figures.
As modern artists continue to grapple with humanity’s vulnerability in a violent
world, they are creating a new realism that places them as heirs to the legacy
of this earlier battle. Fifty years ago it was the chimneys of Auschwitz and the
atom bomb plume at Hiroshima that prescribed the artistic struggle. Now, in the
aftermath of the terrorist atrocities in America, the battle for realism has
assumed a chilling new resonance.
The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War (1945-60),
by James Hyman, is published by Yale University Press at £45. An exhibition to
coincide with its publication is at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London W1
(020-7495 8575), until October 2.
The show must go on
Critics may accuse the South
Bank Show of sycophancy, but as it begins its 25th series,
Rupert Smith finds Melvyn Bragg
in buoyant mood
RUPERT SMITH |
THE GUARDIAN |
MONDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2001
Melvyn Bragg, or
Lord Bragg of Wigton to his peers across the river, rules the LWT arts and
features department from a modest office on the 22nd floor of the London
Television Centre. From his desk he can see the House of Lords (where, perhaps,
he should be sitting) through the spokes of the London Eye. For a man consumed
with the idea of viewing high culture and popular culture through the same
critical lens, it’s an appropriate vista.
To prove a
point, Bragg’s back with a South Bank Show season that includes profiles of
Norman Foster, Rachel Whiteread and Pedro Almodovar, and boasts commissioned
work by Tony Harrison and Ken Russell. The showreel that accompanied the series
launch features SBS highlights with Paul McCartney (composing a song called
Melvyn Bragg in the first show in 1978), Francis Bacon, Woody Allen, Tracey Emin
and Steven Spielberg.
Even more taxing
was Bragg’s encounter with Francis Bacon in 1985. "I’d known Francis since the
early 60s, and I always wanted to make a film on him, but he wouldn’t play. But
then he went and made a film with an American director, which was not good at
all. I went to see Francis and I read him the riot act. 'We make good films.
This is not a good film! I’m outraged that you went with anyone else and you
ended up looking like a pillock!' He just shrugged and said 'OK, do a bloody
film then.' ..."
"Unfortunately,
when it came to shooting the interview I’d just come back from a period of
writing and not drinking at all up in Cumberland. I arrived at Francis’s flat in
Soho and he was pouring champagne for everyone. We drank that, then we went and
had a proper lunch, then we reset the restaurant to do the interview and drank
some more, then on to the Colony Club and then to a casino — my
liver was like a trout leaping up stream. When I sobered up I watched the rushes
and I thought he said some very good things. I knew I’d get slammed for doing an
interview when drunk, but I decided to leave it in. Francis just said 'Oh,
bugger them. Show it all.'..."
“Bacon’s got the guts”
Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
In the final extracts from his new
book of interviews with Damien Hirst, Gordon Burn asks
the bad boy of British art what he
really thinks about the other major talents of his time.
These conversations between Burn
and Hirst are extracted from interviews that took place
over a period of eight years,
beginning before Francis Bacon’s death in 1992
GORDON BURN | THE
GUARDIAN | MONDAY,
OCTOBER 8, 2001
Gordon Burn: Why do you think
Francis Bacon is good?
Damien Hirst: He’s the best.
There’s these two different things, painters and sculptors. And Bacon is a
painter. He doesn’t... It’s not about your ability; it’s about your guts, on
some level. And Bacon’s got the guts to fuck in hell.
You see it in the 1940s paintings.
I remember looking at a newsreader painting at that exhibition he had in Venice.
It was just a head, like a newsreader. You go up to it and it’s, like, the ear
is made of oil paint, but it’s almost like a relief. It’s almost
three-dimensional. You’ve only got to get oil paint and do an ear, and you paint
over it three or four times and it starts to be raised off the canvas. It’s like
you managed to stick a fucking ear on.
There’s a painting he’s done of a
guy cross-legged, and he can’t paint baseball boots. But he doesn’t pretend he
can. That’s why he’s brilliant. He paints a baseball boot to the best of his
ability, and it’s totally naked and clean, and it’s right there in your face,
and you go, "This is a painting by a geezer who totally believes, and it’s
everything he says it is, and whatever his aim is, he’s achieving much more than
that." It’s totally laid out in front of you: no lies, no doubt, nothing. And
he’s a different kind of painter, and he came from nowhere.
Is it just a story that he [Bacon]
went to see the fly piece at the Saatchi Gallery before he died?
No, I know he went. He mentions it
in a letter [he wrote]. It just goes, "Hi, blah blah I’m not feeling well blah
blah it was great to see you the other day. Just went to the Saatchi Gallery and
saw this show of new British artists. Bit creepy blah blah. There’s a piece by
this new artist" – I
don’t think he mentions my name – "and
it’s got a cow’s head in it and a fly-killer and loads of flies and they fly
around. It kind of works." It kind of works! Like: "Nice toilet upstairs. It
kind of works." Fantastic.
When he was there I got a call
from Jenny [Blyth] at the gallery. And she said, "I don’t know if this is
interesting to you, but Francis Bacon’s here, and he’s been in front of your
piece for an hour." Honestly, I got a phone call that said that. It was a bit
embarrassing. I didn’t know what the fuck to say. I dismissed it, but I
understand why he could have liked it – dead
fucking flies. So I dissociated myself from it as an artist and just thought of
it as a spectacle, and quite liked it.
In the interviews with [David]
Sylvester, he talks about killing cattle in a slaughterhouse being like
crucifixions – the
closest you could get to a crucifixion. It would be possible to put forward the
view that you are systematically going through Bacon’s images and obsessions and
giving them a concrete existence.
I am definitely. I am definitely
systematically going through it.
How do you rate Freud against
Bacon?
You look at Lucian Freud, and
Lucian Freud’s an infinitely better painter. But you can just see why he shits
himself while Bacon’s alive. Because he represents something just so fucking
enormous that Lucian’s incapable of.
You mean that Freud’s technically
the better painter?
I’m not saying that. But I am in a
way. But it’s a sigh of relief from Freud when the cunt dies. I mean, Lucian
Freud, without Bacon, would be the best painter we’ve got. But he’s not. He’s
shit next to Bacon. And Bacon can’t paint, and Freud can. What’s going on?
So what makes
Bacon the better artist?
Because he’ll go right out there
on the edge of the cliff and he’ll stand there and he’ll put his arms in the air
with his shirt off in India without his passport and go, "Come and get me, you
cunts!" D’you know what I mean? And no one can get him because of it. He doesn’t
falter. He doesn’t fail. And it doesn’t matter he’s a homosexual. Everybody
wants to do that, and can’t. All everybody ever wants is somebody to represent
that, that "come-and-kill-me".
The Hockney-Caulfield generation
of English painters grew up reacting against what they saw as the horrible dull
greys and sludgy browns of Sickert, and against everything Sickert stood for.
The references were always painters and painting, weren’t they, until about 25
years ago? Have you always reacted against a painter?
Well, you’re always reacting
against something. I grew up in a situation where painting was considered dead.
But I had a massive desire to be a painter. Not an artist. Not a sculptor. I
wanted to be a painter. Not a collagist. The idea of a painter is so much
greater than the idea of a sculptor or an artist. You know: "I’m a painter."
It’s one on one, mano a mano, you on yourself. But the thing is, painting is
dead. It didn’t work. For me, Bacon is the last result of the great painters.
He’s the last painter. It’s all sculpture after that.
Hirst on Jackson Pollock
Pollock’s greatness is supposed to
lie in his naked display of angst and emotion.
Yeh, but he covered it up with
that whole fucking charade as well. The Americans, they always do that, don’t
they? It was guaranteed it was going to look pretty, do you know what I mean?
Whatever he did. He didn’t go up there and wriggle. He wasn’t a worm on a hook.
He admitted he hid behind his work. And he was the best of the gestural
Americans. The great big Americans. But Bacon does it better, because he smashes
right through.
When you compare Bacon to Pollock,
Pollock starts to look like he’s producing logos. When what’s really happening
is he’s scrabbling about in this void which has been created by photography,
between abstraction and figuration. That’s the truth of it. But the moment he
gets there, it starts to look like logos.
These are edited extracts from On The Way To Work, by Damien Hirst and Gordon
Burn, published by Faber and Faber on October 22, priced £25.
Artists’ colony
How do you qualify as a member
of the Colony Room Club?
You either have to be t
Now the infamous private
drinking den, where artists from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst
have partied for more than half
a century, is holding an exhibition of modern art.
COLIN GLEADELL |
THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH |
FRIDAY
19 OCTOBER 2001
ART and alcohol have always made good bedfellows, but nowhere have they snuggled
up so successfully and for so long as in Soho’s notorious private drinking den,
the Colony Room Club. Considering that its founder, the formidably camp Muriel
Belcher, claimed to know 'fuck all about art’, and that it has never been
exclusively an artists’ club, it is remarkable how, since its inception in 1948,
the Colony has attracted so many British artists of renown. From Francis Bacon
and Lucian Freud to Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, successive generations have
made their inebriated way up and down the creaking stairs that lead to this
small, dark, smoke-filled room in Dean Street.
And since the club’s 50th anniversary in 1998, the rank of members and
supporters has been swelled by a stream of thirtysomething British artists with
big reputations. Next week these, together with a host of illustrious figures
from other walks of life who have joined the club, are contributing to an
exhibition curated by Michael Wojas, the club’s proprietor, to celebrate a
hard-won court battle over the lease. Apart from artists of the stature of Sarah
Lucas, Gary Hume, the twins Jane and Louise Wilson and Gavin Turk, the list
includes rock guitarists Paul Simenon of the Clash and Anthony Glenn of Pulp,
Swedish actress Amanda Ooms – shortly to be seen in Granada’s The Forsyte
Saga – and man-about-town and aspiring photographer Dan Macmillan, the
27-year-old great-grandson of former prime minister Sir Harold Macmillan.
So, what’s the attraction? Is it something the barman puts in the drinks? Of
course alcohol is the common bait. But, more importantly, it’s who you drink
with that counts. For members of the Colony this is something that is rooted in
history. Had Francis Bacon not walked into the club the day after it opened and
found someone as sympathetic to his plight as a poor homosexual artist than
Muriel Belcher, the legend of the Colony might never have been born. And had the
legend not been born, the club would undoubtedly not be what it is today.
This legend rests on the fact that Bacon, arguably the most significant painter
of the post-war era, made Belcher’s club his second home. 'At unproductive
moments in his career,' writes Michael Peppiatt, 'he spent more time at her club
than at Reece Mews [his home and studio]'. And where he went, others followed.
In Michael Andrews’s famous 1962 painting, The Colony Room, Bacon sits, holding
court, with Belcher, Freud and the photographer John Deakin in attendance.
Dotted elsewhere around the room are the writers Bruce and Jeffrey Bernard, and
the artist’s mode; and sometime 'Queen of Soho' Henrietta Moraes.
To Bacon’s magnetism, Belcher added a genius for selecting and entertaining not
just artists and writers but also actors, gamblers, criminals, peers and
politicians. As George Melly has written, 'She liked her members to be amusing
or talented or rich, although she could be very kind to down-and-outs.' She knew
instinctively who would fit in and who would not, thus giving the place a sense
of exclusivity. Although she cultivated artists, she knew it would have been
boring if it was just artists talking about art, and bores — except for very
rich ones — were barred.
At the Colony rudeness became a cult. As the Hon Michael Summerskill put it, 'It
was a place where the rules against slander could be suspended.' But under
Belcher’s successor, Ian Board, the cult reached new extremes. According to
Melly, Board was 'a monster of aggressive, sometimes incoherent rudeness'. After
Belcher’s death in 1979, Bacon visited less frequently, and although artists
continued to drink there, the club lost many of its regular customers.
When Board died in 1994, his mantle passed to the barman, Michael Wojas. A less
bombastic, less confrontational character than his predecessors, Wojas quietly
set about re-inventing the club. 'The place had such potential. I couldn’t just
let it drift,' he recalls. 'I didn’t have a plan, but I consciously went out to
clubs and private views to meet people and listen to their suggestions.' When
new faces began to appear at his door he would 'get a feeling, take a chance and
sign them in,' he says of the vetting process. 'It’s something to do with their
general state of mind. And the younger the better, so long as they're not total
bores.' And if they are? 'I eloquently tell them to fuck off!'
For Wojas, the defining moment of regeneration came in 1998, when he conceived
an exhibition by members to celebrate the club’s 50th anniversary. For this he
enlisted the support of former art dealer James Birch. Birch had been going to
the Colony since the late Seventies and had introduced several younger artists,
including Damien Hirst, who was to act as a catalyst for the club’s fortunes in
the way that Bacon had done. At his house in Clerkenwell, Birch designed the
basement as a gallery, and agreed to host the exhibition there. Contributions
were received from older-generation artists such as Patrick Caulfield and Barry
Flanagan, younger bloods Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn and Tracey Emin as well as
from singer Lisa Stansfield and film mkaer John Maybury. It was, said Wojas, a
sort of 'Liquorice Allsorts'. But its impact led to three years of unprecedented
membership expansion at the club.
At the opening, Wojas was introduced to Sarah Lucas and complained that he was
having trouble finding someone to help out behind the bar. To his surprise, she
volunteered her services, adding that she would like to work on Tuesdays
because, says Wojas, 'that was the night when most of the galleries held their
private views, and she hated private views'.
What happened next, as many things in the club do, started as a joke. Lucas and
fellow artist Abigail Lane hatched an idea that each would work behind the bar
for one night with their respective boyfriends — the artist Angus Fairhurst and
the singer/composer/DJ Paul Fryer. Then, when Hirst and his wife, Maia, decided
to follow suit, the idea really took off with celebrity art-world couples
queuing up to offer their services. From November 1998 until March the following
year, Wednesday night became party night at the Colony as art dealer Jay Jopling
and his wife, video artist Sam Taylor-Wood, Tracey Emin and boyfriend Matt
Collishaw, Jane and Louise Wilson and even Suggs from Madness and his wife took
a turn behind the bar.
Artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster worked behind the bar on one of those nights.
'You don’t join the club,' says Webster, 'you just fall in. It’s like a secret
drinking hole. Not anyone can go there so it is sort of exclusive, but not in a
snobby way. The night we worked there, we dressed up as Fred and Rosemary West.
A lot of our friends came expecting free drinks, but they had to pay. The
hardest part was working the till. It’s like one of those saloon bar tills you
see in westerns with big buttons. Instead of ringing up £10, you have to ring up
£1 – 10 times.'
Since then, that till has finally expired and Wojas has acquired an old
customised National Cash Registers till which is being cased in chrome. On the
front a panel has been made in etched glass, and the keys are being decorated
with coloured spots to match a Damien Hirst spot painting behind the bar. It
will be unveiled at Wojas’s upcoming exhibition.
Unlike most curated exhibitions of contemporary art nowadays, where an
apparently disparate group of works is held together by the curator’s underlying
concept, this one holds no such pretensions. As Paul Fryer says, 'It’s a bit
like Peter Blake at the RA this summer. When asked how he had selected the
artists he invited to show there he replied, "They are just basically people I
like." '
Angus Fairhurst describes Wojas as 'a drinking curator', but while some of the
work in the exhibition may have been inspired by drink, references to the Colony
itself are not necessarily intentional. Dan Macmillan’s photograph, Adolf
Hilfiger, for instance, is 'about America and Tommy Hilfiger', he explains.
'It’s part of an ongoing series I’m doing about Nazi imagery in graphic design
work and the power of graphic designers in establishing corporate identities.'
In the context, one is faintly reminded of Muriel Belcher’s repeated references
to the Nazi leader as 'Miss Hitler'.
Abigail Lane’s inkjet print, The Inspirator, is something that could just have
been inspired by an all-night session at the Colony, but apparently wasn’t. In
it, a panda (actually a busker she met on the Underground dressed in a panda
suit) plays the trumpet in a forest. It’s a slightly surreal vision of a
fairground event swathed in the same Buckingham green colours in which the club
itself is painted. Sarah Lucas has made a sculpture for the show that seems more
specific. Smoked, 20 cigarette butts on wire coils extending from the neck of a
hammer like the arms of an octopus, is not about drink but another of the
pursuits of the Colony’s members and 'the price you pay for it'. Gary Hume has
chosen to show a previously unexhibited painting of Michael Jackson taken from a
photograph in the Guardian during the singer’s visit to Oxford earlier this
year. Somehow Hume captures something of the essence of the club in describing
the subject of his painting as 'both brilliant and tragic at the same time'.
Angus Fairhurst’s collage, Proposal for a Monument can be read as a reflection
on how the attitudes of the new generation towards the history of the club have
changed. Without reference to anything specific, Fairhurst made a series of
collages three months ago about the way things collapse under the weight of
their own history. On the top of a building a sign reads: 'Delete All Memories'.
Although the club still looks much the same as it always did, cluttered with
memorabilia and gifts from artists, 'it is not a shrine' says Fairhurst.
'One thing that could have been a problem with the club is that Bacon’s shadow
hangs too heavily over it,' says Matt Collishaw. 'Michael [Wojas] gives people
the freedom to get on with the present without getting tied into some heavy
mythology.' The ghosts of Francis Bacon and Muriel Belcher may still linger, but
they are rapidly being exorcised.
'2001 – A
Space Oddity' runs from October 28 to November 16 at James Birch’s A22 Gallery,
22 Laystall St, London EC1R 4PA
Francis Bacon, clean your room
7 Reece Mews Francis
Bacon’s Studio
Foreword by John Edwards; photographs
by Perry Ogden
THAMES & HUDSON; 120 PAGES; $24.95
BY KENNETH
BAKER |
REVIEW |
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE |
SUNDAY, OCTOBER
28, 2001
British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) left behind a studio that ranks as a
significant artifact in its own right.
Readers who remember the tidy impression Bacon’s work made in the 1999
retrospective at the Legion of Honour may be stunned to see his work space
documented in 7 Reece Mews.
So suggestive of Bacon’s creative ferment was his legendary studio in London’s
Kensington section that the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, Bacon’s
birthplace, purchased and transplanted it as a permanent installation.
The dismantling, archiving and transplantation of the studio from London to
Dublin makes one of the great art conservation stories of modern times. It is
the only thing missing from 7 Reece Mews. The book’s text is a brief
memoir by John Edwards, Bacon’s sole heir and his companion late in life.
Urban archaeologists were enlisted to map and catalogue every scrap of paper,
soiled rag, slashed canvas and pot of soaking brushes that Bacon left behind, so
the whole ensemble could be replicated exactly in Dublin. Facsimiles were
substituted only for articles threatened with ruin by time and those deemed
worthy of scholarly study.
Photographs of the Hugh Lane installation are indistinguishable from those
collected in 7 Reece Mews, expertly made by Perry Ogden. The conservators
found some 1,700 pages of illustrations torn from books, 70 drawings by Bacon,
who claimed he never drew, and 100 perforated canvases.
Bacon called the studio walls, on which he wiped brushes and tested colours, his
only abstract paintings. Ogden recorded them and the whole metier with the
precision of a crime scene analyst.
The fascination of 7 Reece Mews is hard to convey. Ogden’s images
accomplish what would seem impossible for photography: renewing curiosity in
viewers for whom Bacon’s art lost much of its mystery and surprise with his
acceptance into the modern canon.
Bacon 'blackmailed' by art gallery owner,
court is told in dispute over £100m fees
BY STEVE BOGAN |
THE INDEPENDENT |
WEDNESDAY
31 OCTOBER 2001
Claims that the artist Francis Bacon was swindled out of millions of pounds by
his gallery took a sensational twist yesterday when a judge was told of
allegations that the artist had been "blackmailed" by the gallery’s one-time
owner.
The claim that Bacon had been the victim of blackmail surfaced in the High Court
after the 11th-hour submission of a statement to trustees of the artist’s estate
by the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher.
It was the latest twist in a £100m battle by the trustees to establish exactly
what the artist was paid for his work during a 34-year relationship with the
Marlborough Gallery, one of London’s most respected contemporary outlets.
Previous hearings were told that the gallery produced prints without paying
Bacon and that as many as 33 paintings, each potentially worth millions of
pounds, had remained unaccounted for after the artist’s death in 1992.
The trustees allege that Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd took advantage of the
artist, taking up to 70 per cent commissions instead of a "fairer" 30 per cent.
The gallery has always denied the claim, arguing that Bacon was fairly paid but
was ambivalent about money. If he had been unhappy, the gallery has argued, he
would not have remained as a client for so long.
Mr. Glimcher’s statement, which has not yet been formally disclosed to the
court, is thought possibly to allude to that. It was received by Bacon’s legal
team at 11pm on Monday, less than 12 hours before the start of the latest
hearing.
On receiving it, the trustees, led by the artist and friend of Bacon, Professor
Brian Clarke, amended their pleading to allege the artist was blackmailed by
Frank Lloyd, the gallery’s late owner.
The allegations are not thought to relate to anyone else associated with the
gallery.
When Michael Lyndon- Stanford QC, counsel for the Marlborough, suggested the
allegation might amount to fraud, the judge, Mr. Justice Patten, said he
regarded it as "blackmail".
The central allegation is unclear, but during earlier inquiries by The
Independent, close friends of Bacon’s have said he had been worried over his tax
affairs, which were in chaos, and he had sought advice and help from Mr Lloyd.
The allegations are unlikely to have involved threats to disclose his sexuality;
he made no secret of his homosexuality, a state of affairs that did not lend
itself to blackmail. He was, however, known to have been paranoid about unpaid
tax.
It was known in the 1970s, as Bacon was approaching the peak of his talents,
that American galleries, among them Mr. Glimcher’s Pace (now known as Pace
Wildenstein) Gallery, were interested in luring him from the Marlborough,
without success.
Last night, a source close to the Bacon team said: "We cannot discuss detailed
evidence before it gets to court, but it is fair to say Mr. Glimcher’s statement
represents a very interesting development."
The gallery was taken by surprise by hints of the allegations to come. A
spokeswoman said: "It [blackmail] has never been raised by the estate before.
The estate have spent three years extensively researching the case before they
brought it and since 1999 they have amended their claim substantially three
times, making no mention of this issue."
Bacon’s sole beneficiary is John Edwards, with whom he developed a filial
relationship after meeting in London in 1974. Professor Clarke has been at pains
to stress that the primary purpose of the litigation is not to enrich Mr
Edwards, but to establish a full record of Bacon’s work and to provide funds for
research into it.
Professor Clarke and Mr. Glimcher have been advised by their lawyers not to
comment on the case, which is in its preliminary stages. A full hearing is
expected to go ahead next February.
Bacon Estate alleges artist was blackmailed by Marlborough
Potentially
key witnesses, David Sylvester, Gilbert de Botton and Gilbert Lloyd are all
dead
By MARTIN BAILEY | THE
ART NEWSPAPER | WEDNESDAY,
NOVEMBER 28, 2001
LONDON. The Francis Bacon Estate’s legal claim against Marlborough Fine Art has
taken a new twist, with allegations of blackmail. Bacon is said to have decided
to leave Marlborough to move to the Pace gallery (now Pace Wildenstein), but
changed his mind after being warned that he might then have problems with the UK
tax authorities and in getting access to money paid through Liechtenstein into
his Swiss bank accounts.
On 20 November the High Court in London ruled that the blackmail claim could be
incorporated into the Estate’s case, which will come to trial in February. Mr
Justice Patten pointed out that his duty was to filter out “hopeless claims”,
but the new allegation “does not fall into that category.” The judge stressed
that this “does not mean that it will succeed or that I have formed any view at
all as to its truth.”
Although the extent of the Estate’s claim has not been calculated, it could well
amount to more than £100 million. When Bacon died in 1992, he left his assets to
John Edwards, a former East London barman who now lives in Thailand. The sole
executor is Professor Brian Clarke, who believes that Bacon was not paid
properly by his long-time dealer for many of his pictures. Professor Clarke is
therefore taking legal action against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and
Liechtenstein-registered Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment (see The
Art Newspaper, no. 115, June 2001, p. 6).
Dinner at Claridge’s
The alleged blackmail by Marlborough dates back to March 1978, when Bacon tried
to switch galleries in order to boost his earnings. Respected art historian
Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon, told Arnold Glimcher, the chairman of
Pace in New York, that the artist was “unhappy” with Marlborough, his
established dealer. Mr Glimcher then flew over to London, meeting Bacon and Mr
Peppiatt for dinner at Claridge’s on 2 March. Bacon wanted £50,000 per large
single panel painting, and Mr Glimcher made an offer (there is now some
confusion now over whether the 50,000 offer was in sterling or dollars). A
further meeting was held at Claridge’s the following day.
Between 4 and 8 March, Bacon approached Marlborough owner Frank Lloyd and told
him of his decision to move to Pace. The Estate alleges that Mr Lloyd “placed
undue pressure on Bacon to remain with Marlborough”, by threatening that if the
artist left his gallery then (a) “Bacon would have problems obtaining access to
the funds belonging to him which Marlborough had paid into Bacon’s bank accounts
in Switzerland” and (b) “Bacon would be exposed to the English tax authorities.”
Mr Glimcher provided a statement on 1 November 2001, giving details of the
conversations at Claridge’s: “Bacon and I seemed to have an immediate rapport.
By the end of the second meeting, we had reached an agreement on which we shook
hands.” But on 8 March 1978 Mr Glimcher was devastated to receive a letter from
Bacon saying that he had decided to remain with Marlborough. In retrospect, Mr
Glimcher believes that his source of information about what had occurred was
probably Mr Peppiatt.
Mr Peppiatt and his wife Jill Lloyd had a meeting with the Estate in June 2000
to discuss the possibility of compiling a catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work. Mr
Justice Patten recorded: “I am told that this is likely to be a lucrative and
prestigious project and these discussions are relied upon by Mr Lyndon-Stanford
[Marlborough’s QC] as giving his clients additional concern that Mr Peppiatt’s
independence as a witness may thereby have been compromised.” Marlborough has
since stressed to The Art Newspaper that it has never objected to Mr
Peppiatt’s authoring the catalogue, describing him as “by far the best qualified
person to do so.”
Rothko link
Marlborough’s lawyers have pointed out that Mr Glimcher “is in competition with
Marlborough in New York and acted for the Rothko estate in connection with its
dispute with Marlborough in the 1970s”. This was a legal row which has some
parallels with the current case between the Bacon Estate and Marlborough. The
gallery therefore does not regard Mr Glimcher as “in any sense an independent
witness.”
It was also argued by Marlborough that had the blackmail claim been made at an
earlier stage in the proceedings, it would have been possible to have discussed
the matter with two of Bacon’s close associates, art historian David Sylvester
(who died on 19 June 2001) and financier Gilbert de Botton (who died on 27
August 2000). Mr Lloyd, the key witness, died in 1998.
Marlborough concludes that it “does not know why Bacon changed his mind [over
the move to Pace, but would invite the court to infer that it was in his best
interests to continue to work with Marlborough.” Last month a gallery spokesman
told The Art Newspaper that “in relation to the allegation of blackmail,
Marlborough rejects it entirely.”
I offered Bacon £50,000 a picture but rival
blackmailed him over tax bill, claims dealer
BY STEVE BOGGAN | HOME NEWS | THE INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY 28
NOVEMBER 2001
TO MOST hungry artists, the offer would have been too good to refuse. Even to a
wealthy Francis Bacon, sipping champagne at Claridge’s, it seems to have been
the answer to his prayers: a minimum of £50,000 per painting and a move to the
books of the New York gallery that handled Picasso.
The offer
was made in March 1978 by Arnold Glimcher, the influential Pace Gallery owner,
at a time when Bacon, arguably the greatest British-based painter of the last
century, is thought to have wanted to break from Marlborough Fine Art in London,
the gallery that had pushed his work for the previous 10 years.
But Bacon
did not go. Instead, he stayed with Marlborough until his death in 1992, a
decision that baffled those close to him. Why he did not leave has remained a
mystery. However, according to dramatic claims in what could become the most
sensational legal spat the British art world has seen, the reason was simple. He
was a victim of blackmail.
That is the
allegation to be made in a High Court battle in February which, if proved, could
make Bacon’s estate up to £100m richer. On one side is Professor Brian Clarke, a
friend of Bacon and the executor of his will. The professor claims Marlborough’s
then director, Frank Lloyd, asserted undue influence over Bacon, cheating him of
millions of pounds and failing to account for up to 33 of his paintings.
On the other
is Marlborough, the distinguished art house that claims it made Bacon famous and
wealthy and dealt with his every whim with scrupulous fairness. Neither side has
given ground in preliminary hearings since Bacon’s estate launched a civil
action against the gallery last year. But what no one expected was that a row
over money and paintings would turn up allegations of blackmail.
The Independent reported three weeks ago that threats against Bacon had
been alleged, but the full details of the allegations have only become clear
since the judge, Mr Justice Patten, ruled that a statement by Mr Glimcher could
form part of Professor Clarke’s argument.
In it, Mr
Glimcher alleges that Bacon was blackmailed by Mr Lloyd into staying with
gallery.
According to
High Court documents, Mr Glimcher said he had two meetings with the artist in
London. “Bacon
and I seemed to have an immediate rapport," he said. “By
the end of the second meeting [also at Claridge’s], we had reached an agreement
on which we shook hands.”
Bacon, Mr
Glimcher said, was delighted with his promise of £50,000 a painting. But,
suddenly, the artist pulled out.
Later, Mr
Glimcher claims he was told by Michael Peppiatt, the respected art historian and
author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, about the allegations of
blackmail.
Mr Glimcher
said: "When Francis Bacon informed Frank Lloyd he was leaving Marlborough for
Pace, Frank Lloyd told Francis Bacon that if he left Marlborough, Bacon would
have problems accessing funds that Marlborough [had] paid to Bacon in
Switzerland. I recall something that Bacon’s sister was in a sanatorium of some
kind. I was also told that there were threats by Frank Lloyd of income tax
exposure.”
Bacon, who had bank accounts at Dreyfus Soehne and Rothschilds in Zurich, was
deeply in debt to the Inland Revenue. According to Professor Clarke, exposure
would have left Bacon financially unable to care for his sister, Ianthe Knott,
who was suffering from a degenerative disease in Zimbabwe, so he decided to stay
with Marlborough.
In his
statement, Mr Glimcher, who has been advised by his lawyers not to comment on
the case, says he believes it was Mr Peppiatt who told him about the blackmail
threat. Lawyers for Marlborough do not want Mr Peppiatt questioned until the
full hearing in February. In another statement, however, Professor Clarke says
that during a meeting in 1999, Mr Peppiatt said to him: “I
suppose you will be wanting to know about the famous 'blackmail' conversation
with Glimcher.”
Mr Peppiatt
has also been advised not to comment. It is understood he has expressed a
willingness to co-operate fully with the court, but lawyers for Marlborough are
unhappy that Bacon’s estate has asked him to help compile a prestigious
catalogue of the artist’s work.
Marlborough’s legal team is also concerned about the independence of Mr Glimcher.
During a preliminary hearing several weeks ago, Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, for
Marlborough, pointed out that Mr Glimcher was a competitor of the Marlborough in
New York. And he asked Mr Justice Patten to bear in mind that Mr Glimcher had
acted for the estate of Mark Rothko when that artist had had a similar dispute
with Marlborough in the 1970s.
Marlborough
rejects the allegations. It said: “It
remains Marlborough UK’s case that a provisional arrangement was made between
the Pace Gallery and Bacon (as evidenced by [a] letter of 4 March 1978).
"Bacon
responded to that letter on 8 March 1978 stating that he had not made up his
mind about whether to move to Pace Gallery and wrote again on 17 March 1978
stating that for the present time he had decided not to change his gallery in
New York. Marlborough UK does not know why Bacon changed his mind, but would
invite the court to infer that Bacon decided that it was in his best interests
to continue to work with Marlborough.”
That is
something Bacon’s estate disputes. It claims that dozens of his paintings may be
unaccounted for and that he was paid only $40,000 (£28,000) for one series of
lithographs when, in fact, many more than that were produced.
If the court
case is successful, the recipient of any award would by Bacon’s sole
beneficiary, John Edwards, with whom he developed a filial relationship after
the pair met in London in 1974. Professor Clarke says the primary purpose of the
litigation is not to enrich Mr Edwards, but to establish a record of Bacon’s
work and to provide funds for research.
The judge is
keeping an open mind as to the veracity of the allegations. “The
court is only concerned at this time to filter out hopeless claims ... the
blackmail claim does not fall into that category,” Mr
Justice Patten said in his judgment. “But
that does not mean that it will succeed or that I have formed any view at all as
to its truth.”
Mr Lloyd cannot defend himself against the allegations. He died in 1998.

Francis Bacon stayed with the Marlborough gallery
In
memoriam: David Sylvester
The art of the interview
TIM MARLOW |
TATE |
THE
ART MAGAZINE |
ISSUE
26 |
AUTUMN 2001
The interviews
and exhibitions that David Sylvester produced with Francis Bacon were among the
most lucid and revealing critical and curatorial achievements in the latter half
of the twentieth century. But it was only after the artist’s death in 1992 that
Sylvester began to write a book about Bacon, which was published last year. In
his last interview for British, conducted only a few months before his own
death, David Sylvester spoke to Tim Marlow about the importance of Bacon, his
place in history, his trickery and how best to interview an artist.
Tim Marlow: Why has it taken you so long to write a book about Bacon, rather
than publishing interviews with him?
David Sylvester: I had a feeling the two things shouldn’t be happening at the
same time, and the interviews were an on going project. In a way, you know, I
became Bacon’s concierge or butler. I used to get telephone calls from
photographers asking me whether I’d sit for them. I’d say: “Well, I’m very
honoured that you should want to photograph me.” Then the conversation would
always develop in the same way: “Do you think we could photograph you in Francis
Bacon’s studio?” And then: “Do you think that he might join you in a photograph
or two, or that we might do some pictures of him?” So I felt too personally
associated with Bacon. I much prefer writing books about dead artists rather
than living ones because they’re not going t read it... you hope.
Is that because if they're around, then you are, perhaps subconsciously,
concerned about what they'll think and say?
I’m afraid it may be an admission of great weakness, but consciously you feel
that they’re going to read it and they might feel you’re an idiot, or they might
get hurt, or both.
Have your opinions of Bacon changed significantly since his death? You seemed to
have a very crystallised view of him well before he died.
Yes I did and it hasn’t changed since his death. I felt and still feel that he
had two really great periods. One was from about 1944/1945 to 1954; the other
from about 1971 to 1976. I don’t think there were many great works during the
last fifteen years of his career, apart from a number of landscapes which were
quite wonderful. I think, too, my placing of Bacon hasn’t much changed. I don’t
say this in the book, because I don’t think a book is the place to give medals,
but I would now suggest that he was one of the four biggest figures in European
art in the second half of the twentieth century. Disregarding people such as
Picasso and Matisse, who were already great performers from the first half of
the century, I would place him alongside Giacometti, Dubuffet and Beuys. But
there are several American artists whom I would place above Bacon— Newman,
Pollock, de Kooning, Johns and Twombly. They were, too me, greater painters than
Bacon.
About three years ago an amazing “discovery” was made that Bacon drew in
preparation for his paintings You’ve acknowledge this in an article called
Bacon’s Secret Vice. He told you that he didn’t draw, but the conclusion you’ve
now reached is that, even if he did, perhaps the drawings are not as relevant as
some people think. Did you feel betrayed, or did the deception just seem in
keeping with what you knew of Bacon already?
Tim, if I were as good an interviewer as you are, in the course of all those
interviews we did – eighteen sessions over a period of twenty years – I would
have found out more. Early on, he said he didn’t draw, he did no predatory
drawings. And I accepted that. Then sometimes when it was referred to
later, I’d say knowingly: “Well, of course you don’t do preliminary
drawings.” And he’d go along with that, so the fiction was preserved. If I had
been a good interviewer, I would have probed at him and maybe got some
admission that he did draw I had in my possession a little book that I’d stolen
from his studio, which had a set of drawings in it. I put it away safely,
intending to give it to the Tate archive after his death I didn’t d then know
that dozens of drawings would come to light, so the fact that I’ve actually lost
the book doesn’t matter. They were very sketchy little pencil drawings, but they
were undoubtedly done for compositions. So I knew all the time that he did do
some drawings, but I didn’t push it.
Do you think they were crucial to the evolution of the painting, or were they
just one of a number of factors? After all, the words and ideas in his notebooks
also seem central to the way he worked.
I agree with you very strongly. Brian Clarke, the stained glass artist, who has
become Francis’s executor, made a very good point which I quote in that little
article about Bacon’s secret vice. Brian says Bacon made great lists of
subjects, which are almost more important than the drawings. He adds that
Francis was a very verbal artist and often it was a verbal idea – a word or a
phrase – which generated an image, and that, in a way, the real sketches were
the lists of titles.
I think this is one of the reasons why the interviews you did with Bacon are so
crucial. It’s the spoken word by Bacon that tells us so much. You’ ve implied
and you wont admit its tongue-in-cheek, but it is – that you are not as good an
interviewer as me, when in fact you are indisputably the best interviewer of
artists of the past 40 to 50 years. There’s no one to touch you. We live in a
culture where interviews are often combative – there’ s a feeling that were
supposed to argue. You rarely did that with Bacon, if at all. Even when he was
making remarks with which you clearly disagreed – such as Jackson Pollock was
like old lace you didn’t come back at him. Is that the secret of being a good
interviewer, you listen, you cajole, you get him to speak, but you don’t really
argue?
What I said about you was not said tongue-in-cheek, but in any case I think
there are two things that are fatal in interviewing. One is to come up with
questions too quickly. If the guy has said something in answer to one of your
questions and he comes to a stop, wait, and very often he will feel slightly
embarrassed by the silence and come in and fill the gap. The most interesting,
profound and introspective things can be said when there’s no prompting. So, to
wait is one of the rules. The other is not to argue with their opinions; there’s
no point. I said to Bacon when he put down Abstract Expressionism, so why do you
think it moves me? And he said, oh, you’re too subject to fashion, or something
like that. Well, I didn’t argue with him, and I did not argue with him about his
idiotic opinions bout Pollock. You’re not there to argue with the interviewee,
but you are there to probe. I should have probed more. I mean, I should have
said something like: “Well, before you start painting, you’re sketching an
outline on the canvas; you begin by sketching an outline of the figure. Now,
you’ve got to get that right in proportion to the canvas. Do you never do a try
out on paper first? Seeing what size the figure might be in relation to the size
of the thing?” If I had probed him professionally and persistently enough, I
might have go something out of him.
Looking back at Francis Bacon, by
David Sylvester, is published by Thames & Hudson. This interview was first
broadcast on the Artsworld Channel

Tribute
David Sylvester
TIM MARLOW | TATE | THE
ART MAGAZINE | ISSUE
26 | AUTUMN
2001
“Vermeer to bowl
legbreaks,” said a
gruff, deep voice at the
end of the ’phone. It
was around midnight one
Sunday and it took all
of a second to realise
that it was David
Sylvester completing a
Great Artists’ cricket
XI that we’d devised
earlier in the week on a
flight back from
Edinburgh. The day in
Scotland was spent
looking long and hard at
Giacometti’s work, for a
radio piece; the
telephone call was to
discuss two tricky
sentences in an article
for tate about Cy
Twombly, one of which
likened a work by the
American painter to a
“soiled sheet after a
wild night”. Vivid,
visceral and succinct,
as I told him, and
perfectly judged, but
you’re wrong about
Vermeer. The argument
continued for the best
part of an hour. He
cursed me a couple of
times and then conceded
that he’d think about it
again. Here, it seems to
me, is the essence of
the man who was perhaps
the most influential
critic and curator in
post-war British art:
passionate, playful,
profound, an individual
who pondered everything
deeply but was always
prepared to reconsider.
Over the past decade,
David wrote frequently
for tate on a variety of
subjects, from his
masterly ‘Notes on
Installing Art’ (which
should form the basis of
a handbook given to all
young curators) to an
interview with Rachel
Whiteread considered by
the artist as far and
away the best she ever
did. He also, of course,
wrote about Francis
Bacon, whose work he
knew better than anyone
but which he constantly
re-evaluated. This
February, four months
before David died, I
interviewed him about
his new book on Bacon.
He was still wrestling
with the painter’s
methods as well as how
he ranked with other
major figures in
European art – less a
cricket team than a wry
cultural Olympiad. This
all-too brief interview
is published on page 80,
while below are tributes
sent to Tate from some
of David’s friends and
rivals; critics,
curators and artists
whose understanding of
his achievements are
infinitely more profound
than mine.
Five years ago now, in
an early issue of the
magazine, David
experimented with the
idea of re-reading
Bacon’s work as if
through the eyes of
Matisse. Ultimately, he
decided that it was a
fascinating but flawed
concept. His concluding
sentences about Bacon’s
broader creative
approach, though, might
well have been written
about David Sylvester
himself: “Bacon takes a
variety of things and
incorporates them into a
mixture in which their
separate identities are
glimpsed, more or less
changed, sometimes
changed hardly at all,
but which has a
perfectly individual
style. It is very like
what Eliot did and a
consummation that could
have happened only in
our own age because it
depends on our
unprecedented breadth of
reference. Fragmentary
memories of many times
and places, of many
myths and styles, are
brought to mind, some
clearly, some vaguely as
we look. It seems that
all human history is
present. The poignancy
is that those echoes
from the store of common
experience are brought
to us by a voice that is
utterly personal and
singular.”
Tim Marlow
Nicholas Serota
David Sylvester was
singular in his ability
to focus with great
intensity on whatever
issue was at hand. He
was always deliberate in
his judgment and gave
equal weight to the
choice of a painting for
an exhibition, a word in
a sentence, the
juxtaposition of one
work against another, or
the right wine for his
guests. Nothing
apparently minor escaped
his attention.
Rachel Whiteread
He
was an extraordinary
interviewer, the best I
have ever encountered.
He was charming, a
little flirtatious and
was a great enabler. He
led the conversation in
a wholly direct way, but
picked up on things that
others didn’t see. He
had the ability to
generate an intimacy
that made the whole
process of talking about
art a great pleasure.
Anthony Caro
He
was a person of gravitas
and authority. You felt
that everything he said
and wrote had been
seriously considered.
For me, his genius lay
in the shows he curated
and hung. For example,
after seeing a show of
Picasso’s late work at
the Guggenheim, I had
concluded that in his
last days Picasso had
lost it, but the “Late
Picasso” that David
presented at the Tate
(1988) completely
changed my view. His
Bacon exhibition in
Venice was superb. David
had a point of view with
his shows; he was saying
something and made them
work visually and
intellectually. In a way
he was like an artist;
putting up a great show
is an art.
John Berger
David Sylvester
considered me his bête
noire. I think that is
an oversimplification.
It is quite important to
consider there were
quite a number of things
we agreed about. We were
both among the first
newspaper critics to
recognise Frank Auerbach
and Leon Kossoff. We
both greatly admired
Giacometti but wrote
different things about
him. We disagreed about
Francis Bacon, but
disagreements are
healthy.
I thought he was an
extraordinary curator.
He had a precision and
care for detail, and had
a sense of the whole
œuvre of an artist’s
work. His installations
were almost like
landscapes. He was a
good writer. He
struggled towards
maximum precision and
clarity and succeeded.
He also had the spirit
of a great collector;
his attitude was that of
the connoisseur who
believed in the act of
collecting as helping
the artist.
Grey Gowrie
David was above all a
writer rather than a
critic. His subject was
art. Like Ruskin or
Henry James, he explored
the way in which a
visceral response to
things seen translate
into language. It is an
impossible task. As
Beckett might have said,
David failed better than
anyone else. He was a
man easily elated and
easily downcast but
always an enchanting
companion. He was one of
my closest friends, and
where the visual arts
were concerned, my guru.
My celestial dinner
party would include
Francis Bacon, Paddy and
Joan Leigh Fermor as
well as David. Thanks to
him I have enjoyed it on
earth.
Anthony David Bernard
Sylvester,
art critic and curator,
born 21 September 1924,
died 19 June 2001
Perry Ogden’s photographs of Francis Bacon’s Studio
on show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery
Inside 7 Reece Mews
SARAH DOUGLAS
|
BOOKS
|
THE ART NEWSPAPER |
SATURDAY 1
JANUARY 2002
Perry Ogden’s photographs are invaluable documentation of Francis Bacon’s studio
at 7 Reese Mews in London, where he resided until his death in 1992. The studio
was recently relocated wholesale and reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, to which John Edwards donated the studio in
1998.
Ogden’s colour photographs, taken while the studio was still in London, comprise
a book describing the studio’s relocation, put out last year by Thames & Hudson,
and now this suite of photographs is on view at Shafrazi Gallery. The studio
proper, as captured by Ogden, is strewn with clues to the painter’s inspiration
and daily existence—paint brushes sprout willy-nilly from old butter bean and
caper cans; two medical photos of herpes simplex victims abut cardboard boxes
and a pair of ice skates; a snapshot of a youthful Mick Jagger shares space with
a political biography of Karl Marx.
The randomness is delicious, a real-world version of messy installation art like
that of Jason Rhoades. Books piled among the debris document Bacon’s artistic
inspiration: monographs on Munch, Rodin and, of course, Velázquez; a volume on
Egyptian art with a fragment of a head on its cover.
All that is missing is Bacon himself, and he, as well as his ill-fated lover,
George Dyer, are present in crumpled photos within photos, on the littered
floor. Other photos document Bacon’s spartan kitchen, with studies tacked to its
walls, the bare lightbulbs hanging in his bedroom, and even—a spooky touch—a few
crumpled towels clinging to the rim of his bathtub.
Three Bacon paintings up for
auction
MAEV KENNEDY | ARTS
& HERITAGE CORRESPONDENT | THE
GUARDIAN | THURSDAY
10 JANUARY, 2002
Three angst-filled paintings by
Francis Bacon including an ominous portrait of his lover, representing a
traumatic period in the artist’s life, come up for auction in London next month.
Each is estimated by Christie’s
at under £1m, but could well soar far past that: the world record for a Bacon is
over £6m, paid at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last year, and a series of
three portraits of his last companion, John Edwards, sold for just over £3m at
Christie’s in London.
One of the paintings, Head, the
contorted image of a surgeon with a lamp on his forehead, was given as a present
to his friend, the writer Daniel Farson. Four years later, in 1966, Farson sold
it – in
his own words to his "lasting shame and regret" – for
£2,400: it is now estimated at up to £500,000.
Bacon’s relationship in the
1950s with a former fighter pilot, Peter Lacy, was marked by fights which
frequently became violent, and sometimes led to Lacy physically attacking
Bacon’s canvases. Head was painted in 1962, the year of Lacy’s death.
A second small canvas was
painted the following year, Portrait of Man with Glasses IV, and shows a
face so distorted and apparently blood-spattered that it appears to have been
beaten to a pulp: it is estimated at up to £400,000.
The painting expected to
attract most interest is a portrait of Lacy himself, Man in Blue VII,
estimated at up to £700,000. It was the culmination of a series painted in 1954
when Bacon was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, to be near
Lacy’s house.
Christie’s specialist Fernando
Mignoni said yesterday: "It is only fitting that a painting that show’s traces
of the features of Lacy, with whom Bacon had a turbulent relationship, should
show his customary ambiguity. This is Bacon at his most existential."
Bacon’s reputation has
continued to soar since he died in 1992 of a heart attack, leaving his entire
fortune, then estimated at £11m, to John Edwards, a former East End barman.
His chaotic studio, often
knee-deep in litter, has been treated as a shrine, and recreated in his native – but
hastily abandoned – Dublin.
Three Bacon paintings to be sold
for £2m
BY MATTHEW BEARD | HOME
NEWS | THE
INDEPENDENT |
THURSDAY 10 JANUARY
2002
Three paintings by Francis Bacon,
including a portrait of a tortured-looking Peter Lacy, a homosexual lover, are
expected to fetch up to £2m at auction in London next month.
Nearly 10 years after the death of
Britain’s finest post-war artist, competition is expected to be intense for Man
in Blue VII, part of a series Bacon painted in the early Fifties with Lacy
as a model.
The tension-filled portrait shows
the subject in a dark suit, standing as though in the dock of a courtroom. Bacon
emphasises his subject’s vulnerability by ghostly vertical stripes in the
background, which resemble cell bars.
The 60in by 42in (150cm by 105cm)
oil on canvas is estimated to fetch about £700, 000 at Christie’s on 6 February.
A second, much smaller Bacon, a haunting and disturbing painting called Head and
given by the artist to his friend, the writer Daniel Farson, in 1962, is
estimated at up to £500,000. Farson, to his "lasting shame and regret", sold the
painting in 1966 for £2,400 when he found himself "in the doldrums".
A third Bacon, Portrait of a
Man with Glasses IV, painted in 1963 and showing a distorted face
reminiscent of the nanny shot in the head in the Russian film classic Battleship
Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, should make up to £400,000. It is being
offered for sale by a private collector.
The Man in Blue portrait, for
which competition is expected to be fiercest, was painted in 1954 while Bacon
was staying in the Imperial Hotel, Henley-on-Thames, to be close to Lacy, who
had a house in the Oxfordshire town. Fernando Mignoni, a Christie’s specialist,
said yesterday: "It is only fitting that a painting showing traces of the
features of Lacy, with whom Bacon had a turbulent and at times violent
relationship, should show his customary ambiguity.
"This is Bacon at his most
existential, painting the whole angst and fragility of life."
Last year, three 1984 portraits by
Bacon of another lover, John Edwards, fetched more than £3m at Christie’s in
London. The world record for a Bacon is $6.6m (£4.6m) for a 1966 portrait of a
previous lover, George Dyer, who killed himself in 1971. Edwards met Bacon in
1974 and stayed with him until the artist’s death. He was, like Dyer, an East
End boy much younger than Bacon.
Next month, the High Court in
London will hear allegations that Bacon was blackmailed into staying with the
Marlborough Fine Art gallery in London. The Pace Gallery in New York offered to
pay Bacon £50,000 a painting in 1978, but its owner, Arnold Glimcher, claimed
that Bacon stayed with Marlborough after it allegedly threatened to stop his
access to his Swiss bank account and expose him to higher income tax.
The court ruling will settle a
£100m battle waged by trustees of the Bacon estate to establish exactly how much
the artist was paid in his 34-year relationship with Marlborough.

‘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
Perry Ogden
'7
Reece Mews, Francis Bacon’s studio'
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
119 Wooster Street
Soho
Through Jan. 26
By ROBERTA SMITH |
ART
IN REVIEW |
THE
NEW YORK TIMES |
FRIDAY, JANUARY
11,
2002
Francis Bacon had the studio from hell: famously small, never cleaned and
unrepentantly messy. After his death in 1992, it was donated to the Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, which transported it scrap by scrap,
smear by smear, and brush by filthy brush from London to the artist’s country of
birth.
The disassembling and reassembling of this setting, including walls and
especially the ankle-deep debris of printed matter, photographs and art
materials on the floor, was something of an archaeological tour de force. For
better for worse, it set a new standard for the preservation of artists’
studios.
The project began with Perry Ogden’s meticulous color photographs of the site.
Already published in a book and in a Hugh Lane catalog, they are now being
presented as art, part of the growing photographic subgenre straddling art and
documentary. The images first strike the eye as generic and familiar, a kind of
lazy-man’s collage. But soon the forests of dirty brushes, the walls abloom with
color tests, the paint-encrusted easel and most of all the detritus underfoot
specify the context to an utterly engrossing degree.
There are snapshots of Bacon and reproductions of his art and the art of others.
There are all manner of photographs, including reproductions of Eadweard
Muybridge’s ''Human Locomotion'' series; books on bullfighting and sports;
strong-man magazines; a biography of Karl Marx. The importance of both
photography and personal relationships to Bacon’s art is reflected in an image
centered on a creased, torn photograph of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, standing
in his underwear in Bacon’s studio — next to a wall pinned with photographs.
Like its preservation, these photographs could be said to fetishize the artist’s
studio. But they also provide an unusually tangible tour of Bacon’s brain. In
the process they reveal art-making as a process of tremendous, hard-won
distillation, fed by incalculable amounts and many different kinds of knowledge,
work and looking.
All of this was in pursuit of paintings that Bacon intended people to see. That
his studio’s chaos was intrinsic to the artist’s process and possessed an order
of its own is suggested by Mr. Odgen’s photographs of Bacon’s modest,
neat-as-a-pin living quarters, just outside the studio door.
London out of the frame as gallery closes
EU taxes and the rise of New York in the art world have ended a proud old firm
that began with
gifts from Van Gogh, writes Colin
Glendell
COLIN GLEADELL |
NEWS |
THE DAILY
TELEGRAPH |
SATURDAY, JANUARY
12, 2002
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
What life has taught me since 21
YVONNE SWANN |
DAILY
MAIL WEEKEND |
SATURDAY, 19 JANUARY, 2002
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
MARTIN GAYFORD |
ARTS |
THE DAILY
TELEGRAPH |
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2002
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
The Bacon Estate
HENRY LYDIATE | ARTLAW |
ART MONTHLY |
ISSUE NUMBER 253 |
FEBRUARY 2002
The
new year ushered in several important judicial decisions dealing with artlaw
matters, including the Bacon Estate.
It will be recalled that Francis Bacon died in 1992 and left his estate to his
friend John Edwards, naming Brian Clarke as one of his executors. The case is
being brought by Clarke against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and
Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein). Clarke is alleging that
Bacon was dealt with inappropriately by his gallery, specifically (and amongst
other things) in relation to payments for his work.
Late last year, Clarke applied to the London High Court to include in his claim
a specific allegation that when Bacon was considering changing his dealer (from
Marlborough to the Pace Gallery) in the expectation that he might increase his
income from sales, Marlborough’s then Director Frank Lloyd pressured Bacon to
continue with them: in particular, by suggesting that if he left Marlborough he
might then experience difficulty in accessing money in his Swiss bank accounts,
and might encounter future difficulties in dealing with the UK’s Inland Revenue.
Shortly after this alleged encounter, Bacon decided to remain with Marlborough.
The High Court allowed those accusations to be included in Clarke’s claim.
This decision does not mean that the judge has accepted that the accusations are
proven, or likely to succeed; simply that there appears to be on the face of the
evidence presented a real issue to be dealt with at the full hearing.
Marlborough argued strongly against the inclusion of this latest claim, which it
will now contest at the full hearing, likely to be held in coming weeks.
© Henry Lydiate 2002
Heir’s illness ends the battle between
Bacon’s estate and his gallery
BY TERRI
JUDD AND STEVE
BOGGAN | HOME
NEWS |
THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY
2 FEBRUARY 2002
A
LINE WAS line drawn under one of the most acrimonious art wrangles in decades
yesterday when Francis Bacon’s estate and his former gallery opted to settle
amicably.
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 Estate and Dealer Settle
A Two-Year Suit Over Pricing
By CAROL VOGEL | THE NEW YORK TIMES | SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2002
In the eve of what could have been one of the art world’s nastiest trials,
the estate of Francis Bacon and the artist’s dealer mutually agreed to
withdraw a two-year-old case in England over whether the dealer had
fraudulently earned tens of millions of dollars by consistently undervaluing
many of Mr. Bacon’s paintings.
Under their agreement, the estate and the dealer, Marlborough U.K. and
Marlborough International, will each bear its own legal costs and be spared
the risk of losing a bruising case and having to pay both sides’ legal fees,
which could have come to more than $15 million.
Also adding to the estate’s decision not to go to trial was the fact that
John Edwards, the sole heir, was recently found to have lung cancer.
"It was going to be a long, tough case," said John Eastman, one of the
estate’s lawyers. He said the estate’s executor chose to conclude the case
with the uncertain outcome among the uppermost things in his mind.
Mr. Bacon, who died in 1992, left his estate to Mr. Edwards, a reclusive
character with whom he had a filial relationship. Over the years Mr. Bacon’s
paintings of distorted, anguished figures brought as much as $6 million at
auction and made him one of Britain’s most celebrated postwar artists.
The suit contended that Marlborough controlled the most minute aspects of
Mr. Bacon’s financial and personal life — to the point of paying his laundry
bills and handing him spending money — and so could buy paintings from him
at greatly reduced rates and quickly resell them for substantially higher
prices.
Stanley Bergman, a lawyer for Marlborough, called the charges baseless,
saying the estate "realized it was without merit."
Mr. Eastman said that the executor, Brian Clarke, is completing plans to set
up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation for the study of Francis Bacon and
his work.
Bacon paintings expected to raise a million
Three important paintings by Irish born artist Francis Bacon which
are going
under the hammer today at an auction are expected to raise more than
€1.4m
ARTS & CULTURE | THE IRISH EXAMINER | WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY, 2002
Three important paintings by Irish born artist Francis Bacon which are going
under the hammer today at an auction are expected to raise more than £1m
(€1.4m).
The three works will be sold as part of an auction of Post War Art taking
place at Christie’s in London. The bleak pieces have been described as
demonstrating Bacon at his most existential and are good examples of his
angst-ridden style of later years.
His 1954 work, Man In Blue VII, is the earliest of his paintings up for sale
and is expected to fetch between £500,000 (€817,000) and £700,000 (€1.1m).
It was the culmination of a series of pictures he painted while staying in
the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, near his lover, Peter Lacy’s house.
Head, painted in 1962, depicts the head of a surgeon with a lamp strapped to
it. Described as one of his darker works, it was completed in the year that
Lacy died and is expected to fetch up to half a million pounds (€816,000).
The final piece is titled Portrait of Man with Glasses IV which was painted
in 1963 and is expected to fetch in the region of £400,000 (€650,000). It
depicts the image of a man whose distorted face looks as if it had been
beaten to a pulp.
Bacon’s reputation has increased since his death in 1992 with his most
valuable painting, selling for more than £6m (€9.8m) in New York last year.
Bacon paintings sold for
£1.9m
ARTS | ENTERTAINMENT | BBC NEWS | WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY, 2002
Three important paintings by
Francis Bacon have been sold for almost £2m at auction. Christie’s
in London sold the works by the Irish-born artist as part of a £7.4m sale
called Post-War Art on Wednesday.
Man In Blue VII, Head,
and Portrait of Man with Glasses IV went under the hammer for a total
of £1,914,250. But in terms of price, they were eclipsed by the top lot, a
bright canvas entitled No 15 painted by Russian-born artist Mark
Rothko, which was sold for £1.65m.
The Bacon paintings are regarded by
critics as great examples of his most existential and angst-ridden work.
Bacon’s 1954 work, Man In Blue VII, was sold for £707,750. The piece
is the culmination of a series of pictures Bacon painted while staying in
the Imperial Hotel at Henley-on-Thames, near the house of his lover, Peter
Lacy.
Head, painted in 1962, the year Mr Lacy
died, depicts the head of a surgeon with a lamp strapped to it. It was
bought for £311,750.
Violence
Portrait of Man with Glasses IV,
from 1963, was sold for £894,750, twice the expected price. It depicts a man
whose distorted face looks as if it has been very badly beaten. Bacon was
one of the last century’s most successful artists, earning about £14m before
his death in 1992.
Violence was prevalent in much of his
work, reflecting the turbulence of his own life. His relationship with Mr
Lacy was punctuated by fights that often resulted in Bacon’s canvases being
vandalised. A series of three paintings by Bacon of his long-time partner,
John Edwards, sold for £3m in 2001, and Studies of the Human Body sold
for £6m in New York last year.
In total, Post-War Art fetched
£7.4m and included work by Erika Klein and Andy Warhol.

Bacon worked for
30 years at his Kensington studio
Christie’s Post War Art
6 & 7 February 2002
Inside Bacon’s Head
BY WILLIAM PATTON | CHRISTIE’S | 6
& 7 FEBRUARY, 2002
'Francis frequently slept on the sofa at my place underneath a painting he had
given me, the small head of a surgeon with a lamp on his forehead… Having
slashed the larger [original] canvas… a friend persuaded him to let me have it…
To my lasting shame and regret, I sold it when I was in my doldrums in Devon'.
So wrote Dan Farson, describing Head (Daniel Farson, The Gilded
Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London, 1994, pp.251-52).
A Soho habitué and well-known television journalist, Dan Farson had met Bacon in
1951, beginning a long friendship that lasted until the painter’s death. Head
was painted in 1962, a remarkably turbulent year for Bacon.
The opening of his momentous Tate retrospective had been overshadowed by the
death of his lover, Peter Lacy, whose features haunt those of the surgeon in
Head. Their tumultuous relationship was punctuated by fights, which often
resulted in Lacy attacking Bacon’s paintings. This violence was complicated by
Bacon’s complex enjoyment of a certain brutality in his relationships and
trysts, a sado-masochism that constantly permeated his art, not least in the
hulking figure of this surgeon.
Medical images often appear in Bacon’s work, deriving from his impressive
archive of pictures in books on radiography, disease and deformity but they are
always imbued with violence. Bodies are shown bandaged and mutilated, pierced by
syringes. An element of torture taints Bacon’s use of the medical. In Head,
the surgeon’s headlight suggests interrogation rather than inspection
The latent brutality implied by his bulk and distorted head is wholly detached
from conventional images of doctors. Bacon’s decision to take Head from a larger
canvas intensifies this brutality. The surgeon bursts forth from the small
painting, dominating its composition completely. This surgeon — possibly a
unique figure in Bacon’s œuvre — shows none of the healer’s compassion. Instead
he appears as an aggressor, a hybrid of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is the
harbinger of horror, occupying a role usually reserved for Bacon’s nightmarish
zoomorphic Furies
The bodies Bacon depicted in his paintings tend to be those of victims or
patients, but here the surgeon, as protagonist, stalks Bacon’s psyche in all his
Neanderthal glory. He is not merely the embodiment but also the cause of the
'human cry' that Bacon sought to capture in his art, what he once described to
Farson as the 'whole coagulation of pain, despair.
William Paton is a Researcher in the 20th Century Art Department at Christie’s
King Street, London
CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR (EVENING SALE)
London, King Street Sale Date Feb 06, 2002
Lot Number 13 Sale Number
6553
Francis Bacon
(1909-1992) Head
oil on canvas laid down on board
16 5/8 x 17in. (42.4 x 43.2cm.)
Painted in 1962
Estimate: 300,000
- 500,000 British pounds
Literature: R.
Alley and J. Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 205, p.148
(illustrated p.248).
Provenance: Daniel
Farson, London. His sale; Sotheby’s London, 14th December 1966, Lot 156 (sold
for £ 2,400).
Lot
Essay
Painted in
1962, Head was
a gift from Bacon to his friend Daniel Farson, a writer who would later become
the artist’s biographer. Speaking of the house in Limehouse that he owned
between the mid-1950s and 1964, Farson wrote, 'Francis frequently slept on the
sofa at my place underneath a painting he had given me, the small head of a
surgeon with a lamp on his forehead... Having slashed the larger canvas… a
friend persuaded him to let me have it. Years later, when it hung above the
fireplace in my home in North Devon, Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the
Otter, studied it in amazement. 'That man is a great artist!' he whispered,
though he had not heard of Bacon. To my lasting shame and regret, I sold it when
I was in my doldrums in Devon' (Daniel Farson, The
Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London, 1994,
pp.251-52). Farson had met Bacon in Soho in 1951, and they struck up a long
friendship that would last until the artist’s death.
The early
1960s were a crucial period in Bacon’s career, especially the year that this
work was painted. Bacon had recently signed a contract with Marlborough Fine
Art, giving him both significant financial stability and increased exposure, and
it was in 1962 that the Tate Gallery held the artist’s first retrospective. The
previous year Bacon had changed studio, moving to the mews that he was to use
until his death. Despite all these positive aspects to his life at this period,
the success of the Tate retrospective was utterly punctured by the simultaneous
death of his lover Peter Lacy.
Death and
violence often formed the backdrop to Bacon’s life, and this translated
forcefully to his art. In Head,
the menacing hulk of the surgeon reeks with brutality. Bacon himself
differentiated between the violence on and off the canvas, saying, 'I have been
accustomed to always living through forms of violence — which may or may not
have an effect upon one, but I think probably does. But this violence of my
life, the violence which I’ve lived amongst, I think it’s different to the
violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to
do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence
of reality itself' (Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York,
1990, p.81). Bacon well remembered the atmosphere of suspense and latent
violence in Ireland during his youth, when English and Anglo-Irish families like
his lived in constant fear of death. This thread of violence continued in London
through the two World Wars where he lived under threat of bombing and,
importantly, witnessed the immediacy of the effects of the death and destruction
wrought upon the people and the landscape — it is no coincidence that Bacon
returned to painting during the Second World War. Likewise, violence played a
large part in many of Bacon’s relationships, especially that with Peter Lacy.
Their fights were often brutal. Bacon’s attitudes towards this violence were,
however, mixed. Indeed, Bacon was known to enjoy suffering a certain brutality
in his relationships. This was most obvious during his time in Tangier, where
Lacy worked as a pianist and where Bacon would often be found, bloodied and
bruised after an evening’s tryst. This mixture of fear and guilty enjoyment
mingles freely in Bacon’s paintings. The violence of his imagery is mixed with
an overt enjoyment of the sensuality of flesh, which he took great relish in
painting. The smeared features in Head, the hallmark of Bacon’s work, are
redolent with a fleshiness that is obtrusive to the point of nausea. The very
application of the paint shows an appreciation of the sensual, the materiality
itself imbuing the flesh of this menacing surgeon with an awesome presence,
perfectly condensing the 'violence of reality itself'.
The implied
violence of the surgical theme was of immense interest to Bacon, whose paintings
often contained elements filtered from books on radiography, deformity, disease
and other medical texts. Bacon himself often told of buying an antique book on
diseases of the mouth while in Paris. The book was filled with exquisitely
hand-coloured illustrations which he found beautiful. Bacon saw this same
strange, horrific beauty in car crashes and other sights packed with the mixed
colours and contrasts death and destruction. This fitted with Bacon’s
fascination with violence, and especially violence wreaked upon the body. In Head,
the surgeon, possibly a unique figure in Bacon’s oeuvre, is depicted during
surgery, wearing what appears to be a surgical robe as well as the light on his
head. Usually when medical elements appear in Bacon’s work, the subject appears
to be the patient or victim — mutilated and deformed bodies people his
paintings. The image here is all the more striking because it is the aggressor,
the surgeon, an aspect complicated by the surgeon’s role as healer. It is clear
from other paintings by Bacon that the surgical processes and implements,
represented by bandages, mutilations and hypodermic syringes and recalled in
many of his works by the slab-like supports upon which his subjects often
languish, were sources of little comfort to the artist. Each medical element in
his painting screams of horror and torture. In Head, the light on the
surgeon’s head reminds the viewer more of interrogation than mere inspection.
This Dr. Mengele ambiguity, the dichotomy between torturer and healer, cuts to
the core of Bacon’s life, and especially to his relationship with Peter Lacy.
Indeed, traces of Lacy’s features haunt this surgeon’s face. The pair often
fought intensely, and Lacy often destroyed Bacon’s paintings in fits of rage,
yet he also provided Bacon with great happiness.
While
surgical features often appeared in Bacon’s works, the surgeon himself is a
theme of startling rarity. In many ways, he appears to be a rare, fully human
manifestation of the Furies who often appeared in Bacon’s paintings, embodying
an abstract sense of guilt and violence. The Furies feature throughout Bacon’s
work, often taking strange, fleshy yet zoomorphic shapes. Here, Bacon has
managed to translate this same animal brutality to the image of the surgeon. His
thick, dark arms and sloping shoulders retain a sense of the simian. The
surgeon’s menacing, elongated head is portrayed using Bacon’s hallmark methods
of distortion, a means of intensifying the image and its reality. Bacon, in a
televised interview with Melvyn Bragg, said that his work was a 'concentration
of reality, shorthand of sensation' (The South Bank Show, London, 1985).
By avoiding what he termed 'illustration' and disrupting actual shapes and
sights, Bacon unveiled a subjective awareness of reality and horror. This is
achieved both in his swirls of paint and the introduction of an animalism to the
surgeon’s body. As Bacon himself put it a few years after Head was
painted, he aimed to 'distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the
distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance… I think that the
methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my
case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back'
(Bacon, 1966, quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews
with Francis Bacon, New York, 1990, p.40).
As Daniel
Farson pointed out, Head originally formed part of a larger picture.
Bacon himself cut the head and shoulders from the painting and, judging by the
drawing pin marks, stuck it up in a place of choice for some time. Bacon was
known for his almost whimsical destruction of canvases that he felt were
inferior or that he had ruined. However in Head, whatever happened
elsewhere in the larger composition had evidently not affected this section
enough to merit its obliteration. Although Bacon seems to have spent little care
or attention in the cuts themselves, nonetheless he salvaged this part, a
testimony to the artist’s own satisfaction. The haunting, stretched head has a
peculiar and disturbing resonance intensified by its dominance of the picture’s
new smaller size. This intimate scale and close-quarters depiction of the
subject cut to the core of Bacon’s portraits in the present format. In
retrospect, Bacon’s decision to remove this section appears judicious, as
increasingly in the early 1960s he espoused brighter colours and a stark but
more expansive sense of space in his larger paintings while the smaller ones
tended to retain this darkness and customary claustrophobia. Head is
similar to these smaller works in appearance and effect. The dark background and
looming figure of the surgeon pack the work with intensity, almost inducing an
existential nausea with its very presence. Bacon’s perceived reality finds a new
strength in this small format, and Head becomes an icon to the horrors of
existence.

CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR (EVENING SALE)
London, King Street
Sale Date: Feb 06, 2002 Lot
Number: 13 Sale Number: 6553
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Man in Blue VII
oil on canvas
60 x 42½in. (152.7 x 107.9cm.)
Painted in 1954
Estimate GBP
500,000 — 700,000
Literature
J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon, New York, 1964, p. 88, no. 87
(illustrated).
Exhibited
Venice, XXVII Biennale di Venezia, June-October 1954, no. 58a.
London, Redfern Gallery, Summer Exhibition 1961, June-August 1961, no. 9.
Lisbon, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Arte Britanica no Século XX,
February-March 1962, no. 52 (illustrated).
Lot Essay
Man in Blue VII,
painted in 1954, is the culmination of a series of pictures with the same title
that Bacon painted while staying in the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames.
Although to some it seemed like an unlikely spot for the artist to reside, Bacon
spent a great deal of time in Henley during the 1950s in order to be close to
his lover Peter Lacy, who had a house there. Lacy, in fact, appears to be the
model throughout the series, as is most evident in Man in Blue V, where
the subject, filled with confidence, confronts the viewer with an intense gaze
reminiscent of a photograph of him relaxing in Ostia. However, in Man in Blue
VII there is less confidence. The depicted man seems oppressed both by his
background and his situation.
During the early 1950s, Bacon had begun to abandon the expressionistic,
dreamlike images he had earlier produced, paintings filled with zoomorphic
horrors. Instead, he took as his main subject the human form. His palette became
superficially more reserved, with dark backgrounds, blues and blacks, dominating
his work. Beginning with his reinterpretations of the famous Velazquez Portrait
of Pope Innocent X, Bacon explored tortured humanity on an intimate level. In
them, the 'Pope' sat, screaming, eyes fixed on the viewer. From these evolved
intense images of men dressed in suit and tie, sometimes bespectacled, usually
screaming. Despite the superficial normality of the businessman as subject
matter, Bacon was far from developing a respectable pictorial process — what he
termed 'illustration' had no part in his work. Instead, he was exploring
increasingly recognisable subjects that he could manipulate in order to harness
the anguish so central to his work. Apart from the Popes, Bacon tended to use
photographs of people he knew as the subjects for his paintings, preferring to
work from stills rather than live models. However, he always disrupted the
scientific certainty of the images of the photographs he used, explaining that,
'I don’t think it's damage. You may say it’s damaging if you take it on the
level of illustration. But not if you take it on the level of what I think of as
art. One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over the only way one can'
(Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with
Francis Bacon, New York, 1990, p.43).
The Man in Blue took this system of representation to a new scale. The
figure is at the centre of a far larger composition, giving a sense of oblivion
to the bleak surroundings. Where other figures filled their canvases, here the
subject is stranded at the centre of his, helpless. Although in Man in Blue
VII the figure is not screaming, nonetheless there is a huge tension as he
stands in his suit as though in the dock at court. This adds to the sense that
the subject is a defendant, the prey; although Bacon deliberately leaves the
nature of his ordeal unknown. Bacon has emphasised the subject’s vulnerability
with the introduction of the ghostly vertical stripes which resemble bars on a
cage. There is a sense of confinement and imprisonment, but at the same time of
complete negation, in that the figure appears absorbed into the nothingness of
the background. In this final work in the series, Bacon has allowed the figure
to be consumed by his surroundings — where he dominated the picture in Man in
Blue V, now he is its victim. He appears disorientated, as though he is
looking for some relief or respite from above infuses the painting with a sense
of paranoia. The simple fact that there is nothing threatening within the
painting except the atmosphere itself allows Bacon to imply that the predator,
the source of menace, is elsewhere, not within the realm of the painting, but in
the realm of the painter — the realm of the viewer.
It is only fitting that a painting that shows traces of the features of Bacon’s
lover, Lacy, with whom he had a turbulent and at times violent relationship,
should show his customary ambiguity. Indeed, the suit is so crisp that the
viewer is forced to wonder in part whether the subject is a victim in the dock
or a dictator on his podium. The uniform-like suit gives an air of authority,
and the pose mingles an impression of restraint — his hands tied behind his back
— with a pose of confidence. The mangled features combine the sad eyes of the
persecuted with an almost rabid mouth, the fanatical orator frothing with
ferocity and enthusiasm. However, the almost disembodied torso that blends into
the background, while making this character something of an eminence grise,
also lends him an insubstantiality inappropriate to the wilful tyrant. In turn,
this phantom-like appearance accentuates the pale face and flesh tones, which
are pushed into relief by the chiaroscuro, the tiny spot of flesh almost
phosphorescent against the dark. This is Bacon at his most existential, painting
the whole angst and fragility of life.

Man in Blue VII 1954
Francis Bacon
Buyers stampede for ‘bleak’ Bacons
BY
MARTIN EVANS | THE
INDEPENDENT | THURSDAY
7 FEBRUARY
2002
THREE PAINTINGS by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon sold for nearly £2m at
auction last night. The three works were snapped up during an auction of
post-war art at Christie’s in London.
The bleak pieces have been described as demonstrating Bacon at his most
existential and are good examples of the confrontational, angst-ridden style of
the artist’s later years.
His 1954 work, Man In Blue VII, was the earliest of his paintings up for
sale and was sold for £707,750. It was the culmination of a series of pictures
that Bacon painted while staying in the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames,
Oxfordshire, near the house of his lover, Peter Lacy.
Head,
painted in 1962, depicts the head of a surgeon with a lamp strapped to it.
Described as one of his darker works, it was completed in the year Lacy died and
was sold for £311,750.
The final piece under the hammer was titled Portrait of a Man with Glasses IV,
painted in 1963. It fetched £894,750, more than double the estimated price. It
depicts the image of a man whose distorted face looks as if it has been beaten
to a pulp. Bacon’s reputation and standing have gone up markedly since his death
in 1992, bringing higher prices for his work. His most valuable painting sold
for more than £6m in New York last year.
The sale comes the week after Bacon’s estate and his former gallery settled a
long-running financial dispute.
Eggs, Bacon and jellied eels
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,
Francis Bacon (1955)
JONATHAN JONES | PORTRAIT
OF THE WEEK | CULTURE | THE
GUARDIAN | SATURDAY
23 FEBRUARY
2002
Artist: Francis
Bacon (1910-92),
who once described his art as an attempt "to unlock the valves of feeling". To
do this, he tore apart conventions of modern and traditional art, walking a
tightrope between the figurative image and abstraction, returning to the early
years of modern art and the example of his hero Vincent van Gogh
Bacon was a romantic — and also a reader. A more studious figure than Bacon the
Soho low-lifer was revealed last year by the installation of his studio as an
exhibit at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. In addition to well-thumbed volumes
of Heidegger, Lacan, Freud, Joyce, Chaucer and Aeschylus, there is his copy of
the life-mask of William Blake.
Subject: William
Blake (1757-1827), author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, engraver of The
Ancient of Days. By his old age, when he had his life-mask taken, Blake was a
cult figure among a small circle of Romantics. In September 1823, he let the
sculptor James Deville immerse his head in plaster, with only a straw to breath
through as it solidified.
Before photography, masks from moulds of living and recently dead faces were the
most accurate way of preserving someone’s appearance. Deville probably learned
the technique from his master, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. Deville practised
phrenology — reading
character from the size and shape of the skull, as devised by J Spurzheim. Blake
seems to have read Spurzheim, too. His drawing of the man who taught him
painting in his dreams (c1819-20) resembles a phrenology diagram. Deville built
up a collection of casts and wished to include Blake’s "as representative of the
imaginative faculty". Because of phrenology, we have a quasi-photographic image
of an artist who has become infinitely more famous since his death.
Distinguishing features: Blake
is a pale film in the dark, a flayed face, features compressed like those of a
bank robber with a stocking over his head. The features are brutally crushed,
there and not there, eyes pressed shut, one eyebrow oddly raised, the lips
pushed in. Although skin is vividly suggested in the sickening pink of the brow
and cheek, this is not the outward man. White mist flows up the cheek and over
the broad skull, dematerialising the flesh. It’s as if we are looking underneath
the surface of skin at the ghostly presence of the man within. This is a
portrait not of the flesh, but of the spirit.
Bacon made a series of paintings of Blake’s life-mask in the mid-1950s. The
title, however, is generalised: "Study for Portrait" suggests this is an attempt
to get at the essence of what a portrait is
Bacon kept his own copy of Blake’s life-mask next to treasured personal
photographs. His painting feels as if it were based on a photograph. Bacon
stresses the similarity of life-casting to photography, in order to reveal the
deathliness and violence of both in rendering brute fact. His painting, however,
apprehends something beneath the visible skin: an inner self, suffering in
absolute isolation.
This is a passionate and finally mysterious tribute from one great London artist
to another.
Inspirations and influences: There
are models for this intense communion with a dead artist in Blake’s work. Blake
portrayed, from life, the spirits who visited him. Blake’s spirit portraits
include John Milton, and The Ghost of a Flea (c1819-20). There’s a similarity
between Bacon’s Blake and Blake’s Flea in their fleshy, monstrous intensity, the
authority of a vision seen in darkness.
Where is it? Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8008).

Here’s A Francis Bacon, And Another, And Another…
BY DOROTHY HO | NEWSWIRE |
WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 2002
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
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) lived and worked in 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington
from 1961 until his death in 1992. One of a short row of converted coach houses
on a quiet cobble stoned lane, the mews was a modest dwelling and consisted of a
kitchen-cum-bathroom, a bedroom, and a studio. In contrast to the rather spartan
quality of the bedroom and kitchen, the artist’s studio was chaotic. Bacon said
himself of his cluttered studio: 'I feel at home here in this chaos because
chaos suggests images to me' (Fig l).1 He
rarely painted from life and the heaps of torn photographs, fragments of
illustrations, books, catalogues, magazines and newspapers provided nearly all
of his visual sources. Commenting on the wealth of photographic material in his
studio, Bacon said that he looked at photographs for inspiration in the way that
one looks up meanings in a dictionary.2 On
the studio floor, reproductions of fine art paintings jostled with illustrations
of crime scenes, skin diseases, filmstars, athletes and other imagery which
clearly appealed to Bacon’s artistic imagination. Photographs by John Deakin,
Cecil Beaton, Peter Beard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Peter Stark, and many others
provide a fascinating insight into both the bohemian milieu in which Bacon
operated and the artist’s method of manipulating his source material. The sheer
range and diversity of Bacon’s interests is reflected in the types of books
found in the studio. Books on subjects including art, sport, crime, history,
photography, cinema, bullfighting, and parapsychology were found in pre carious
piles on the studio floor and highlight the eclectic nature of Bacon’s
influences. Other material found in the studio includes one hundred slashed
canvases, correspondence, magazines, newspapers, vinyl records, and a vast array
of artist’s materials.
When the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin received the donation of the entire contents
of Francis Bacon’s Studio in August 1998, it marked the beginning of an unique
project. While Bacon’s reputation as one of the foremost artists of 20th-century
figurative painting is unquestioned, his studio contents and what they could
contribute to current scholarship on the artist was a journey into uncharted
territory. In order to interpret the material fully, every single item was
recorded in detail on a specially-designed computerised database. With 7,500
entries, this is now one of the most comprehensive documentary archives of any
artist, living or dead. Given the volume of material, the cataloguing of the
studio contents and the reconstruction of the studio in the Gallery involved
hours of painstaking work and was an extremely complex task. Nevertheless, this
work has proved extremely rewarding and a number of important revelations have
been made regarding the artist’s life, inspiration, unusual techniques, and
working methods.
The validity of disassembling and reconstructing an artist’s studio is beyond
the scope of this article and undoubtedly lengthy debates on this subject will
continue long after the reconstructed studio opens to the public. In this
article, I propose to focus on one of the most important aspects of the
project — the discovery of a considerable quantity of works on paper by Francis
Bacon in the Reece Mews studio. These are significant for a number of reasons,
not least Bacon’s persistent denial throughout his life that he ever did
preliminary sketches for his paintings. The following themes will be explored:
firstly, the controversy surrounding the existence of drawings by Francis Bacon;
secondly, the types of works on paper found in the Reece Mews studio, their
relationship with finished paintings and what they reveal about Bacon’s thought
processes and working methods; and, finally, approximate dates for these works.
Throughout his life, the existence of drawings by Francis Bacon appeared to be
shrouded in secrecy. Although some of Bacon’s friends and contemporaries owned
drawings by him, they seem to have accepted his desire to keep his drawings out
of the public domain during his lifetime. In 1975, Henry Geldzahler wrote that:
'Very few drawings by Francis Bacon exist, or, to be more exact, very few of his
drawings have been seen.'3 This
was not always the case, however. In 1934, finding it increasingly difficult to
persuade a gallery to display his work, Bacon organised an exhibition of his own
work at the Transition Gallery in Sunderland House, London. It consisted of
seven oil paintings and about five or six gouaches and drawings. This would
indicate that at that time, Bacon considered his drawings to be works of art in
their own right, an attitude that was soon to change. Apparently, two of these
drawings, Composition (Figure) 1933 and Composition (Figures) 1933
were purchased by Bacon’s cousin, Diana Watson.4 The
notion that Bacon did not draw stems from interviews between Bacon and David
Sylvester, the distinguished British art historian most closely associated with
the artist and the author of a number of publications and articles on the
artist. Sylvester carried out a series of extensive interviews with Bacon which
were broadcast on both radio and television and also published in book form in
1975. In the first interview, which took place in October 1962, the following
exchange takes place, David Sylvester: 'And you never work from sketches or
drawings, you never do a rehearsal for the picture?' Francis Bacon: 'I often
think I should, but I don’t. It’s not very helpful in my kind of painting. As
the actual texture, colour, the whole way the paint moves, are so accidental,
any sketches that I did before could only give a kind of skeleton, possibly, of
the way the thing might happen.'5 Bacon’s
consistent denial that he produced drawings of any kind became a recurring theme
in the countless interviews the artist gave during his life. In an interview
with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show in 1985, Bragg enquired as he stood in
the Reece Mews studio, 'Do you do drawings beforehand?' to which Bacon’s reply
was an emphatic 'No'. Bacon qualified this by stating that it is 'so much better
to immediately attack the canvas with the paint.'6 In
an interview with a French journalist in 1987, Bacon stated 'J'adore des
dessins, mais je nen fais pas?1 This
stance was maintained until Bacon’s death in 1992 and went relatively
unchallenged.8 However,
since the artist’s death, a considerable number of drawings, both by Bacon and
attributed to him, have surfaced and with the emergence of these different
bodies of work, the art world has been forced to re-evaluate Bacon’s oeuvre in a
new context. In 1996, some Bacon drawings and over painted material were
exhibited as part of a major Francis Bacon exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in
Paris but these were seen as being rare examples. Then in 1997-98, the Tate
Gallery in London acquired a number of Bacon drawings and these were exhibited
there in early 1999. The provenance of the Tate drawings, some forty works in
total, is of interest. In the 1950s, Bacon gave four of the drawings to the
poet, Stephen Spender. He was a close friend and had written articles on Bacon.
The other drawings acquired by the Gallery were also gifts, in this instance, to
Bacon’s longstanding friends, Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock, who kept them
until after his death.9
Another archive of drawings and sketches, allegedly by Bacon, has surfaced in
Italy. Christian Ravarino, an Italian American journalist, originally owned this
material but it has now been sold and dispersed amongst several Italian
collectors.10 It
is unclear what connection Ravarino had with Bacon or how the material was
acquired. The Joule Archive, a controversial body of work consisting of sketches
and over-painted material attributed to Francis Bacon, emerged in 1996. Barry
Joule met Bacon in 1978 and a friendship ensued. An amateur artist in his own
right, Joule claims that he was given the material shortly before Bacon’s
departure for Madrid, where he died in April 1992.11 The
material was first accepted as genuine by leading figures including David
Sylvester but since then its authenticity has been called into question. A
selection of the material has been exhibited at both the Irish Museum of Modern
Art and the Barbican Centre in London but further analysis and research is
warranted before the issue of authenticity is fully resolved.
A number of possible reasons why Bacon was so secretive about his drawings can
be put forward but Sylvester probably provides the most logical explanation
when, with the benefit of hindsight, he says, 'Early on, he decided that he
couldn’t draw, and thereafter pretended that he didn’t.'12 Bacon’s
drawings do not reveal him to be a skilled draughtsman but this did not pre vent
him from professing great admiration for drawings by artists including
Michelangelo, Ingres, Degas, Picasso, and Giacometti, often rating their graphic
work as amongst their best work. It is also of significance that it was an
exhibition of drawings by Picasso, which Bacon saw in Paris in 1927, which
prompted him to become an artist and he believed that Picasso had 'a great gift
as a draughtsman.'13 In
addition, he deeply admired Michelangelo’s drawings for 'their grandeur of form
and grandeur of image' and thought they were the greatest things he ever did.14 In
fact, he even went so far as to single out the drawings of Swiss sculptor,
Alberto Giacometti, as being superior to his sculptures. Bacon dismissively
stated of the sculptor’s work, 'My own feeling about Giacometti is that he never
had any necessity either to do sculpture or to paint, that he was able to do
everything in his marvellous drawings.'15 Perhaps
Bacon felt that a comparison between his own drawings and those of other artists
would leave him in a rather second-rate position as an artist. Given his
notorious lack of generosity in relation to other artists’ work, one can deduce
that Bacon was insecure as an artist.16 In the 1960s, when Bacon’s stature in
the international art world was growing and his works began to fetch higher
prices, it would have been difficult for him to concede that he produced
drawings. If he did, he might have been pressurised by his dealers, Marlborough
Fine Arts, to allow some of these works to be sold. As it is, he signed a series
of lithographs of his paintings for a time which Marlborough did sell.17 Most
importantly, by admitting that he did draw, Bacon would dispel the myth that his
work on canvas was entirely spontaneous. However, on close examination of
paintings by Francis Bacon, the very deliberate, studied quality of many of the
works belies any notion that they were spontaneous. Maybe it is a tribute to
Bacon that he was so adept at creating the sense of spontaneity.
More than seventy works on paper were found in Bacon’s Reece Mews studio and
they are now in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery. Given the rich
diversity of the graphic material found, a distinction must be made between the
different types of works on paper that Bacon produced. The most logical
subdivisions are as follows: (1) drawings on paper (2) interventions that Bacon
has made on leaves torn from magazines, books, catalogues, and photographs. The
drawings were executed on a variety of media including tracing paper, lined
paper, chain-laid manufactured paper, and the blank end-papers of books. Some
are cursory sketches executed in pencil, others are in ball point or felt-tip
pen and some are oil sketches. Most are monochromatic. Nearly all the works are
unsigned and undated but, stylistically, approximate dates can be assigned. Some
bear close similarities to finished paintings, whereas in other instances the
links are less obvious. Taken together, this material provides a very good
record of the type of works on paper Bacon was producing from the 1930s onwards.
The Hugh Lane collection of drawings is therefore more representative than the
Tate collection which dates from the 1957-1961 period.
A certain sense of hesitancy is discernible in Bacon’s early drawings,
indicating that he was not a natural draughtsman. One notes the influence of
Picasso’s drawings from the late 1920s in Biomorphic drawing c. 1936 (Fig
2) but very little of the confidence of the Spanish master’s draughtsmanship.
The figure is drawn with a circular head, eyes, open mouth, two arms stretching
upwards and two or three tapering stilts balanced on a plinth. In this early
work in black ink on lined paper, the lines are tentatively executed, possibly
using a quill, and one notes that parts of the figure have been redrawn, most
notably the mouth and the left arm of the figure. The circular head and clenched
teeth of the figure can be linked to the central panel of Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Fig 3), Bacon’s most famous
painting, but the drawing also relates to a destroyed painting entitled, Abstraction,
c. 1936 (Fig 4). It is likely that it was executed in the 1930s, making it one
of Bacon’s earliest extant drawings.
The artist frequently worked in pencil on tracing paper and twelve drawings of
this type were found in the studio. The earliest example of a drawing executed
on tracing paper is Figure on plinth. 1930s (Fig 5) but in this instance
Bacon has attached the piece of tracing paper to a torn sheet of bond paper. The
subject of this drawing is difficult to distinguish due to the amount of
overdrawing. It appears to show a figure on a plinth with outstretched arms. The
background consists of vertical and horizontal lines with three window-like
squares and resembles the central panel of Three Studies for a crucifixion,
1965. The shape of a ladder seems to be visible in the lower left foreground.
The sketchy angular strokes have been applied with a soft dark graphite pencil.
Stylistically it is close to other works on paper by Bacon dated to 1933-34
including Crucifixion, 1933, Composition, 1933 and Corner of the
Studio, 1934. However, the bond paper has a water mark, 'Harelaw', which was
used on bond paper from the 1940s. It also appears on a number of Francis Bacon
sketches in the Tate Gallery which date from the 1950s.
The most striking example of a clear compositional link between a drawing and a
painting can be found in Figure mounting step, another drawing on heavy
grade tracing paper (Fig 6). In this drawing, the lower section of a striding
male figure mounting a step within a rectilinear structure is portrayed. It
relates quite directly to the central panel of Triptych 198718 (Fig
7) and more loosely to Figure in Movement 1985 and the central panel of Triptych
Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981, which feature figures in
similar poses. However, it is difficult to establish whether the drawing was
done as a preliminary sketch for Triptych, 1987 or after the painting was
completed. That so many of the drawings found in the studio are executed on
tracing paper is significant and may provide further insights into Bacon’s
idiosyncratic techniques. Bacon kept many of his own exhibition catalogues in
the studio and he often painted over plates from catalogues of his paintings,
almost as if he were still experimenting with the completed painting. It is
possible that he also traced over the plates and that these drawings are the
result of this. Many of the figures in Bacon’s paintings feature repeatedly and
this may have been a simple way of borrowing a figurative motif from one
painting and using it as a basis for another painting.
Over six hundred books were found in the Reece Mews studio and Bacon frequently
used the blank endpapers of books to exe cute drawings or make hand-written
notes. One of the best examples of Bacon’s painted sketches can be found in the
end papers of a catalogue for an exhibition of paintings by Chaim Soutine held
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1950. Many parallels can be made
between the work of Bacon and Soutine, whom Bacon held in high esteem. Both were
untrained and valued spontaneity in painting. The Soutine catalogue in the Hugh
Lane Collection contains two drawings by Bacon dating from the late 1950s or
possibly the early 1960s. Stylistically, these monochromatic drawings in black
paint are completely different from each other. The drawing at the front of the
book shows a chair on a raised dais within a circular space (Fig 8). Two
owl-like forms can be noted on the back of the chair. Elements of this sketch
are found in a number of different paint ings from the late 1950s and early
1960s. The raised platform and mottled carpet effect in the circular area can be
related to the left and right hand panels of Triptych inspired by T S Eliot’s
poem 'Sweeney Agonistes'. The second drawing, on the inside pages of the
back cover (Fig 9) closely resembles the work of French artist, Henri Michaux.
Around 1966, Bacon acquired an untitled Indian ink drawing by Michaux dating
from 1962. Characteristically, he quickly tired of the Michaux drawing and sold
it.
Another drawing by Bacon can be found in the endpapers of a book on film (Fig
14). The book was published in 1947 and it is likely that the sketch dates from
the 1950s or early 1960s. It is executed in ballpoint pen and features a figure,
seated on a divan and enclosed in a box. Although it cannot be conclusively
related to any particular painting, it can be loosely related to Double Portrait
of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964. The posture of the figure resembles
that of Francis Bacon’s painting Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud
(sideways) August 1974. The divan and ovals are prominent features in a
number of paintings. Aside from drawings, hand-written notes on ideas for
paintings often feature on the endpapers of books. In fact, the large number of
notes in Bacon’s very distinct handwriting held by the Hugh Lane archive is
particularly revealing. Many of these clearly refer to ideas for future
paintings and this very personal form of artistic shorthand is an excellent
record of Bacon’s thought processes as demonstrated by his hand-written notes in
V J Stanek’s text, Introducing Monkeys (c.1957) (Fig 16).19 The
notes on the right hand page are dated August 18th, 1958 and one extract reads
as follows: 'Concentrate entirely on studies of human figure and on heads
situate figure in attitudes of apes background brilliant colour -
netting – brick – tiles – and
corrugated iron keep figure nude.'
Sometimes these hand-written notes appear in conjunction with a small sketch as
is the case with the sheet of 'RMS Edinburgh Castle' notepaper (Fig 17). This
had been inserted into a book on wildlife written by Alistair Graham and
published in 1973. The book contains illustrations by Bacon’s friend, American
wildlife photographer, Peter Beard. The note and sketch almost certainly date
from the 1960s. The note reads 'Plan for painted sculpture Remember bird of prey
end of the game figure moving on circular steel frame.' The small drawing below
consists of a circular structure with a figure crawling on it and in the
foreground are two pedestals with what may be a bird on the left one and either
a head or another bird on the right one. The drawing can be read as an
illustration of the notes. Bacon was fascinated with Greek and Egyptian
sculpture. The reference to 'painted sculpture' may link with the herm-like
forms found in paintings such as Triptych – Two figures lying on a bed
with attendants, 1968. In the lower right foreground of the left panel of
this triptych, a bird in flight is seen on a pedestal. Bacon includes images of
birds of prey in a number of his paintings and books on this subject were found
in the Reece Mews studio. The reference to 'end of the game' can be linked with
Beard’s book of the same title which first appeared in 1965. The book dealt with
the destruction of African wildlife and Beard’s spectacularly beautiful
photographs of animals impressed Bacon who particularly admired his aerial shots
of dead elephants. The reference to circular steel structures can also be easily
explained. Circular steel structures first appeared in Bacon’s painting in 1946
and occur most often in his paintings of the 1960s such as From Muybridge - The
Human Figure in Motion: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water/Paralytic Child
walking on all Fours, 1965 (Fig 10). It is likely that the inspiration for
these came from the ultra-modernist pieces of furniture Bacon designed during
his brief career as a furniture and interior designer around 1930.21 Two
other drawings feature similar structures. In Figures on Rail (Fig 11),
one can identify one or possibly two figures balanced on a circular tubular
frame supported by three legs. The drawing is executed in grey, blue, and red
felt-tip pens on paper and is in a fragile state. A piece of sellotape attached
to the right edge indicates that it may have originally been attached to a
support. Bacon frequently attached cuttings and drawings to cardboard using
either sellotape or paperclips. This meant that they could be placed on a small
easel to the left of his main easel in the studio which enabled him to glance at
them while painting. A second drawing in brown felt-tip pen (Fig 12) on blue
chain-laid manufactured paper features a figure or figures on a raised
rectangular structure surrounded by a circle and possibly the outline of a
second figure in a rectangular structure on the right. It shares certain formal
elements with Triptych inspired by T S Eliot’s Poem 'Sweeney Agonistes,
1967.
Like Picasso, Bacon made interventions on newspapers, magazines, leaves torn
from books, and photographs. Of these over worked pieces, the Cinerama sketch
(Fig 15) is perhaps the most striking. It consists of a perspectival box painted
in blue paint over an illustration of a projected image of a suited man. The
man’s image consists of thin vertical strips. The caption above it reads 'The
Cinerama screen looks like an unbroken flat surface to the audience but is
actually made up of hundreds of overlap ping strips.' The vertical striations or
shuttered effect must have appealed to Bacon and they relate to a number of
paintings from the 1950s including Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of
Pope Innocent X, 1953 and Study for a Portrait, 1953. In the 1950s,
Bacon did a series of paintings of men in suits.
On other occasions, the artist worked directly on to photographs. A series of
contact sheets with black and white photographs of wrestlers has significant
over-drawings in red, green, purple felt-tip pen (Fig 13). Apparently, Bacon
directed the photography in the 1970s22 and
the photographs are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of nude
wrestlers which deeply influenced him. Bacon has overdrawn circles, lines,
boxes, and arrows and he has even isolated particular areas of the image. These
relate to Bacon’s paintings of isolated limbs from the late 1970s and early
1980s, in particular, Painting 1978. In conclusion, taken together, these
works on paper in the Hugh Lane Collection make a significant contribution to
studies of the artist’s work. While they may not compare favourably with works
on paper by other artists, they do have intrinsic value in that they help to
reveal Bacon’s method and thought processes. It is perhaps ironic that the best
way to describe Bacon’s drawings is in his own words: when he said that possible
drawings could only provide a skeleton for his works, he inadvertently provided
us with an accurate description of his works on paper.
Dr Margarita Cappock is Project Manager of the Francis Bacon Studio which opened
at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin in May 2001.
Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the following people:
Barbara Dawson, Christine Kennedy, Maime Winters, Alexander Kearney, Professor
John Turpin, and Paul Spellman. I am grateful to the Estate of Francis Bacon,
the Tate Gallery, London, Stedilijk, Amsterdam for permission to reproduce a
number of the paintings.
1 D
Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London 1993), p. 190.
2 Sides
of Bacon, London Weekend Television; produced by D Bailey, directed by B
Gowers, including interview with D Sylvester (London Nov 1975).
3 Francis
Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum
of Art (New York 1975), Introduction by H Geldzahler, p. 10.
4 J
Rothenstein and R Alley, Francis Bacon, (London 1964). This book includes
a catalogue raisonne of Bacon’s work, p.30. A complete catalogue raisonne of
Bacon’s oeuvre has never been produced.
5 D
Sylvester (as note 1), pp. 20-21.
6 F
Bacon, Interview with the artist by Melvyn Bragg, South Bank Show (LWT 1985).
7 Interview
with Henri-Francois Debailleux, Liberation (Paris 29 Sept 1987) as quoted
in Art REVIEW, 'Bacon’s Unseen Sketches', E Lucie Smith, p. 40.
8 In
D Sylvester’s most recent publication, Looking Back at Bacon (London
2000), pp. 205-206, Sylvester refers to Bacon’s drawing as his 'secret vice'. He
defends his own position by stating, 'I, for my part, wasn’t being entirely
truthful with him when in that interview, as in others from 1962 on, I
courteously refrained from mentioning a series of small pencil sketches for
paintings which I had seen in the endpapers of his copy of a paperback edition
of poems by Eliot. However, I had been gullible enough not to have realised that
these were the tip of an iceberg.'
9 On
his return from Tangier in the autumn of 1955, Bacon lived with Danquah and
Pollock at Overstrand Mansions in Battersea until 1961. He also had a studio
there and it is thought that all the Tate drawings were made in this studio. It
has been suggested that the drawings were a gift to Danquah and Pollock instead
of paying rent. After this period in Battersea, Bacon moved to Reece Mews, where
he lived for the rest of his life.
10 Art
REVIEW (as note 7) , p. 40.
11 The
ground floor at Reece Mews was entirely occupied by a large garage where Bacon
kept surplus items from the studio. It was here that Bacon allegedly brought
Barry Joule to give him an old photograph album from which the snaps had been
removed but which had been filled with drawings, oil sketches, collages, and
paintings, including an early self-portrait. He also had books, bundles of old
magazine pages, and photographs which had been worked over. Bacon helped Joule
carry the material out to place in the boot of Joule’s car. Joule drove Bacon to
the airport to get a flight to Madrid. On the way, he asked Bacon what he wanted
him to do with the material to which Bacon replied 'You know what to do with
it.' Joule asserts that if Bacon wanted him to destroy the material he would
have said so in a clear, direct manner. Whether these sketches, drawings, and
over-drawings are all by Bacon or whether there is another hand at work has not
yet been resolved.
12 D
Sylvester (as note 8),
p. 208.
13 M
Archimbaud, Francis Bacon, In conversation with Michel Archimbaud (London
1993), p. 33. 14 M Archimbaud (as note 13), p. 37.
15 D
Sylvester (as note 8), p.245.
16 A
large number of artists including Holbein, Bruegel, Bosch, Vermeer, Poussin,
Klee, Dali, Ernst, Pollock, Hockney, and Sutherland came in for harsh criticism
by Bacon.
17 M
Gale, Francis Bacon, Working on Paper, Tate Gallery Publishing (London 1999),
Introductory essay by David Sylvester, p. 10.
18 The
original painting was inspired by a poem by the Spanish poet, Lorca, entitled 'Llanto
por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias', a funeral song for the death of a torreador. Bacon
was fascinated by bullfighting and did at least two other paintings on the
subject.
19 Tate
Gallery, London recently acquired a copy of V J Stanek’s Introducing Monkeys (c.1957)
which also belonged to Bacon. In the Tate volume, Bacon’s notes on the endpapers
are dated 11 Dec 1958. Using the same ballpoint pen he made most of the notes on
13 and 17 Dec. These continued at the front in different ink on 26 Dec and (in
pencil) 9 January 1959. An inserted sheet is inscribed 10 Dec 1957. The notes on
the Hugh Lane copy of this book pre date the Tate ones.
20 Bacon
first met Peter Beard at the Claremont Club in London in 1965 for the launch of
Beard’s book. A large amount of material relating to Beard was found in Bacon’s
studio. Bacon also painted nine portraits of Beard who was strikingly
good-looking.
21 On
his return to London from Paris around 1928-1929, Bacon started to design
furniture and carpets. In 1930, The Studio magazine published a feature
on Bacon’s furniture designs under the heading 'The 1930 Look in British
Decoration'.
22 M
Harrison, Francis Bacon, Paintings from the Estate 1980-1991, Points of
Reference, p. 18.
CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR (EVENING SALE)
London, King Street Sale Date Feb 06, 2002
Creator Francis Bacon
(1909-1992)
Lot title Portrait of Man
with Glasses IV
Provenance A
gift from the artist to the present owner.
Literature J.
Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, p. 154, no. 220
(illustrated).
John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1985, p. 123.
Estimate 300,000
- 400,000 British pounds
Painted in 1963, Portrait of a
Man with Glasses IV was one of a series of four pictures depicting the same
man at slightly varying angles. In the early 1960s, Bacon increasingly used
small canvases to paint bust portraits, sometimes executing small series
reminiscent in their variations of the sequence photography of his much admired
Edward Muybridge.
Portrait of a Man with Glasses IV shows a distorted
face looking as though it has been beaten to a pulp. The mangled glasses even
have a spray of red, implying blood. The head looks battered and bruised. The
glasses make this an image reminiscent of one of the most important sources of
inspiration to Bacon, the nanny shot in the head in Eisenstein’s film Battleship
Potemkin, where the woman’s twisted glasses are shattered, blood on her face,
her mouth open in a scream. Of this film, Bacon said, 'It was a film I saw
almost before I began to paint, and it deeply impressed me — I
mean the whole film as well as the Odessa Steps sequence and this shot. I did
hope at one time to make — it
hasn’t got any special psychological significance — I
did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry… it’s much better in
the Eisenstein' (Bacon, 1966, quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of
Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York, 1990, p.34). Here, Bacon has
eschewed his quest for the human cry, instead presenting a haunting image of a
beaten man. The dark abysses in place of the eyes create a skull-like effect,
while the mouth, so detached from any scream, seems to show the man’s
resignation, his facial expression appearing as hollow as his eye-sockets.
The dark background in Portrait of a Man with
Glasses IV pushes the flesh to the fore, as does the composition. The
unpainted areas meld with the man’s body and hair. Bacon often used contrasting
thick and thin paints, heightening the almost plastic effect of the flesh, but
here he has taken it to an extreme, the small areas of raw canvas adding both
colour and texture to the painting. Using this technique on the hair and torso
of the man serves to make the pallid flesh all the more striking, sensuous yet
repellent. Portrait of a Man with Glasses: 'had passed between them, like
a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events,
as the snail leaves its slime. I think the whole process of this sort of
elliptical form is dependent on the execution of detail and how shapes are
remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces' (Bacon,
quoted in The New Decade, New York, 1955, p.63.)

The Estate of Francis Bacon drops legal action against Marlborough
No evidence of blackmail,
and video shows the artist satisfied with his gallery
MARTIN BAILEY | THE
ART NEWSPAPER | FRIDAY
1 MARCH 2002
LONDON.
The Bacon Estate has dropped its legal action against the Marlborough
Gallery, just days before the full hearing was due to begin. Executor
Professor Brian Clarke had initiated the case because of concerns that the
London gallery and its Liechtenstein subsidiary had not paid Francis Bacon
properly for his pictures, resulting in a loss which could have amounted to
as much as £100 million. The Estate also suggested that Marlborough had
“blackmailed” the artist to prevent him moving to New York’s Pace Gallery (The
Art Newspaper, No.121, January 2002, p.3).
Last month the Estate said it was “pleased to announce that it has settled
its litigation with Marlborough.” Both sides are paying their own legal
costs, which altogether could amount to £10 million. It was also revealed
that the Estate’s sole beneficiary, Bacon’s close friend John Edwards, 51,
is suffering from a serious form of lung cancer. The Estate explained: “This
settlement has been agreed, 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.” The three-month trial, due to start on 18 February, was
abandoned at a formal hearing on 6 February.
Marlborough was also delighted with the outcome. Gallery head Mr Gilbert
Lloyd commented: “We are pleased that the Estate has finally accepted that
the entire case is completely without foundation. The case was totally
unsustainable. Contrary to the Estate’s claims, no paintings are missing, no
fraud took place and there was no attempt at blackmail. The result of the
action is that the Estate has needlessly wasted millions of pounds on legal
costs.”
Blackmail
A key factor behind the dropping of the case was the question of evidence of
the blackmail which is alleged to have taken place in 1978. Pace director Mr
Arnold Glimcher, who had heard about the allegation at the time, believed
that his source had probably been Michael Peppiatt, an art historian and
close friend of Bacon. Initially Mr Peppiatt did not wish to become involved
in the recent legal case, but last month he met Marlborough and told them
that he had no knowledge about the alleged blackmail. According to
Marlborough’s record of their meeting with Mr Peppiatt on 4 February 2002:
“Neither blackmail nor any suggestion of blackmail was ever mentioned by Mr
Peppiatt, Mr Glimcher or by Bacon [in 1978]. The first time Mr Peppiatt
remembers blackmail being mentioned was in late 1999. The word was first
mentioned by Brian Clarke when he was telling him of the various
misdemeanours of which he suspected Marlborough.”
The Estate puts a different gloss on the situation. In a statement, it said
that although Mr Peppiatt had no knowledge of blackmail, “there remains an
unresolved conflict of evidence; Mr Glimcher is clear and detailed as to
what he was told; Mr Peppiatt has made it plain that he could not have been
the source of that information.”
Further evidence to support Marlborough’s argument that Bacon had been
treated properly by the gallery came in the form of a video film made by
Francis Giacobetti shortly before the artist’s death ten years ago. In the
video, Bacon describes the system under which Marlborough sold his
paintings, an arrangement with which he appeared satisfied. This evidence
would have proved helpful to the gallery if the case had proceeded.
Future plans
Speaking after the claim had been dropped, Professor Clarke told The Art
Newspaper: “We now intend to focus all the Estate’s resources in creative
enterprises relating to Bacon rather than the time-consuming investigation
of the relationship between artist and Marlborough.” To this end the John
Edwards Charitable Foundation is being set up to advance the study of Bacon
and his work. It is expected to be chaired by Professor Clarke. Although the
Estate was valued at £11 million a decade ago (in paintings and other
assets) and has since grown, millions of pounds were spent on legal fees. It
is therefore possible that pictures may have to be sold to fund the
foundation’s work in the years to come. The most ambitious project will be
the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s oeuvre. Professor
Clarke has already identified eight art historians who might be a suitable
editor, and a decision will be made shortly on who should lead the project.
A book on the relationship between Bacon and photography is also expected to
be commissioned later this month and other publications are likely to
follow. Professor Clarke points out that the information which surfaced
during the legal proceedings will “cause almost every book on Bacon to have
to be reassessed in some ways.” The Estate, which owns a number of important
paintings, has already had requests to participate in 14 Bacon exhibitions,
including two major retrospectives planned for the next couple of years.
The difficult question now is whether the Estate and Marlborough will be
able to work together. The Estate may need access to Marlborough’s
photographs of lost and destroyed works for its catalogue raisonné.
The gallery, on its side, will only have limited rights to reproduce Bacon
paintings which it wishes to sell. In theory, the two sides would benefit
from cooperation. However, relations between the Bacon’s Estate and his
life-long dealer are now strained and it may be some time before they can
work constructively together.

A photograph of Francis Bacon taken by his sole heir, John Edwards
The Bacon Estate
HENRY LYDIATE | ARTLAW | ART
MONTHLY |
ISSUE NUMBER 254 | MARCH
2002
On February 6, 2002, the High
Court in London dismissed the claims brought by Brian Clarke against the
Marlborough Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Francis Bacon, who had decided
not to pursue the matter. The Judge, Mr Justice Patten, was told that the
parties had managed to resolve their differences, and would not require the
court to conduct an estimated three month trial of the issues, which had been
set to start on February 18, 2002
Bacon died in 1992 and his will
named Clarke as one of two executors of his Estate, responsible for managing his
affairs and ensuring that Bacon’s friend John Edwards received the artist’s
assets remaining; after all expenses and taxes had been paid.
The first legal issue arose
when the High Court ordered the removal of Clarke’s co-executor, who was a
Director of the Marlborough Gallery. There was an apparent conflict of interest
between the duty of the executors (to maximise the value of Bacon’s estate) on
the one hand, and the duty of Marlborough’s Director (to act in the best
interests of the Gallery), on the other hand. It would have been unfair to both
the Gallery and the Estate for the Director to continue to act in both
capacities. This decision left Clarke as sole executor, and he had no such
conflicting interests, being a friend of Bacon in his later years and wishing
merely to do his best for the Estate.
As the nature and extent of
Bacon’s dealings with the Marlborough Gallery over five decades (from around
1956) began to emerge, Clarke’s concerns over the artist/gallery relationship
began to develop. Eventually, Clarke’s concerns drove him to launch proceedings
against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art
(Liechtenstein); he sought clarification of the nature and extent of the
contractual relationship between the artist and gallery over 40 years. The
Gallery resisted Clarke’s claims that it had dealt with Bacon inappropriately.
One of the major issues in the
case was whether or not Bacon was subjected to undue influence by the Gallery,
and this and other issues were complicated by the paucity of clear documentary
evidence of the terms of the contract between them. The particulars of claim
served by the Estate asserted that ‘the artist was bohemian lacking in business
and financial experience without the benefit of any independent advice’; which
claim the Gallery disputed.
The Estate also asserted that
the Gallery owed the artist a high duty of care, attention and transparency in
its commercial dealings with him, and had failed in these respects; for example;
by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and re-selling it for seven times as much; the
absence of clarity as to whether works were ‘bought in’ by the Gallery and then
re-sold for a profit it determined, or were sold by the Gallery on behalf of the
artist as his agent; and that many paintings were unaccounted for. Marlborough
strenuously resisted all such claims, and contended amongst other things that
Bacon’s works were purchased ‘in arm’s length’ transactions.
Late last year the case took a
dramatic turn when the High Court allowed Clarke to include in his claim a
specific allegation: that, when Bacon was considering changing his dealer (from
Marlborough to the Pace Gallery, New York), Marlborough unduly influenced the
artist to continue with it by suggesting that he might then experience
difficulties both in accessing money in his Swiss bank accounts and in his
future dealings with the UK’s Inland Revenue (see AM 253).
This latest assertion appears
to have flowed from a recent dialogue between Clarke and the well-known art
historian Michael Peppiatt (a friend of Bacon), in which they had discussed
Peppiatt’s recollections of his liaising with Arnold Glimcher, the Chairman of
the Pace Gallery, New York around 1978. Peppiatt had evidently acted as honest
broker, relaying to Bacon that Glimcher was interested in representing him and
attending a meeting which was then arranged between the artist and Glimcher at
which sale prices and Bacon’s shares thereof were discussed. Nothing came of
this exchange and Bacon remained with Marlborough.
Days before what became the
final High Court hearing on February 6, Peppiatt formally clarified to
Marlborough’s solicitors that in his discussions with Clarke he had not
encouraged Clarke to believe that there was any substance in the suggestion that
Bacon had been blackmailed by Marlborough. And it was this event which triggered
the settlement of the dispute and the formal dismissal of the Estate’s claims;
the terms of the settlement are not public knowledge.
At the heart of this sorry saga
lies the absence of clear documentation recording the nature and extent of the
respective contractual duties and obligations of artist and gallery. For the
past 25 years or so (and throughout roughly half the length of Bacon’s
contractual relationship with Marlborough) this column and other informed
commentators have increasingly and continually stressed the need for such clear
documentation between artist and gallery; covering, amongst other things:
* parties’
names and contact data
* dealer’s
engagement (exclusively or otherwise) to promote and represent the artist by one
or any combination of:
1 selling
work
2 arranging
commissions
3 arranging
showings
4 arranging
lectures, talks and media appearances
5 publications
*which
works are included: all; only paintings; only works on paper; sculpture alone,
and so on; existing and/or future work
*copyright:
who owns it, manages and licenses reproductions and on what terms
*moral
rights: who can allow works or reproductions of them to be altered or amended in
some way
*geography:
the limit of the dealership’s territorial representation (worldwide; only EU; EU
and North America and so on)
*length
of representation: whether for a fixed term (normally no more than two years) or
periodically renewable with written notice on either side
*sales:
pricing strategy: timing of release into primary marketplace; gallery’s
commission; VAT arrangement
*consigned
works: details of finished or future works to be deposited with (consigned to)
the gallery for sale/not for sale
*bought-in
works: how many and which ones will or may be bought in by the gallery; prices
including discount to the gallery.
Crucially, such deals also need
to clarify: when and how the artist will be paid, and for statements of account
to be given by the gallery; details of all transactions including names of
purchasers, prices, commission, and so on, and whether cash advances or stipends
are to be set off against future income: the artist’s rights to have access to
the gallery’s accounts and records, for the purpose of independent auditing (if
ever required by the artist).
Finally, agreement as to what
should happen to the works, benefits and obligations covered by the deal in the
event of the artist’s death or the dealer’s bankruptcy or ceasing to trade.
Sadly, the creation and regular updating of such documentation or similar
records continue to be avoided by many artists and their dealers/galleries –
often in the belief that they are unnecessarily bureaucratic and time-consuming
matters. In truth, they are necessary ‘good housekeeping’ chores; every good
home should have them.
© Henry Lydiate 2002
OPINION
FRANCIS BACON STUDIO
BARBARA DAWSON | LETTERS | THE
IRISH TIMES |
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
Sir, — Victoria White's Front Row of January 31st was somewhat confusing in its
comparisons between the National Gallery of Ireland and the Hugh Lane Gallery.
The excellent exhibition, Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape, at the
National Gallery of Ireland is a temporary exhibition and, like all shows of
impressionist paintings, has a broad appeal and will achieve high visitor
numbers, as such exhibitions do in any city.
The Royal Academy's recent Monet exhibition in London was a case in point.
The Francis Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery is a permanent installation
built to house a fascinating collection of items which provide unprecedented
insights into the mind of one of the most significant painters of the 20th
century.
The studio has been a major critical success and has received positive and
lengthy reviews both in Ireland and abroad, the most recent being in the New
York Times and the Washington Post (January 20th).
Francis Bacon’s studio is a unique installation. It consists of a superb series
of rooms designed by David Chipperfield which house the studio, a small cinema
screening the celebrated Melvyn Bragg interview with Francis Bacon, a
micro-gallery with seven touch-screen interactive terminals to allow the visitor
to explore the studio contents, and a gallery of unfinished paintings which have
never been previously exhibited, making it one of Dublin’s top cultural
attractions.
The studio has also won two prestigious awards: the Best Larger Museum Award
from the Gulbenkian Foundation in association with the Heritage Council and
Museums Council of Northern Ireland; and the Interpret Ireland Award from the
Association for Heritage Interpretation (UK).
Contrary to what Victoria White suggests, we are very happy with our visitor
numbers.
I think Dublin is fortunate to have the opportunity to host a world-class
Impressionist exhibition at the same time as the superb installation of Francis
Bacon’s Studio. — Yours,
etc.,
BARBARA DAWSON,
Director,
Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery
of Modern Art,
Parnell Square,
Dublin 1.
Homosexuality out of the margins and in the heart
LOVE
IN A DARK TIME
Gay
Lives from Wilde to Almodovar
By Colm Toibin
Michael
Arditti
MICHAEL ARDITTI
|
BOOKS
| THE TIMES
|
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2002
Last year Paul Bailey published Three Queer Lives, a
study of three largely forgotten heroes of popular culture: the music-hall
performer Fred Barnes; the writer Naomi Jacob; the broadcaster Arthur Marshall.
Now, fellow novelist Colm Toibin weighs in with nine more short biographies,
although, in keeping with their high-art credentials, they are accorded the less
confrontational designation “gay”.
Toibin’s choice of subjects subscribes to a novelist’s rather than a
polemicist’s imperative. He opts not for those such as Edward Carpenter,
Radclyffe Hall and Magnus Hirschfeld who worked to change society, but for
figures “whose legacy was ambiguity, who suffered for their homosexuality (Oscar
Wilde, Roger Casement) or had remained uneasy and secretive about it (Thomas
Mann, Elizabeth Bishop); who had allowed it to nourish rather than dominate
their work (James Baldwin); who had thrived in adverse conditions (Francis
Bacon, Pedro Almodovar); and who had written the elegies and memoirs during the
Aids catastrophe (Thorn Gunn, Mark Doty)".
Bailey was attacked in some quarters for a lack of original research. Toibin
pre-empts a similar charge by focusing less on his subjects’ lives than on the
way those lives have subsequently been perceived. Thus, while little might be
gained from yet another rehearsal of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, Toibin examines the
way that the story has been filtered through the prejudices of even a
sympathetic biographer like Richard Ellmann.
To Ellmann’s assertion that “neither Wilde nor Douglas practised or expected
sexual fidelity, money was the stamp and seal of their love”, Toibin’s response
is that “that last sentence, so full of judgment and certainty, shows us perhaps
more about Ellmann than it does about Wilde and Douglas”. He presents their
relationship in the context of the complex and fluid attachments of such couples
as W. H. Auden and Chester Kallmann, and James Merrill and David Jackson.
Similarly, in his study of Roger Casement, he shows how an acceptance or
otherwise of the notorious Black Diaries in which Casement recorded his sexual
activities has been determined largely by the commentator’s bias. Whereas Toibin
considers that Casement’s homosexuality may have given him a particular empathy
with the victims of oppression both in Africa and Ireland, the authors of The
Vindication of Roger Casement could claim, as late as 1994, that
“For all these Christian people, freedom by a pervert would be a perverted
freedom and not acceptable.”
In his examination of Francis Bacon, whose life has been painted in lurid hues,
Toibin moves from the limitations of particular biographers to those inherent in
the genre itself, declaring that “it is one of the problems of biography that it
seeks out the colourful and the dramatic at the expense of the ordinary and the
true”. A future biographer subjecting Toibin’s account to similar analysis would
conclude that it is sympathetic, sober and sensitive — although he or she might
find it telling that, having repeatedly rejected the tragic model of gay men’s
lives, Toibin should so readily describe the one woman in the collection, the
poet Elizabeth Bishop, as having a “great,and tragic lesbian love story”.
The most challenging chapter of the book is the first, in which Toibin mines the
gay subtext of literature from Marlowe to Kafka. While dissociating himself from
more extreme interpretations (such as an analysis of Iago based on his sharing a
bed with Cassio), he follows the poet Gregory Woods in identifying the gay
element in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In contrast to Eric Partridge, who began his
argument against Shakespeare ’s homosexuality with the words “like most other
heterosexual persons, I believe. . .”, Toibin shows how an honest reader of
whatever persuasion must acknowledge that a sonnet such as “A woman’s face with
Nature’s own hand painted" is, at the very least, alive to the possibilities of
homosexual desire.
Such readings are crucial, for it is only when homosexuality is removed from the
margins and placed at the very heart of the cultural canon that the world
predicted by Toibin in which “being gay will no longer involve difficulty and
discrimination” will come to pass.

Bacon, standing before one of his paintings, thrived on the adverse
conditions of his life as a gay man
OPINION
FRANCIS BACON STUDIO
STAN GOGGIN | LETTERS | THE
IRISH TIMES | WEDNESDAY,
MARCH 27, 2002
Sir, — The letter of March 8th from Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery, contained the sad news that she considers the Francis Bacon
Studio to be a permanent installation at the Municipal Gallery. I sincerely hope
not.
Installed, perhaps, in a Dublin house, owned by the Bacon family, it might serve
as some form of monument to the artist. Installed in the Municipal Gallery, it
is a monumental error.
Minimalist works, soiled beds, lists of past lovers, animal bodies in
formaldehyde and elephant dung arrangements are, at least, planned by their
originator to have some contrived effect on the beholder. The studio "happened”
through years of sheer neglect. Dublin gained a cleaner’s worst nightmare and,
in exchange, lost a small but long-admired showing of Roderic O’Connor’s work,
which — dare I suggest, from an Irish and tourist point of view — was every bit
as important as the well advertised and over-vaunted “Impressionist” exhibition
at the National Gallery.
As regards the National Gallery extension, I have read glowing “architectural”
reports. They seem to ignore the “mean streets” entrance, the labour exchange
lobby, the darkest, most characterless shop I’ve ever seen, the labyrinthine
passageways to the old gallery and the truncated and now claustrophobic old
shop.
Perhaps someone might give an opinion on whether the external stone facing is
completed! — Yours, etc.
STAN COGGIN,
Howth Road,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.
Testy tosspot never quite doused
anger
Obituary: Graham Mason 1942-2002
Denizen of Soho, journalist
OBITUARIES |
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH |
TUESDAY, 9 APRIL, 2002
GRAHAM MASON, the journalist who has died aged 59, was in the 1980s the
drunkest man in the Coach and Horses, the pub in Soho where, in the half century
after the Second World War, a tragicomedy was played out nightly by its
regulars.
His claim to a title in bibulous
misbehaviour was staked against stiff competition from Jeffrey Bernard and a
dedicated cast of less-celebrated but formidable drinkers.
Mason was a fearsome sight at his
most drunkenly irascible. Seated at the bar, his thin shanks wrapped around the
legs of a high stool, he would swivel his reptilian stare around behind him to
any unfortunate stranger attempting to be served and snap: "Who the fuck are
you?"
Unlike his friend Bernard, though,
Mason did not make himself the hero of his own tragedy. His speciality was the
extreme. In one drinking binge he went for nine days without food. At the height
of his consumption, before he was frightened by epileptic fits into cutting
back, he was managing two bottles of vodka a day.
At lunchtime he would walk through
the door of the Coach and Horses still trembling with hangover, his nose and
ears blue whatever the weather. On one cold day he complained of the noise that
the snow made as it landed on his bald head.
His practice of "boozer’s
economics" meant dressing in the shabbiest of clothes, many of them inherited
from the late husband of the woman with whom he lived. He wore a threadbare
duffle coat with broken toggles. One day it was inexplicably stolen from the pub
coat hook. Bernard took the opportunity to combine kindness with condescension
by buying a replacement of much grander design and cloth.
From the 1960s on, Mason was a
friend of many of the painters, writers, actors, layabouts, retired prostitutes,
stagehands and hopeless cases that then gave Soho its flavour. He enjoyed
talking to Francis Bacon in the Colony Room Club because Francis Bacon was
funny; and, until they finally had a row, Francis Bacon enjoyed talking to him.
In a couple of hours one evening in
February 1988 he had loud altercations with John Hurt ("You’re just a bad
actor"); with a law writer nicknamed the Red Baron, who was later murdered ("You
know I don’t like you. Go away and leave me alone"); and with Bernard (who stood
up and shook him by the lapels).
Michael Heath often featured Mason
in his comic strip The Regulars. In one episode he is shown apologising
for being so rude the night before: "You see, I was sober."
Amid the violence of Soho arguments
he became a friend of Elizabeth Smart, the Canadian author of By Grand Central
Station I Sat Down and Wept, a book about her lover George Barker, the poet, who
became another friend. Mason also succeeded in liking Francis Bacon’s final
close friend, John Edwards, which some people did not.
Mason felt at home in the Colony
Room Club in the years before homosexuality was decriminalised because no-one
who drank there minded one way or the other.
Mason’s own closest friendship was
with Marsh Dunbar, the widow of an admired art director at The Economist. He
lodged with her at first in a fine early 19th-century house in Canonbury Square,
Islington, where she was bringing up three sons. She had herself fallen into
Soho after the war, knowing everyone from John Minton to Lucian Freud. Though
enthusiastically heterosexual, she lived with him until her death.
In the days before licensing
liberalisation, he resorted in the afternoon when pubs were closed to drinking
clubs such as the Kismet, a damp basement with a smell that wits identified as
"failure"; it was known as "the Iron Lung" and "Death in the Afternoon". Mason
admired the diminutive but firm presence behind the bar, known as Maltese Mary.
But his favourite resort remained the Colony.
Graham Edward Mason was born in
Cape Town, South Africa. He had been conceived on a sand dune and to this he
sometimes attributed his abrasive character.
He was educated at Chingola,
Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and then joined a local newspaper. From there,
as a bright and promising 18-year-old, he was recruited for the American news
agency UPI by its bureau chief in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare,
Zimbabwe).
He learnt fast as a reporter of the
civil war in Congo, finding the veterans from the Algerian war among his
colleagues both kind and helpful. He witnessed a line of prisoners executed with
pistol shots to the head and was himself injured in the thigh and chin by a
mortar shell. Among those he interviewed were Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe; he
did not take to the latter.
Posted to the UPI office in London
in 1963, he set off in a Land Rover with three friends and no proper map through
Tanganyika, Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, and then on
an East German ship via Trieste to Hull.
From UPI’s London office in
Bouverie Street, Mason soon discovered Soho and, like many before him, felt he
had come home. He continued as a foreign correspondent, taking a year out in
1968 to work for 20th Century Fox on feature films, which he hated.
With BBC Television news he
reported from the Northern Ireland troubles and in 1975 took another year out to
run a bar in Nicosia. It happened to coincide with civil war and he and Dunbar
were lucky to be evacuated by the RAF. From then until 1980 he worked for ITN.
One day he was found asleep under his desk, drunk. It was something of a low
point.
He was living with Dunbar in a flat
in Berwick Street, Soho. A fire there sent them, fleeing bills, to a rundown
council tower block on the Isle of Dogs. The compensation was a view of a sweep
of the Thames towards Greenwich. He worked while he still could, managing Bobby
Hunt’s photographic library.
Mason cooked Mediterranean food
well and liked classical music and fireworks. After Dunbar’s death in 2001, with
almost all his friends dead, he sat imprisoned by emphysema in his flat, with a
cylinder of oxygen by his armchair and bottles of white wine by his elbow,
looking out over the Thames, still very angry.

“Cheerio” Francis Bacon, Graham Mason’s friend and
fellow-drinker in one of their favourite watering holes.
The art of loss
Paul Bailey on a
collection of portraits of creative gay lives:
Love in a Dark Time: Gay
Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar by Colm Tóibín
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives
from Wilde to Almodóvar Colm Tóibín 288pp,
Picador, £16.99
PAUL BAILEY
| THE
GUARDIAN | SATURDAY,
13 APRIL, 2002
In the introduction to this
perceptive collection of essays, Colm Tóibín admits to an "abiding fascination
with sadness...and, indeed, tragedy". It should be stressed that this is a
sympathetic fascination, not a morbid or mawkish one, as his brief accounts of
the painful lives of Elizabeth Bishop and James Baldwin – two of the best pieces
here – testify.
What Tóibín admires about the
painter Francis Bacon is his life-long refusal to play the role of "tragic
queer". He is properly scathing about the three biographies that appeared, with
indecent haste, after Bacon’s death – by
Andrew Sinclair (scissors and paste), Michael Peppiatt (dull when it isn’t
prurient) and Daniel Farson (a hotchpotch of sexual tittle-tattle). "It is one
of the problems of biography that it seeks out the colourful and the dramatic at
the expense of the ordinary and true," Tóibín observes.
Bacon’s relationship
with George Dyer wasn’t all gloom and drunken doom – at
least, not in the beginning. Tóibín prefers to look at the paintings, with apt
quotations from Bacon’s conversations with David Sylvester, Michel Archimbaud
and the shrewdly observant John Russell. He reminds us how hard Bacon worked,
and that the real danger he had to cope with was that of repeating himself and
burning himself out. This is more interesting, though less amusing, than his
remark – which
was intended to be heard by the posh women seated nearby – that
he wanted to be buggered by Colonel Gadafy.
Tóibín’s other subjects are Oscar Wilde,
Roger Casement, the poets Thom Gunn and Mark Doty, and the film director Pedro
Almodóvar. This last, a reprinted article from Vanity Fair, is the one really
weak chapter in this otherwise fine and thoughtful book. One wants to know more
about this man who thrives in an atmosphere of chaos. Tóibín, for once, provides
only a sketch, instead of the customary rounded portrait.
Paul Bailey’s most recent book is Three
Queer Lives (Hamish Hamilton).
Francis Bacon and the Death of Art
BY JOAN ALTABE | FEATURE | GADFLY | MONDAY, APRIL
22, 2002
British painter Francis Bacon has been dead for ten years, and, in a way, so has
art—at least the kind that makes known the wounds we inflict on one another and
on ourselves. Now we get that other British bad boy, Damian Hirst, chopping up
animals and distilling them in formaldehyde.
Bacon painted people as though they were hit with force-ten storms and knifing
rains. Their anxiety chokes them purple. Their edges appear in fitful blurs.
Color is so loud that it comes across like hostility. Even the pigment looks
racked. You feel assaulted by an unknown dread when you see it. You try to make
sense of it. Bacon said not to try:
"Hardly anyone really feels about painting. They read things into it—even the
most intelligent people—they think they understand it, but very, very few people
are aesthetically touched by painting." Culture critic Susan Sontag said
something similar. Too many intellectualize art at the expense of sensory
experience. She called it the "erotics of art."
The "erotics of Bacon’s art" is raw flesh. Ripping past the skin, past surface
reality, he pictured that level of existence within us that has no visible
reality—the panic brought on by estrangement—not from others, necessarily, but
from ourselves. His paintings are us, inside out.
And Bacon’s point in regard to aesthetics is about the other part of us, our
outsides. Aesthetic form is our physical form—the symmetry of our limbs and face
parts, the contrast of skin to hair to teeth, which is probably why good
composition in art attracts us. We seek out what we are, what we know.
There’re plenty of our physical selves in Bacon’s work. Without it, his
expression of emotion would be just a tantrum made graphic—boneless and
featureless. Like us, Bacon’s paintings are aesthetically structured. While the
derangement he illustrates is barefaced, his configuration of colors and shapes
is a physical monument to order. Call it a mix of truth and beauty. Beyond the
psychic scars that he exposes with color and shape, beyond his urge to express a
state of mind, is the urge to sort it out and put it right. And that’s where art
comes in: crystallizing/controlling the chaos that is life.
Georges Seurat showed the same urge in his painting, La Grande Jatte. The
sublime arrangement of tiny dots, made with machinelike precision, is really
Seurat describing the joylessness of middle-class life. Empty faces and
starched, separate bodies are his icons of alienation in modern life. The dot
matrix magnifies the anonymity of that life.
Like Seurat, Bacon conveyed the modern experience of isolation. His Study
After Velasquez: Pope Innocence X is a 17th century figure passed through
the 20th century experience. As if weighed down by the pressures of orthodoxy,
the figure sits on a throne of gold, looking caged, Bacon’s vertical brushwork
approximating prison bars. Yet the architecture of the picture—the weave of his
paint swaths—comes across like a steady rain, the yellow of the throne looking
like the rays of a sun breaking through.
Bacon’s Crouched Nude shows the same architecture—the caged setting and
the look of a downpour. In much the same way, in his One of Three Studies for
a Crucifixion, the splattered blood-reds—resembling shafts of light dropped
by a morning sun—seem to paint a new day, the smooth background reds signaling
the unspoiled air.
All of which makes the crown of gloom over Bacon’s work, by contrast, appear all
the more wretched—like a bad traffic accident on a pretty day.
This is a long way from the Luis Buñuel film that is said to have influenced
him. By the incoherent, unconnected slices of life in Un Chien Andalou—such
as dead donkeys lying on two pianos—Buñuel can be said to have held more sway
over Hirst than Bacon. Consider Hirst’s mindless display of an actual pig
carcass cut length-wise, its halves suspended with one inching back and forth on
a mechanized tract so the carcass looks like it’s being constantly sliced.
However disturbing Bacon’s work is, however it pokes out our eyes with edginess,
it’s not the shock art of a Hirst and other artmakers in the ’90s who functioned
like a work party of Larry Flynts, depicting bodily functions and
sadomasochistic acts of gore. Granted, toward the end of his life, Bacon showed
a splatter of blood on the floor of an otherwise bare room in Blood on the
Floor. But by giving it a context of an empty room, Bacon heightened the
sense of lost life. He made you feel the loss.
Bacon’s shock art, then, never is the stuff of, say, that plastic facsimile of
puke that showed in the ’90s at the Whitney in New York. Or the bed frame there
covered by muslin burned through with hot irons—the burn marks standing for
answers to a sex survey: "More than once a week. Once a week. Two to three times
a month." Bacon also gave us a bed scene with his Three Studies of Figures on
Beds. But while he shows couples twisted in knots of need, burying
themselves into one another, he gave them context. Bare walls, lumpy bare
mattresses and a naked light bulb heighten the air of unleashed hunger and
abandon, which is far and away from illustrated answers to a sex survey.
Some say that shock art has a point, that it’s meant to jolt us into realizing
and solving our problems. It doesn’t say enough to do that. It just entertains
or enrages us. Bacon’s art says something. He saved his work from the merely
shocking with that mix of truth and beauty in which color reveals our nervous
system and smeary shapes record our cries.
In the autobiography Flaw in the Glass by Noble Prize winner Patrick
White, Bacon’s appreciation of beauty got a mention: "One afternoon at
Battersea, crossing the river together by a temporary footbridge while the
permanent structure was under repair, he (Bacon) became entranced by the
abstract graffiti scribbled in pencil on its timbered side. Alone, I don’t
expect I would have noticed the effortless convolutions of line he pointed out
for me to admire."
Of course, beauty without truth in art is just as empty as shock art.
Impressionism makes the point, its fleeting brushwork being about surface
things, about our eye, as if that’s all we are about: style. Bacon had us
covered. He said, "It’s really a question in my case of being able to set a trap
with which one would be able to catch the fact at its most living point.… I want
to make a thing of sense, of reality, yet unlock the vowels of feeling."
In Pope Innocent X, Bacon seems to be saying that each of us is the Pope,
staring from way inside like a scared animal looking out from a bad hiding
place. A passage in Willa Catha’s Death Comes for the Arch Bishop could
pass for a description of the painting: "His mouth was the very assertion of
uncurbed passion...the full lips thrust out and taut, like the flesh of animals
distended by fear or desire."
How important is Bacon? Think over how much art today reflects on the voltaic
and cybernetic—movies, magazines, television. And think over how shades of
meaning get lost in the electronic glare. Conditioned by this exposure, too many
artists work like photoelectric sorters, scrambling for new images as fast as
video programs roll over, 20-plexes change their lineup and newsstands restack.
Sealed off from the rich air of actual life, their images are sterile—like all
things vacuum-packed. Bacon’s pictures are a relief for mass-media-sore eyes.
What you see is not what you get. What you get is beyond seeing: a state of
mind—timeless and placeless.
Wait, there’s more: Bacon’s originality. Remember that one-of-a-kind thing that
art used to be, when artists told us how they felt about what they saw, when
Mike Bidlo wasn’t copying Picassos out of art books and Richard Pettibone wasn’t
copying Stella and Warhol and Elaine Sturtevant wasn’t copying Liechtenstein,
Oldenburg and Segal and Sherrie Levine wasn’t copying Malevich and Schiele and
Julian Schnabel wasn’t copying Rodchenko? Bacon didn’t copy anybody. He
daydreamed, he said. "Pictures drop in like slides. The way I see them is not
necessarily related to the way I paint them."
Did you get that? Bacon doesn’t even copy his daydreams. And even while Bacon
shared the need to express inwardness with 20th century’s big gun, abstract
expressionism, he never gave up on representing the seeable. Coming through in
his characteristically frenzied brushwork is everyman crazily furious.
It’s hard to think of an artist who does that now. Bacon’s 10-year absence is
enough to move one to prayer:
Hello, God? Could you send Francis Bacon back, please? It’s getting pretty bad
down here.
Francis Bacon Study for Self-Portrait 1976
LEISURE/WEEKEND
DESK
Francis Bacon
Tony Shafrazi
119 Wooster Street, SoHo
Through May 18 2002
By KEN JOHNSON | ART
IN REVIEW | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | FRIDAY, APRIL
26, 2002
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
Tate takes Bacon archive at last
DALYA ALBERGE
| NEWS | THE TIMES | THURSDAY MAY 2 2002
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.
ART GUIDE
Galleries: SoHo
KEN JOHNSON | REVIEW | ART GUIDE
| THE NEW YORK TIMES | FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
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.
Bacon archive
Tate to acquire
Bacon collection after rejecting it |
The Times, Friday 1oth May 2002
The Tate is accepting a Francis Bacon archive of more than 1,000 sketches and
annotated photographs four years after it rejected the offer. The collection,
said to be worth £20m, is owned by Barry Joule, who was Bacon’s chauffeur and
handyman.
Joule is said to have struggled for years to prove the authenticity of a
collection he says Bacon gave to him days before his death. 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 they acquire it. The Times says 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 says one of his duties
was destroying works with which Bacon was not satisfied. He said the artist
handed him a bundle of papers to destroy but he realised their importance and
had kept them instead.
The Tate Gallery has asked us to make it clear that, whereas it is looking
forward to discussions about Barry Joule’s Bacon archive (The Times report, May
2 2002) it has not yet received, or accepted, a formal offer.
Philips de
Pury & Luxembourg
Contemporary Art & 14 Duchamp Readymades
3 West
57th Street
7pm, Monday, May 13, 2002 Sale NY865

Lot 30: Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon, 78 by
58 inches, 1964
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
THE ARTS ESSAY
‘Photographing artists is relatively easy’
With these words, Bruce Bernard modestly dismissed his portraits.
Next week, however, Tate Britain mounts a retrospective exhibition.
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)
He climbed inside faces
Liz Jobey on the 'wizened, acned
dwarf' of 1960s Soho who documented city lives
A Maverick Eye: The Street
Photography of John Deakin by Robin Muir
208pp, Thames & Hudson, £36
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
Handle publicity with great care
INSIDE TRACK LAW & BUSINESS
By
ROBERT HUNTER | THE
FINANCIAL TIMES | SATURDAY,
JUNE 10, 2002
"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.
Sotheby’s
CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING
26 JUNE 2002 | 7:00
PM BST |
LONDON
LOT 17
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Three Studies for a Portrait
each: titled and dated 1976 on the
reverse
oil on canvas, in three parts
ESTIMATE £1,400,000
- £2,000,000
LOT
SOLD Hammer
Price with Buyer’s Premium: £1,546,650 GBP
PROVENANCE
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Marlborough Galleries, Inc., New York
Charity Auction: Dublin, Artists for Amnesty, 19th May 1982, Lot 31 (Acquired by
the present owner)
EXHIBITED
Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Francis Bacon: Oeuvres Récentes, 1977, no.
8, illustrated in colour
Mexico City, Museo de Arte Moderno; Caracas, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo,
Francis Bacon, 1977
New York, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon Recent Paintings, 1980, p.
29, no. 12, illustrated in colour
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art (Extended loan since 1982)
LOT NOTES
"The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards, the scene of
some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes
leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry
their ghosts within them.'' (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p.
99)
As part of the constant questioning of his ability to transcend mere
representation in his work, to record the self beyond the expression, Bacon’s
small portrait studies became the lifeblood of his oeuvre. In his unbounded
quest for the ultimate immediacy of depiction, the intimate size and proportions
of these canvases allowed him to experiment endlessly with the potency of his
brilliant painterly gesture. Bacon would paint, re-paint and discard these
pieces until he found the core of his subject’s being.
For a few chosen subjects, Bacon’s constant social and professional dedication
to their appearance, his repeated observations of their mannerisms and movements
provided the key to their existence on canvas. In the age of photography, Bacon
felt that traditional portraiture lacked depth and mere appearance was not
enough to capture the essence of life. For him the outcome of his art depended
on a direct opposition between a kind of visual intelligence (ordering,
remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His portraits strove not to tell the
story of someone’s life, but to clamp themselves to the viewer’s nervous system
and offer as he put it "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.’' A
history of observation could be conveyed in the cast of a gesture and that was
where the painting stood or fell.
Executed during what David Sylvester has described as 'Bacon’s peak years as a
painter', Studies for a Portrait – Triptych is
one of Bacon’s finest portrayals of his close friend Henrietta Moraes, former
wife of the renowned Indian poet Dom Moraes. Bacon counted very few women
amongst his pantheon of friends and even fewer made it onto his canvases, but
after meeting Moraes in Soho in the mid-sixties, she immediately became one of
his favourite and most striking subjects. This particular piece is taken from a
renowned series of triptych portraits, begun in the late sixties, which boldly
confronted the human subject, literally head-on. Pushed right up to the front of
the picture plane, these three deep meditations on human appearance test the
viewer in a manner unique to the art of Francis Bacon: unnerving the viewer,
challenging his or her sensibilities, yet still declaring a masterful poise and
precision of both portraiture and painting.
When Bacon turned his hand to portraits, as he did more and more in the
seventies, it was his friends who came under scrutiny: "If they were not my
friends, I could not do such violence to them'' (Francis Bacon in David
Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London
1990, p. 41). This violence, however, was perpetrated in absentia – since
he painted his portraits most usually from memory, and from photographs, or in
general from anything except the actual living and sitting model. This varied
source material formed Bacon’s unique 'dictionary' of Henrietta’s appearance in
his mind. Spread around his studio, these photographs became a gallery of her
'fleeting expressions', a record of her individual existence which Bacon
translated to a newly invigorated being and vitality. Her presence in the room
would have inhibited his progress towards 'truth'. He went on to say: "If I like
them, I don’t want to practice the injury that I do to them in my work before
them. I would rather practice the injury in private by which I think I can
record the facts of them more clearly.'' (in David Sylvester, Op. Cit., p. 41)
Here, the 'facts' come in the shape of three starkly painted canvases, which
present a Modigliani-esque Moraes almost filmically, in a fleeting, angst-ridden
moment. She fidgets across the swathe of the triptych bearing a remarkable
economy of marks, each exceptional motion of the loaded brush adding up to a
true reflection of the fragility of Moraes’ existence. Onto the pink background,
Bacon has forcefully modelled and invaded Moraes’ face with fluid gestural
brushstrokes that at once define, yet distort her features, chasing across the
canvas not so much her physical presence – her
muscles, sinew and bone structure – but
rather the psychological trace of her own existence. At one point, in the
central canvas of this disturbingly honest depiction, Moraes’ face becomes more
rounded, her cheekbones more pronounced and her jaw thrusts forward, teeth
dramatically exposed. Studies for a Portrait-Triptych must thus be seen
as a perfect marriage of the physical and psychological; the meeting point where
presence becomes absence, and vice versa. As such, the viewer is presented with
a haunting, almost mystical image that transcends the boundaries of mere
depiction. However this drama, of matter and of existence, is counterbalanced by
the softness of Bacon’s palette: a combination of gentle lilacs and fleshy pinks
punctured by stark whites and enshrined by haloes of thick brown hair. These run
throughout the triptych and although each portrait differs from the others, the
dynamic of rhythmical gesture, blurred distortion and bold inscription contrives
to build a magical presence which somehow adds up to much more than the sum of
its parts.

the phantom of provence
Eleven years after one of van Gogh’s most mysterious self-portraits was
destroyed in the war, David Plante writes, Francis Bacon painted a series
of homages that is now being shown in its entirety for the first time.
DAVID PLANTE |
FEATURES | VOGUE
|
JULY
2002
In 1966, when I was guest of the poet Stephen Spender at his home outside the
town of Maussane, in the South of France, Francis Bacon and his lover George
Dyer came down to join us. Stephen drove all of us about on excursions. The
autumn landscape, on which the light was magnifyingly bright, reminded me of van
Gogh’s first letter from Arles to his brother Theo in 1888 in which he noted “splendid
red stretches soil planted with vines, with a background of mountains of the
most delicate lilac.”
The four of us had very pleasant dinners in chilly restaurants where the soup
tureen steamed. Francis and George were, Stephen told me when we were alone,
getting on lovingly, not often the case. But the scene that comes most
forcefully to me from those days is this: Stephen was driving us along a country
road and was stopped by a policeman because a car up ahead had hit a small lorry
carrying pigs, and many of the animals were scattered across the narrow road,
their yellow-pink bodies and blood vivid on the gray tarmac. Francis, who was
sitting in the passenger’s seat, leaned forward, excited at the sight. As the
policeman guided Stephen among the carcasses to continue on our way, Francis,
his eyes large, stared out and even contorted his body to turn and stare after
we had passed through. I felt there was something overstated in Francis’s
excited, even transfixing, reaction to the dead pigs.
Over the next 25 years or so of our friendship, I heard Francis say, often and
adamantly, that all of humankind had no other fate but to be “dead
meat.” For
all the absoluteness with which he made such statements, he denied that his
paintings were in any way illustrations of them. He denied what many people saw
in his paintings of distorted, if not mutilated, naked bodies sprawled on bare
mattress – that they were interpretations of violence and horror. Francis was,
in his paintings, “just
trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system” as
possible. Ten years after his death, when I now think of such works as his
series of screaming popes, inspired by Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent
X, I wonder how I could ever have believed Francis when he denied how these
paintings were overstatements of violence and horror.
But then there are the paintings Bacon was inspired to do by van Gogh’s The
Painter on the Road to Tarascon (which survives only in reproduction, as it
was destroyed in Germany during World War II). The series – ten in all – is on
view this summer in a show at the Foundation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Eight
are from 1957; another, a rather tentative first, is from 1956; and the last was
done in 1985. The first nine, unveiled in London in 1957 at the Hanover Gallery,
were received with great enthusiasm, especially for their vibrant reds, blues,
and yellows, and also because they appeared to be more accessible than the
artist’s previous work. Yet in John Russell’s in-depth study of Bacon, the art
critic writes that “in
the context of Bacon’s entire oeuvre,” he
finds the van Gogh series “perhaps
the weakest of his group paintings.” Over
the years following their appearance, Bacon according to Russell, developed “an
idiom which makes the van Gogh paintings look melodramatic and illustrative.” Yes,
there is something haunted in these paintings, for Bacon imagined himself, like
van Gogh’s original figure, to be a phantom on the road. And one could even
interpret the fifth painting in the series – of a figure tethered by his walking
stick to his shadow – as something of an illustration. But to me the van Gogh
paintings are the least melodramatic and illustrative of his work.
In a set of remarkable interviews with his friend David Sylvester, the art
critic, Francis said, “Van
Gogh I one of my great heroes because I think that he was able to be almost
literal and yet by the way he put on the paint gave you a marvelous vision of
the reality of things. I saw it very clearly when I was once in Provence ...
one saw in this absolutely barren country that by the way he put on the paint he
was able to give it such an amazing living quality.... The living quality is
what you have to get.”
I find much of what Francis said of van Gogh’s work to be true of his own,
especially of these particular paintings. As transformed as the figures in these
canvases are, for instance, they appear “almost
literal.” What
also adds to my growing appreciation of them is Bacon’s primary insistence –
like van Gogh’s – on the use of paint as the essential subject. The compellingly
applied reds and yellows and greens recall from van Gogh’s letters to Theo such
passages describing his own paintings: “The
ground is bright orange, the grass bright green, and the sky and water blue.”
After George Dyer’s death in 1971 – brought on by pills and drink, either
accidently or on purpose – Bacon painted a number of triptychs that reduced his
lover’s life to the brutal basics. George’s naked body eaten away by darkness,
George collapsed on a toilet, George vomiting into a washbasin. I once asked
Francis how he could bear such pessimism, which came from his deepest feelings
about the life and death of his lover and which had to be one with the
expression of it in the paintings. Once again, he denied that he was expressing
anything in his painting. He laughed a high-pitched, throwaway laugh and said
that as pessimistic as he was, he was an optimist for the simple fact of putting
paint on canvas. It was his way of doing this that gave all of his paintings
that “living
quality” –
but none more empathically than his haunted homage to van Gogh.

VAN GOGH’S SHADOW Study
for a Portrait of van Gogh V,
1957
Good help is very hard to find
By
NANCY BANKS-SMITH | TELEVISION | THE
GUARDIAN WEEKLY | THURSDAY
11 JULY 2002
The Strange World of Barry Who? (BBC4) was an
oddly engrossing look into the life of a hanger-on.
Barry Joule, a well-off nonentity, wheedled
his way into the lives of several celebrities – all gay – by being charming,
available and effusive.
Once you have scraped acquaintance with your first
celebrity, in his case Francis Bacon, you can catch many more if you bait your
hook with tasty bits of Bacon.
The rich and famous are particularly vulnerable when, in
an evocative phrase, they are "the phantom of someone who has been famous".
Like the dying Nureyev, whom Joule photographed in his
bath.
Vincent
Van Gogh et Francis Bacon,