JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER  |  ARTS & BOOKS  |  LIFE & ARTS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  SEPTEMBER 13/14 2008

“No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least 75 to 100 years before the thing begins to sort itself out from the theories that have formed about it.”

Thus said Francis Bacon in 1966, at the height of his powers and ambition, to his amanuensis, the distinguished critic David Sylvester. Aged 57, Bacon had recently completed the pair of triptychs which marked the emergence of his mature, electrifying, shocking style: the Guggenheim’s bloody-orange-black Three Studies for a Crucifixion of 1962 (pictured above), with its mutilated seeping body on a bed, fringed by a fleeing young man and a howling slit-open figure twined upside down round a plinth, and Munich’s 1965 Crucifixion, where the central crucified form is trussed up/pinned down by a butcher’s frilled rosettes like an animal carcass, and a murderer sports a swastika.

Why did Bacon, a militant atheist who, as Sylvester recalled, “always seemed to be looking for pretexts to issue a reminder that God was dead and to bang a few nails into his coffin”, make his great breakthroughs by depicting the Crucifixion? These two important loans at Tate Britain’s sombre, persuasive centennial retrospective look back to the revolutionary canvas which Bacon considered the start of his career, Tate’s own 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and even to a ghostly small Crucifixion of 1933, painted on the young artist’s return from a visit to a Berlin of rent boys and Nazi officers. Juxtaposing them all, Tate dramatises the procession of Bacon’s imagery from Picasso-like, writhing biomorphic forms to his own pictorial language of savage lone or coupling figures, distorted by the blur which recalled their photographic sources, dissolving in pools of liquid paint as if identity, existence, were collapsing into nothing.

Bacon gambled: he wanted his pictures to end up in “either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between”. He knew that, post-photography, post-Holocaust, the stakes for an art of human figuration were high; while other artists fled to abstraction or mimicked photography in pop styles, he subsumed the blur and all-over texture of photography and film into his own work while painting like an Old Master. His yelling caged popes – he did 45 altogether – have the silk-and-velvet grandeur of their inspiration, Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, combined with the instant, rushing horror of a modern urban nightmare as expressed in their other source, the shrieking nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Several Popes, including one privately owned masterpiece of condensed white and flesh-coloured strokes against a luxurious vermilion from 1965, are here; so is Frankfurt’s grimly expressive Study for the Nurse from Battleship Potemkin, setting the naked curled figure in a sumptuous deep green ground whose painterliness rivals the purple and gold harmonies of the pontiffs.

In each case, formal splendour lends weight to the ugly panic which makes Bacon, with Giacometti, the arch visual exponent of existentialism. What is a man? One of the strengths of this exhibition is the inclusion of almost a zoo – MoMA’s Study of a Baboon, Stuttgart’s Chimpanzee, Buffalo’s Man with Dog, all from the 1950s – whose screaming, squatting beasts underline the infantile desperation and animal violence of Bacon’s businessmen (Man in Blue), lovers (Two Figures in the Grass, derived from Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s Wrestlers) and crouching quasi-embryonic nudes.

Similarly, it is as a symbol of humanity’s reversion to barbarism that the Crucifixion served Bacon’s purposes – along with the long art-historical tradition that made it “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation”. The 1962 and 1965 triptychs paraphrase the sinuous body in Cimabue’s Crucifixion, which reminded Bacon of a worm crawling down the cross, as well as referencing Soutine and Rembrandt in the bravura impasto passages depicting dying flesh as meat.

Bacon’s crucifixions are, of course, without redemption – the more so because their horror is charged, as Michael Peppiatt suggests in a superb new volume, Francis Bacon, Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99), with autobiographical impulse. “It’s nearer to a self-portrait,” Bacon admitted. In this reading of Three Studies, the young man clothed almost entirely in a black stocking is the 16-year-old Bacon traumatically expelled from the parental home for surreptitiously donning his mother’s underwear, the jowly, harsh, older figure behind him is his violent horse-dealer father and the bleeding body on a bed his own sexualised crucifixion; Bacon told Peppiatt that his homosexuality was “a defect – like being born with a limp”.

Bacon loathed narrative, but, like Picasso in the half century before, he became the greatest artist of his generation by transforming the events of his life into modern mythic images through paint. Those events have a legendary quality anyway – the expulsion from home; the death of his aggressive alcoholic lover Peter Lacy in Tangier just as the first Tate retrospective opened in 1962, commemorated in a little-known, ferociously painted Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, with a black shadow rising up through ochre-sunflower tones; the suicide of his equally cruel/pathetic successor, George Dyer, in a Paris hotel on the eve of Bacon’s Grand Palais opening nine years later.

On the showing here, these triptychs mark Bacon’s last great period. Although this exhibition dutifully continues through the next 20 years, much of what follows is self-pastiche, with broad flat areas often dully painted, sometimes in fast-drying acrylic. Like T. S. Eliot, the modernist writer Bacon most admired and whose brilliant early distillation of nihilism into a rhythmic formal language he echoed – the Smithsonian’s 1967 Triptych – Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ is another highlight here – he was perhaps too bleakly reductive an artist to develop a great late style. Among repetitive portraits, Blood on Pavement and Jet of Water, both 1988, stand out as paintings of absence, set against pared-down industrialised backgrounds, human life swept offstage. Like the best work here, they seem inevitable yet astonishing, concluding a show which, although it carries no revelations, steers clear of theory and gives us “the thing itself” – Bacon as the most raw, physical, urgently affecting and intellectually convincing painter of the second half of the 20th century.

Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London SW1, to January 4, tel: +44 (0)20 787 8000. Then Prado, Madrid, February 3-April 19; Metropolitan Museum, New York, May 18-August 16. Sponsored by Bank of America

Beauty and the beasts

Damien Hirst’s new formaldehyde zoo is as arresting as it is heart-breaking.

By Jackie Wullschlager
 

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER  |   COLLECTING   |  LIFE & ARTS  |  THE FINANCIAL TIMES  |  13/14 SEPTEMBER 2008

From his first Freeze exhibition 20 years ago to the Sotheby’s sale on Monday and Tuesday, Damien Hirst’s timing has been infallible. Hirst is both opportunist and an artist so viscerally in touch with his own age that a Greek sense of kairos, of a fated, propitious moment for action, attends his every move. Was it chance that he launched “Beautiful Inside My Head”, the exhibition of his 223 new pieces, the same week as the opening of this autumn’s first major museum show. Tate’s centennial Francis Bacon retrospective? The earliest piece in that show, a 1933 “Crucifixion”, is symbolically owned by Hirst, and the final entry in Tate’s catalogue is Bacon’s note, written a month before he died in April 1992. that “at the Saatchi collection there is a very interesting installation by a young man called Damien Hirst called ‘a Thousand Years’. It is of a cow’s head in one compartment and in the second part they breed the flies which swarm around the cow’s head it really works.”

So Bacon. 20th-century painter of man as dead meat, passes the baton to Hirst, 21stcentury sculptor of dead animals. Although almost all Hirst’s trademark genres — the deathly pharmaceutical cabinets: the canvases studded with butterflies, razor blades or flies: the interminably dull dot paintings; vitrines of industrially produced diamonds are here, unashamedly on sale as upmarket brands in varying prices and sizes, it is the formaldehyde zoo. featuring zebra, white horse turned unicorn, piglet with wings, that “really works”. Encased, womb-like, in watery tombs, evoking at once vulnerable embryos and the stuffed corpses of a Victorian taxidermy shop, these dumb beasts juxtapose birth and death with a devastating economy of means that recalls Bacon’s recurring language of primal infantile scream and crucifixion.

Like Bacon too. Hirst is a wildly inventive plunderer from past and present, from Grunewald (a painted skeleton here. “St Anthony’s Fire”, surely alludes to the medieval altarpiece created to spiritually heal sufferers from this disease) to Donald Judd’s minimalist stacks (the inspiration for the cabinets and the ghastly, ghostly glass boxes containing such mementos as office chair, ashtray) to Gabriel Orozco (the ornamental skulls). He also, increasingly, borrows from himself: thus a new shark is a smaller version of the 1991 “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” — its sober diminishment is the now middle-aged artist’s point.

By turns slick, clever, wounding and always ironic in its democratic elevation of banality, this show does not mark an advance in Hirst’s oeuvre; rather, it retrenches and refines the vocabulary of mortality, religion, science and commerce in last year’s “For the Love of God”, featuring the £50m diamond skull. But the best works here, the gold-homed and -shod bull and calf minotaur, false idol, ancient sacrifice — are arresting, heart-breaking, art-historically rich (remember Poussin’s “Golden Calf” and, as part of a performance-installation whose crescendo will be the auction itself. constitute a sharp money-bling commentary on the way we live now that confirms Hirst as the defining voice of his generation.

Raw Bacon

The Tate’s retrospective of Britain’s greatest

painter in a century is a triumph

REVIEW  |  THE TIMES  |  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

Shocking, disturbing, brutal, his paintings have been seen as a savage summary of the postwar bleakness that followed the liberation of Belsen. There is nothing comforting in Francis Bacon. Raw depictions of pain and alienation reflect the terrible knowledge of man’s bestiality that the West could not escape after 1945. His paintings flout convention, espousing a philosophy of futility that lay at the heart of his own fervent hedonism. But their compelling power has made Bacon the single greatest painter that Britain has produced for the past century. His idiosyncratic style fathered no new language of art in this country. But his vision and influence are global.

The retrospective that opened at Tate Britain yesterday is the third that the gallery has staged. In his lifetime, Bacon also enjoyed two other similar triumphs: in New York in 1985 and in Paris in 1971 — the latter being the very moment when his lover committed suicide, thus giving birth to a terrible new beauty in Bacon’s haunting memorial triptych. The current exhibition is set to draw record crowds. There is something about Bacon that inspires a frisson as chilling as those screaming popes, and it is in this quality that a man wholly indifferent to the Establishment accidentally hit on the elixir of commercial success.

Accident was central to Bacon’s “gilded gutter life” in Soho. His lusts, despairs, cruelties and loves have become the stuff of Bohemian legend. All were tossed by accident, like a medieval turn of fortune’s wheel. But from this chaos Bacon, ruthlessly and with discriminating acumen, salvaged only the best, the art that survived his frequent culls. The Tate has triumphed in showing us this distorting mirror of our times.

Bacon’s merciless slices of life

A beautifully presented show at Tate Britain casts intriguing new light on

Francis Bacon’s visceral visions of humanity, says Richard Dorment

RICHARD DORMENT  |  EXHIBITION  |  ARTS  |  DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

Francis Bacon is something of an artistic chimera, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mixture of British insularity and modernist sophistication.

Born in Ireland in 1909, he belonged to a generation of British artists and draughtsmen loosely identified as the Neo-Romantics. No one denies that he was the most naturally gifted painter to emerge in this country after the war, but from the perspective of international modernism that dominated art during the 20th century his paintings never transcended the time and place in which they were made.

But step back and look again and suddenly you see another Francis Bacon, this one the heir not to any British painter but to Cézanne and to Picasso.

In the nocturnal Study for Nude (1951), the shadowy form in front of the black curtain is just as likely to be a gorilla as a person. Typically, Bacon has taken an idea that is only implied in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — that women are creatures of the jungle — to its logical conclusion: whether you paint an animal or a human being, it’s pretty much the same thing. Here, the broad facets of pink and black paint Bacon uses to create volume are lifted directly from Cézanne, who also shared Bacon’s obsession with eternal movement and constant change.

The Bacon retrospective that opens today at Tate Britain is the third to be held at Millbank, but the first since the artist’s death in 1992. It is also the first major show in years not to be selected and installed by his formidable champion and interpreter, the late David Sylvester.

As an exhibition organiser, Sylvester was a magician who made any work of art he touched somehow look better than you’d ever seen it look before. Yet even he never convinced me of Bacon’s artistic stature, so I was curious to see whether the Tate show would be the beginning of a major critical re-evaluation downwards.

That that has not happened is a tribute to the organisers, Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens. Rigorously chosen for the quality of the pictures, the show is also beautifully displayed to take us through Bacon’s career chronologically and thematically. What it does that is new is to focus our attention on the specificity of Bacon’s art by making us see how much of it is rooted in visual (as opposed to emotional) experience.

In part this is possible because a vast archive of Bacon’s photographs, ephemera and drawings has become available to scholars in recent years. A whole gallery has been given over to showing a fraction of this material, and in some ways it is the armature around which the whole show has been built.

In a 1952 painting showing a mad dog running in circles, for example, Bacon captures in paint the panic and frenzy of the abandoned animal in a way I’ve never seen done in art before. Panting from thirst, the possibly rabid creature is a moving blur that yet seems to pause for an instant to look directly out of the picture at us, a living embodiment of the futility of existence. But, for all its metaphysical content, before it is anything else the picture is the expression of Bacon’s pity and horror for the plight of a specific animal abandoned near a highway in a hot country.

Likewise, the snarling dog that bares its teeth in Man with Dog becomes, in Bacon’s hands, an embodiment of evil, a Cerberus who guards the entrance to an underworld represented by the sewer in the street. Once again, however, it is the visceral immediacy of the image that captures and holds our attention, not its symbolic content. The dog is so vividly rendered in silvery blacks and blues that your first thought in front of the picture is that it would bite your arm off if it weren’t restrained by its chain.

Later, in a section of Bacon’s portraiture, you have the same sense that, far from painting vague evocations of friends and lovers, each person in these pictures is an instantly recognisable personality. Bacon was working from the specific to the general, never losing a connection with his source of inspiration, even if, as was usually the case, that source was a photograph.

Where I lose patience with Bacon is in pictures such as the famous Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), where three armless and legless torsos howl with rage and despair. His attempt to symbolise the human condition might appeal to an adolescent or a fan of science fiction, but for me the picture fails because I can find no equivalent to its histrionics in my own experience.

Bacon returned to the subject twice. In the version of 1965, he included the figures of two comic-book mobsters standing at a bar to watch the show, and adding utterly unnecessary details such as the Nazi armband worn by the eviscerated and mutilated carcass at the far right.

I just hate art that makes me feel manipulated. What other possible response could we have to these images of blood-smeared Nazi amputees beaten to a pulp than blank revulsion? I’m not saying these things don’t happen or that artists shouldn’t paint them, but that it is all too easy to get a response by depicting them.

After a sustained period living in the South of France and North Africa, in the Sixties, Bacon begins to drench his pictures in lush, saturated colours. But, for all his chromatic extravagance and technical virtuosity, at precisely this period he also starts to work on a scale that is just too big. Whether it is the female nude on the bed in Lying Figure (1969) or the Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer (1971), wonderful passages of bravura painting are set against large areas of pure colour that read not as space or light but as dead background. American painters from Pollock to Johns were concerned at this date with precisely this problem of how to sustain visual interest over every inch of the canvas surface. Bacon doesn’t seem to recognise the problem exists.

Whether this is a good thing depends on your point of view. When I first started to look at Bacon’s work in the Sixties, it puzzled me that he couldn’t have cared less about the integrity of the picture plane. From the very first pictures, Bacon created the illusion of three-dimensional space by encasing his figures in linear cubes that look like glass vitrines. Symbolically, their function was to render the powerful figures inside them powerless. But formally the device makes the pictures look as old-fashioned as anything by Bouguereau.

But in art nothing ever stands still. Looking at these works in 2008, the way Bacon separates his central images from the flat areas of colour surrounding them feels curiously modern – simply a device he uses to foreground the picture’s subject rather than draw attention to its formal properties. Bacon had no interest in contributing to the history of art or its advancement. I faulted him for this, but now that lack of interest looks like the most avant garde thing about his work.

I’ll never be completely sold on Bacon, but that’s my loss and certainly won’t stop the crowds from pouring into Tate Britain.

Until January 4. Sponsored by the Bank of America

ONE learns by looking. Thats what you must do, look. Francis Bacon didnt believe in teaching. Micheleangelo urged others to draw, but Bacon maintained  that his audience was to look. This imperative drove him.  He was infuriated  with himself and with others when a description or interpretation was bailed to his work. The arist wanted the images to evoke an emotion in the viewer. Bacon had his own. Bacon had his own analogy — I dont understand music, even though oy effects me very much, and yet I have no need of explanations. I know that people often look for explanations, if they need them then its always possible to find people who can provide them, but that seems odd to me (from In conversation with Michel Archimbaud, 1992).

Seventy paintings will be on show at Tate Britains new exhibition Francis Bacon, and they confirm how looking is imperative. The first, Crucifixion (1933) is exquisite and bewitching. The last, Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988) is majestic, a gift from the artist to his fellow countrymen. The greater number of these works are seldom available; half are short-term imports and many are in private hands. Included in the exhibition are portraits of his intimates — George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and his heir, John Edwards — and himself.

But one aspect of the artist that is little touched upon is his obsession with flora, fauna and the countryside. Study of a Figure in a Landscape (1952), which is not in the exhibition but is illusttrated in the catalogue, is a memento of his visits to South Africa. Its colouring is strident, playful, engaging, and, for Bacon, unexpected. The landscape is harsh, probably cruel; the oil paint has been applied with quick discipline, in conspicuous detail. The figure in convulsed, pensive, speechless and immobile within a maelstrom of itching discomfort.

This is a countryman’s painting. Each and every tremor has been seen, felt and noted. For Bacon, like Shakespeare and Constable, worked in the city, yet his sensibility remained in the soil. He repeatedly talked of swaying grass, of animals slinking between bushes, of skulls picked fleshless by sharp-beaked birds.

Bacon grew up in rural Ireland; in various houses with servants and sizeable stables and acreage. As English settlers in Ireland, the family was at risk. Bacon watch insurgents, crablike on their bellies, slither across fields towards his home. The IRA and death were daily dreaded guests. So he matured circled encircled by fear, irritated by warnings of prudence. Bacon’s father, a former army officer, bred and trained horses. He was demanding and intemperate. His wife was Edwardian, well-to-do with high aspirations.

Of Francis, the second son, much was required. But as a countryman, Bacon was born to be an exile. A;though he appreciated the animals and the land, it was a visual experience. In practice, he was unskilled, inept. It was soon clear he was a cuckoo in the nest. He fell out, or he was pushed. Picaresque, dishonest and egotistical, Bacon was also appealing, mischievous and generous.

Picaresque, dishonest and egotistical, Bacon was also appealing, generous and mischievous. His unkindness was as remarkable as his consideration. Her was an alien to his family, and yet was deeply involved in enduring their well-being. He was both a mountebank and a genius. Like so many with an abiding disability (asthma), he was explosive, stubborn and zealous.

Bacon was obsessed with the human animal. He did not see it politely, respectfully, nor did he withdraw when it was indecorous, unscrupulous, debased or rotting. Seeing all the vices and virtues that man can play with, he did exactly that — he played. Reality was his toy; he threw it high and caught it as it fell. Oil paint was the clay he shaped and placed with finesse. He imposed disfigurement on the portraits of his friends with composure and an amazing lack of concern. These subjects, it is known, did not object. The more perceptive may have understood that to him they were his pets, the animals he fed and nurtured on his aesthetic pastures.

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London  SQ1  from September 11 to January 4, 2009.

      (Above) Study for a Figure in a Landscape, dating from 1952   THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON DC

MATISSE SUCKS, SAYS FRANCIS BACON FROM BEYOND

 SCOTT THILL  |  CULTURE  |  WIRED  |  WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2008

Art biographies are sometimes dull exercises for specialized audiences. Yet Michael Peppiatt’s forthcoming book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, might be a rude exception.

Who knows? The Yale University Press title might even set off an art beef – the likes of which you usually see in hip-hop and pro wrestling – between supporters of Bacon and Henri Matisse, the legendary French Fauvist.

Bacon took the first punch in 1987, while criticizing Matisse on tape to Peppiatt, his official biographer.

"I loathe them," Bacon complained of Matisse’s later works, according to Times Online. "I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can’t bear the drawings either. I absolutely hate his line. I find his line sickly."

Peppiatt sat on the tapes for awhile, for the sake of comity, but the opportunity was too good to pass up now, and the recordings are featured in his upcoming book.

The timing is right: A major Bacon retrospective opens Thursday at Britain’s stunning Tate Modern Gallery, and current events are suitably nightmarish. After all, Bacon was a descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher of the same name and a pro when it came to grotesque and controversial phantasmagoria.

One can only wonder what the iconoclastic painter would have made of the war on terror. It probably would have made for even more quotable gossip.

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain

Critics agree that this centenary retrospective is a sizzler –

but could there be too many masterpieces on display?

OGINIA O’DELL  |  REVIEWS ROUNDUP  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2008

Amid economic meltdown and on the eve of being sucked into a black hole, it was perhaps unusual to see a London exhibition opening featuring on the BBC’s News at Ten. Then again, Tate Britain’s centenary retrospective of Francis Bacon, which opens to the public tomorrow, has been widely anticipated as a major art highlight of the year.

Irish-born artist Bacon, widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, is known for his giant canvasses spilling out nightmarish visions and contorted bodies in their raw and fleshy glory. The Tate retrospective, arranged broadly chronologically, brings together approximately 70 of the most important paintings from the artist’s turbulent life, including his portraits of Pope Innocent X and celebrated triptychs such as Three Studies for a Crucifixion. The exhibition will travel to the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York next year.

For Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writing in the Times, Bacon is "quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters … His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul." Campbell’s high point of the five-star show is the "gallery dedicated to images of crucifixions, including three triptychs … In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, man is butchered like an animal on the cross of his life. The raw brutality of pain is overpowering."

She is less impressed, however, with a room devoted to archive material found in Bacon’s studio. This collection of source material – including preparatory sketches, photographs of close friends, film stills and images of violence, animals, athletes and medical examinations – was revealed posthumously when Bacon’s studio was painstakingly dismantled and relocated piece by piece to a Dublin gallery. It now sheds light on some of his working methods and dramatically dispels Bacon’s self-mythologies about the spontaneous nature of his own work.  

For Campbell-Johnston, it is "better to ignore those irritating wall texts and pass over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings do their work."

She also highlights a theme that troubles nearly all the critics: Bacon’s monumental legacy and fame. There are almost "too many great paintings" on show, she writes. Overfamiliarity is also the subject of Fisun Güner’s five-star review in Metro. The retrospective is "excellent" but Güner immediately highlights the "jaw-dropping" incongruity of Bacon’s Van Gogh series of paintings made in north Africa in the late 1950s. Notably, Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI – a "riot of neon-bright streaks" – is used by the Tate on some of the exhibition memorabilia: "Perhaps they want to entice us with something less familiar, amid so much that is almost too intimately known," writes Güner. The Independent’s Tom Lubbock agrees: "[Bacon] now looks simply like an icon of general British culture. He’s a familiar. You talk about Bacon as you talk about The Beatles or Monty Python."

Lubbock’s review goes on to focus on the artist’s shameless, showbiz approach to his art, calling him a "vulgar entertainer" whose art was rooted in shape-shifting theatricality: "The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It’s a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring … Bacon is a magician, a quick-change artist."

The Guardian’s art critic, Adrian Searle, admits to being an adolescent fan ("the grisly aspects of Bacon’s art appeal to the teenage mind") but after looking at the artist for 40 years, he is still troubled by the "myth, rumour and anecdote about his life [that] have come to dominate discussion of his art".

Searle writes: "Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal ... Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. This retrospective … is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was". He concludes: "I still ask myself if he was the real deal."

Matisse has been damned from the grave by Francis Bacon in a previously-unknown interview which is to be made public for the first time. The French master is revered worldwide as a giant of modern art, but Bacon could not have been more dismissive of him in recordings revealed to The Times.

In the recordings, which will be published next month, Bacon was talking privately to Michael Peppiatt, his official biographer and friend, in 1987 when he said of Matisse: “I’ve never liked his things very much, except the very, very early things... I loathe them. I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can’t bear the drawings either – I absolutely hate his line. I find his line sickly.”

Nor was he impressed by Matisse’s sculptures. Dr Peppiatt had refrained from publishing the comments at the time because he thought Bacon might object. Wary of using an off-the-record conversation, he recalled: “Bacon wouldn’t have wanted to be seen as slagging off another artist.” He was astonished to rediscover the material in returning to the tapes for a new biography for Yale University Press.

“I thought I’d better listen to them again,” he said. “I was surprised to find quite a few things that 25 or 30 years ago didn’t seem so important. Now we regard Bacon with such fascination that even the odd asides become significant.” Commenting on why Bacon would have disliked Matisse so vehemently, he singled out works such as the images of odalisques.

He said: “The odalisques were everything Bacon isn’t. They are very fluent, fluid, easy, graceful, harmonious – and Bacon is the opposite of all that.”  Dr Peppiatt will now include the interviews in Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, whose publication coincides with a major Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain and as the artist continues to break records in the salerooms. 

The Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich is among his most fervent collectors, paying a staggering $86.3 million (£44.4 million) for the 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s New York. The purchase set a new auction record for a post-war work of art. Yet, in the 1940s, an art charity in Britain struggled to persuade any public collection to accept another major Bacon painting as a gift. Not one of the museums and galleries approached was remotely interested then in his angst-ridden pictures.

Bacon, whose paintings express the isolation, brutality and pain of human existence, is best-known for images such as his screaming popes in which Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was converted into a nightmarish depiction of hysterical terror.

This month, the James Hyman Gallery in London will also be exhibiting a previously-unseen mutilated Bacon canvas, an untitled Study for a Pope, which dates from around 1959. Bacon slashed and gouged out the central section, leaving only the top of the head and shoulders.

It was acquired by a collector last year from Ron Thomas, a porter at Marlborough Gallery, Bacon’s dealer. Mr Thomas used to deliver and collect paintings for Bacon, and do odd jobs around the house. Over the years, they became great friends, so much so that Bacon would give him and his family cheques at Christmas.

Its owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Times: “I could never afford to pay £10 million or £15 million for a complete large canvas. To me, this was the next best thing. I have part of an original Bacon.”

Bacon, a self-taught and deeply self-critical artist, was famous for destroying works, taking a knife to even his finest pictures. He once said that he destroyed “all the better paintings” in attempting “to take them further”. 

James Hyman, a Bacon expert, said: “We are delighted to be able to present his mutilated Pope for the first time. The discovery of this abandoned and slashed canvas... provides an insight into somebody who was very ruthless and self-critical. Putting a knife through your own picture is a very self-destructive thing to do.”

My encounter with Francis Bacon

PETER BRADSHAW  |  FILM  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  WEDNESDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER, 2008

Visiting the big new Francis Bacon exhibition at London’s Tate Britain this week, I was assailed by what I can only describe as a repressed memory — a memory which is bizarre in the extreme, and entirely shaming and unedifying.I was in Room 6 of the exhibition, which the curators have entitled "Archive", because it attempts to excavate Bacon’s working practices, and shows the way he uses found images and pictures ripped from magazines: photographs and stills from movies.

Intriguingly, the exhibition juxtaposes Bacon’s copy of this battered paperback with his copy of a book called Phenomena of Materialism: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, by Baron Von Shrenk Notzing. This contains blurry images of what appear to be strange contorted apparitions — again, grist to Bacon’s mill.

Looking at this, I pondered Bacon’s perception that still movie images detached from a motion picture sequence have an uncanny, deathly quality: undead, zombie forms deprived of the "life" that the moving picture gave them, yet not entirely dead — and also ghostly. I duly made note of all this, before suddenly being assailed by an extraordinary memory. I remembered that I can claim something that very few non-specialists can claim, and perhaps very few art historians.

I had once spoken to Francis Bacon on the telephone.

It was in 1990, and I was in my first job after leaving university: doing shifts on the Londoner’s Diary of the London Evening Standard. In those days, the Diary was edited by a notorious figure, Rory Knight Bruce, reputedly the model for the character "Rory Plantagenet" from Martin Amis’s novel The Information. Rory was an eccentric figure, to say the very least; passionately dedicated to hunting and with a fiery temper, he was the master of foxhounds of the United Pack in Shropshire and hunted about two or three days a week, coming to London for the rest of the time to edit the column.

On what would have been my first week there, he peremptorily informed me of my assignment of the morning: I was to write a full-blooded attack on the Turner prize - or rather, I was to persuade some public figure to attack the Turner prize on the column’s behalf, and this would constitute our "story" of the day.

"Is it really acceptable ... " Rory declaimed, "... that a collection of loathsome art-crowd inverts should use the name of Turner to lend substance to this appalling and valueless charade? Peter, I want you to telephone Francis Bacon and put that to him. Get him to attack the Turner prize! Attack it, attack, attack!"

Blandly, I prepared to telephone Francis Bacon’s agent, or his dealer, and leave this message, and resign myself to naturally never being called back. But Rory had something up his sleeve. "Here is Francis Bacon’s private telephone number!" he hissed, scribbling it on my pad. "Dial it, and destroy it immediately. Do not put it in your contacts book!"

But of course I did, and I dug this book up today, 18 years after the event, and here is the number: 071-584 2925. Francis Bacon’s home telephone number, the number at his legendary chaotic studio in South Kensington, the studio that has since been dismantled and reverently reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. How on earth had Rory Knight Bruce got Francis Bacon’s home number? Well, Rory had a certain epicene handsomeness in his youth, and was rumoured to frequent the Colony Club in Soho, a haunt of Bacon’s ...

At any rate, I was now expected to telephone the world’s greatest living artist, then 81 years old, actually to interrupt him in the middle of his work, with the most extraordinarily fatuous and offensive question surely ever posed by a journalist.

"Phone him! Phone him! Phone him! Phone him now!" hissed Rory, and he gripped my upper arm. "And remember to say 'loathsome art-crowd inverts'."

Utter silence fell on the desk as all the other reporters realised what it was I was supposed to do. Pleadingly, I glanced over at Rory’s deputy, Marcus Scriven, who had relatively recently joined the column after having been a captain in the Welsh Guards. He grinned at me cheerfully: "Public service journalism, old boy!"

I could feel myself going wobbly and pale, a sweating, traumatised carcass, like one of Bacon’s own figures. With fingers like chippolatas, I stabbed out the number: 071-584 2925. There was a brief silence, while I prayed for an "engaged" or "unobtainable" signal. Then it rang — for a long time. Then someone picked up, and said: "Yes?" on a quavering, rising tone.

"Is that Mr Francis Bacon?" I squeaked.

"Yes," he replied, in the same rising tone.

"Erm, this is Peter Bradshaw from the Londoner’s Diary page in the Evening Standard."

Again: "Yes?"

I looked over at Rory who was fixing me with his Ancient Mariner’s gaze. There was no backing out.

"Could you tell me, Mr Bacon — do you think it objectionable that a crowd of loathsome art-crowd inverts should abuse the name of 'Turner' for their prize?" I gabbled, feeling quite sure that my place in hell was now utterly assured.

There was silence, and then, thankfully Bacon began to laugh. "I’m awfully sorry, Mr Bradshaw, but I’m afraid I cannot help you!" And he replaced the receiver. I went over and told Rory what Francis Bacon had said to me.

"Oh Christ, that’s no fucking good!" he spluttered. "No fucking good at all. Fuck me. Look, I’m going to lunch. If the editor comes in, tell him I’m out on a story. Fuck!" He left. It was 11:45am.

In Room 10 of the Tate exhibition (entitled "Late") one can see Francis Bacon’s last triptych from 1991, the painting that he may well have been working on when I telephoned. The catalogue observes of this piece: "He faced death with a defiant concentration on the exquisiteness of the lived moment." How remarkable to think that his concentration on this moment was interrupted by a grotesque person from Porlock.

But there it is: his number.

As Tate Britain’s Francis Bacon retrospective opens,

TOM LUBBOCK  |  ARTS  |  EXTRA  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2008

As befits a man who was the major figure in British art of the 20th century, Tate’s third major retrospective of Francis Bacon offers an impressive collection of paintings ranging across ten rooms reflecting the full range of Bacon’s career.  Going for the major works of each period the curators have chosen many familiar pieces from a canon which is pretty well established. The result is an impressively coherent show full of key works that people will recognise.

Apart from a room concentrating on Bacon’s series of crucifixion triptychs and an atmospheric archive space that pulls out items from his famously chaotic studio, Tate’s Francis Bacon takes you on a clear and linear journey that will have you reaching for the familiar – visceral, physical and animal – Bacon adjectives. 

The canvasses – many of them huge two metre monsters full of his trademark abstraction and raw physicality – succeed in hammering home the artist’s stated aim of painting being a means of carrying out the emotions – through the canvass and into our nervous systems.

Everywhere are powerful artworks with figures contorted like mangled pieces of abattoir flesh, curled in agony before some abyss or left screaming in the void as they dissolve into oblivion. Seeing them together is a potent experience. There is also an underlying philosophy, which is constant throughout; A Nietzchian atheism which he stuck to right until the end, together with the more practical idea that photography can change what painting is fundamentally about.

Visitors unfamiliar with the minutia of Bacon’s practice may be surprised to learn the extent to which he studied and worked from photographs. But it’s a fact hammered home by the picture captions and the archive section which is full of his notebooks, raw preliminary sketches, lists of ideas, photographic books and the creased and paint spattered photos that were the raw material for many of the portraits in the exhibition. 

It’s interesting to trace a direct line from these photographs of muses, models and lovers to the great canvasses that line the walls.

But perhaps more striking is the all pervading sense of danger, madness and horror. Right from the off there is a feeling of menace and violence as the exhibition opens with the terrifying world into which the world had emerged in 1945. A world made all the more shocking by the paintings of the young Francis Bacon.

Room 1 features a series of startling portraits from the 1940s that show the animalistic side of the human being – many of them superimposed with the snarling mouths of apes. The first painting is a figure in a landscape, shown in a group exhibition when Bacon was an unknown, next to the likes of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore.

Supposedly based on a photograph of his friend Eric Hall sitting on a chair in Hyde Park, it is full of the strange malevolence that became key to nearly all of Bacon’s work. It must have made an impact in 1945 – and marked the young artist out as an important painter of the post war period.

This period also saw the appearance of a series of head studies. Displayed together here they offer a tantalizing glimpse of his fledgling artistic vision and establish some of the early ground rules (violent abstraction, man as an animal) that informed his practice right up until his death in 1992.

There is also an early appearance of Pope Innocent X, who as the exhibition makes clear, became something of an obsession. An early version from 1949 is just as impactful as many of the later works on display here and casts the Pope as a horrifying figure, screaming for air as his head dissolves into the overlaid brushstrokes of vertical paint.

For Bacon “Velázquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.” Of course, Bacon took the business of arousing the emotions of the spectator to new levels.

Beyond the recurring subject matter, this early Pope painting also points to an emerging way of working that fused Bacon’s visceral approach to portraiture with the complexities of pictorial space.

Paintings of the early 1950s show figures boxed into cage-like structures, ‘space frames’ and hexagonal ground planes. Poor old Pope Pius is accordingly subjected to various states of torture and imprisonment. Seeing them together here allows them to unfold like stills from a horror film.

Elsewhere male figures are shown as isolated shapes dissolving in hotel rooms and darkened interiors – there are also animals, mainly stray dogs and snarling apes, and then a room full of crucifixion triptychs. Again it’s fascinating to see them together and study how Bacon, the godless artist, approached this most holy of themes. What begins as an ambiguous set of issues soon resolves itself as a grisly act of slaughterhouse violence.

Further on are responses to the abstraction of the 1950s and the embracing of the bold use of colour — and the portraits of George Dyer. Upon the suicide of his lover in 1971, Bacon embarked upon a series of powerful triptychs showing Dyer’s final, desperate moments. In a show packed with powerful images they are among the most compelling paintings on display.

To a great extent, this exhibition shows how Bacon hammered away at the same themes. The canvasses from the late 1940s and 1950s have the same jaw dropping intensity of those from the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps it is this that made Bacon great – that he hammered away, always finessing the same themes, plunging ever further into his own hellish vision of humanity.

‘Spleen, bile, attitude and foul language were always

 the stock in trade at the Colony Room Club’

JOHN WALSH  |  TALES OF THE CITY  |  EXTRA  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  TUESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER  2008

Soho’s smallest, smokiest and sourest drinking den, the Colony Room Club, is facing closure. Just as it celebrates 60 years of bad-tempered existence, its owner has revealed that it can’t afford the rent any longer. The smoking ban hasn’t helped, and neither has a wrangle over the licence. You can learn about the club’s crisis by checking its website, where you’ll be greeted with the words, “What the fuck is going on?”

But then, spleen, bile, attitude and foul language were always as much the club’s stock-in-trade as gin and art. I visited once in the late 1970s, brought along after lunch by my first editor, George Bull. As we rang the entry bell and toiled up the stairs to the tiny, green-painted, painting-strewn, phone-boothsized bar-room, George shared his droll memories of Muriel Belcher, the club’s terrifying, money-grabbing, lesbian founder, who played hostess to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and addressed politicians and artists alike as: “Hello, cunty” George could never explain why one might want to spend more than a few seconds in her company.

Muriel had died bythe time I visited, but her successor behind the bar was another Soho “character,” Ian Board. He glared at me – a wet-behind-the-ears 25-year-old in a three-piece heather suit – and grated “Who the fuck is this?” in welcome, his opaque sunglasses perched on an enormous mulberry nose. As George became engrossed with Daniel Farson, the art critic, I tried chatting up a young woman by the piano. She was fabulously sloshed, and punctuated our conversation by thumping the piano, demanding, “Can’t somebody play this thing?” I told her about my fascinating interview with a business guru. I explained about my imminent fact-finding trip to Sri Lanka. To all my tales she replied, slurrily, “So, basically, it’s a big PR stunt then?”

Since I had the boss with me I was insured against professional disapproval, so I admit a few gins and tonics found their way into my hand (everyone there drank spirits or champagne – no beer, precious little wine). By 4pm, I was wondering: has nobody any work to do? Do these people drink in here every afternoon? And, crucially: how can I get out of here? For the conversations weren’t sparkling excursions of arty repartee, they were cross and bitter, the laughter was mirthless and sour, and the club members seemed locked in a game of mutual piss-taking about their talent or grasp of aesthetics, that was bound end in tears, fists or flying pigment.

I later discovered a perfect image for the place, from a TV review by Julian Barnes. Clocking the Colony throng behaving with typical hostility in a TV documentary, Barnes mused about Bacon’s “screaming pope” paintings. Can it be, he asked, that Bacon was inspired, not by a religious vision of Hell, but by the sight of his cronies calling for double brandies at four in the afternoon?

Perhaps I’d have warmed to the place more if I’d met its most famous member, Francis Bacon. A hundred stories about the Colony revolve around Bacon and his friends. One day in the late 1960s, he arrived with a little bald Frenchman, who took a seat in the corner of the club while Bacon greeted the regulars with his customary exuberance. “Would you care for a drink?” he asked. “I’ll have a cup of tea,” the man replied, at which the club erupted in laughter. (Tea in the Colony Room?). “Francis, who is the old git in the corner?” asked Belcher. “This is Henri Cartier-Bresson,” said Bacon. “He takes a good snap.”

Bacon painted Ms Belcher several times, and one of his portraits of her was bought by a titled gentleman, whose male secretary rang the club. He was, he said, looking for some “background” about the painting’s subject: who Muriel was, what she’d done with her life. Muriel said she would co-operate in return for two first-class tickets (for herself and her girlfriend, Carmela) to New York   im,via the Caribbean. “Sorry,” said the secretary, “I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”  There was an awkward pause. “Where’s the picture now?” asked Muriel. “In the dining-room," said the man. “Well, tell his lordship from me,” said Muriel, “every time he eats his dinner and looks at the painting, I hope he fucking chokes.”

No bigger fan of the Colony Room exists than Michael Clark, the portraitist turned conceptual artist, who was taken up by Bacon in the 1980s, and drew some brilliant pencil portraits of Bacon and Belcher. He remembers being rung up, after his work appeared in the Independent Magazine, and asked by an anonymous woman if he did commissions. She wouldn’t say whom she represented. They arranged to meet at the Colony. She came up the stairs and said, “I’m a big fan of yours, as are David and Iman, who I think are just arriving.” Outside in Dean Street, the Bowies were indeed stepping from a taxi...

An amazing place, the Colony Room, for mingling art and squalor, fame and degradation, talent and decadence. And I discovered that it’s the height of folly to try to be condescending towards it. Once, when I was writing about the club for a London paper, Clark and I took Board out for lunch at Sheekey’s, to download some stories from the old days. We twittered for an hour – that is, twittered about the Soho village, Michael made intelligent remarks about the arty clientele, and Board growled unenthusiastically – then Board got up. He had to go. “You not well, Ian?” asked Michael. “Feeling a bit tired?”

“Nah,” grated Board, “I just can’t stand any more of this crap chat.”

London retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings

By JILL LAWLESS  |  THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE  |  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

LONDON — No artist captured the horror of the 20th century quite the way Francis Bacon did.

Bacon spent a lifetime painting the human body in a world ripped apart by the slaughter of two world wars and the Holocaust. More than 15 years after his death, a major new retrospective bound for London, Madrid and New York shows that his twisted forms, mottled flesh and screaming mouths have lost none of their power to shock. The show’s co-curator, Chris Stephens, says Bacon’s subject was "the tenderness and absurdity and fear and lustfulness of being alive."

"He was passionately atheist and saw that as the key thing about living in the 20th century," Stephens said Tuesday. "He set out to express what it is to be alive when God does not exist — (when) man is just an animal." The show opens Thursday at London’s Tate Britain gallery.

Irish-born of Protestant English stock, Bacon was for decades a fixture in the drinking dens of Soho, London’s red-light district. But he was also a prolific artist, working relentlessly in his tiny, chaotic studio. Stephens said the Tate exhibition includes "only the very greatest paintings from each period." Still, it is a big show, with 65 works arranged over 10 rooms.

Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, destroyed most of his early work, so there is little from his youthful stints in Paris and Berlin or from the years he spent in London in the 1930s. The show opens with 1940s paintings brimming with horror and absurdity. There are bestial human figures, contorted bodies and screaming mouths displaying jagged teeth.

Stephens said works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion — a triptych of writhing tubular figures on a flaming orange background, first displayed in 1945 — "became intimately connected to the opening of the concentration camps in Europe and the aftermath of the Second World War." Bacon became the poster boy of wartime horror and postwar anxiety.  Among the best-known early works in the show is Head VI, the first of dozens of paintings inspired by 17th-century artist Diego Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

"It’s a picture I have always been haunted by," Bacon once said, though he never saw it in person, only reproduced in books. In Bacon’s hands, the papal figure appears to be in agony, his purple robes topped by a distorted head and screaming mouth.

Bacon painted more than 40 of these screaming popes, which are among his most recognizable works. Stephens said that in Bacon’s hands, the papal figure becomes "an expression of fear and pain, and also aggression — and a kind of tenderness."

"The paintings invite the viewer to empathize," he said. "You feel their pain or fear. They’re not romantic, but they have a tenderness as well as a brutal frankness." Those mixed signals are typical of Bacon, a stout nonbeliever who was drawn repeatedly to religious icons and themes.

The most striking room in the exhibition displays three monumental triptychs depicting crucifixions. They are among his most disturbing work and include Three Studies for a Crucifixion, which shows figures hacked open like joints of beef.

Other rooms display portraits and muscular nudes — many modeled by his lover George Dyer and other friends — that are flayed and twisted almost beyond recognition. In one room, brooding portraits of black-suited politicians and salesmen are displayed alongside paintings of chimpanzees and baboons.

Bacon influenced many younger artists, including Lucien Freud, who shares a penchant for painting bruised and battered flesh, and Damien Hirst, whose pickled sharks and rotting cows’ heads display a similar fascination with corporeal decay.

On the eve of his centenary, Bacon’s reputation has never been higher, nor his works more valuable. In May, his Triptych, 1976 sold for $86 million in New York, a record for a postwar artwork. Hirst, who reportedly spent US$33 million last year on a Bacon self-portrait, said the older man was "a hero" when he was starting out as an artist.

"I was painting myself and I just made bad copies of Bacons," Hirst said Monday. "When I came to London, he was around and I saw him: It was the first sort of connection with a living artist that was a person; it wasn’t this mythical figure in some way that was unattainable."

While artistic fashions change — and the global art market wobbles amid the global credit crunch — Bacon’s reputation seems secure.

"What he does is look at the big questions of life," Stephens said. "So it’s kind of timeless."

The exhibition runs at London’s Tate Britain through Jan. 4, 2009. It goes to Madrid’s Prado from Feb. 3 to April 19, 2009 and then to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 18-Aug. 16, 2009.

ADRIAN SEARLE  |  ART & DESIGN  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  TUESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2008

For several reasons, Francis Bacon continues to be extremely popular. His art deals with human suffering, and timeless tropes of the human condition: solitude and isolation, anxiety and ennui, horror and tragedy. Bacon’s paintings have sex, violence and death in them — but then so do CSI and Miss Marple.

None of which would count for very much if the artist, almost entirely self-taught, didn’t have such a good nose for paint. His paintings look like real art with a capital A, and they have the gold frames to prove it. They have the touch and manner of great, painterly painting, fetishised, and all the more tantalising and unworldly, for being always shown, at the artist’s insistence, under glass.

Bacon learned by getting up close to paintings and observing their surfaces. He looked at how paint behaved both as a substance and as a visual surrogate for all the textures there are in the world: for cloth, grass, fur, porcelain, skin. And in Bacon’s case, one might say: for chrome, mattress ticking, vomit, meat.

Bacon not only borrowed from, but added to, the vocabulary of painting. He also tainted it, and made certain ways of approaching painting untouchable. Knowing this would, I think, have pleased him. He developed all sorts of interesting shorthand ways of describing things. He had a good sense from the first of what paintings should feel as well as look like, what the variety and drama of their substance and textures should be. So we find congealed masses of dried opaque colour next to the thinnest stains, whose edges are as controlled as a Barnett Newman. We find graphic outlines and contours filled-in with compound, and often contradictory gestures that somehow manage to pull themselves into a figure, even if it is a figure that is pulling itself apart. This sort of dichotomy makes Bacon exciting.

Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal. Bacon invariably fell back on something like illustration, for all that he disdained it. He overtly references Velázquez, Van Gogh and Ingres, and steals backgrounds from Mark Rothko and British colour-field paintings of the 1960s, about which he was always dismissive. He was a card. Maybe he thought no one would notice.

Bacon also depicts a modern world — modern furniture, men in suits, dangling lightbulbs, plumbing, fitted carpets and floor-to-ceiling curtains. His early career as an interior decorator informed his art. He had a keen feel for the psychology of a space. All this gave his art a sense of the timely, and lent it a kind of spooky realism. At the same time, Bacon was an almost entirely mannered and theatrical painter. Sometimes I think this is all that’s left for painting now anyway. But all his affectations seem at one with Bacon’s personality: his stylistic and technical tics are at one with brushing his teeth with Vim and dyeing his hair with shoe polish.

The cast of sexy low-life gangster boyfriends, louche dissolutes, Colony Room renegades and hard-drinking, hard-smoking Soho gorgons who people Bacon’s art also keep the paintings alive and vivid for us. These feature animals, captains of industry, dead politicians, Renaissance popes, Mick Jagger and Ian Botham, though the last two have wisely been left out of Tate Britain’s retrospective.

Bacon’s art also contains an entire repertoire of bruises, wounds, amputations done up with soiled bandages, Nazi armbands and other paraphernalia verging on cliché. There is much blood, and a great deal of alizarin crimson. Unconvincing jets of water struggle to clean all the muck away, though the flying spunk clings on like ectoplasm, unless it’s just a spatter of white paint that has fallen off a passing Miró. While we are at it, Bacon is very good at male feet and footwear, at sneakers and Hush Puppies. It is often the details — a doorknob or a wristwatch, teeth or toiletware — that make his paintings plausible and seductive.

The horrors of the 20th century echo through Bacon’s sparse interiors. A man swerves in his chair. There is death or a lover at the door. There, I’m at it now. Next I’ll be going on about Bacon’s Grand Guignol dramas, the encroaching blackness and intimations of mortality, the horror that lurks beneath the skin. Everyone else does. The catalogue to this retrospective has a screaming pope on the cover, unless it’s a pope at the dentist or a yawning pope, with Bacon’s name picked out in gold.

Protestant Irish-born 99 years ago, Bacon grew to be the most famous British painter of the latter half of the 20th century. Myth, rumour and anecdote about his life have come to dominate discussion of his art, in the same way that his art fed on the litter of medical illustrations, books of nature photography, cricket annuals, newspaper clippings and gay body-building comics that he tramped underfoot in his midden of a studio, now rebuilt in Dublin. All those published conversations with David Sylvester, the hilarious drunken TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, John Maybury’s biopic with Derek Jacobi, and the appearance of Bacon paintings in the credits to Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris — all these things add to the intensity of Bacon’s painted scream. Aaaaarghhhh.

But it is a hollow cry. Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement — yours as well as his — setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was. Bacon died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Velázquez will kill him there again, when the show comes to town — but then Velázquez kills everyone.

Devoting almost an entire room of Tate Britain to Bacon’s 1950s businessmen, with their Giacometti-derived faces looming from the Prussian blue darkness of their shadowy lairs, works very well. They evince the power of well-bred English mafiosi, with the right sort of animal carnality beneath their suits. This room is titled Apprehension. Others are called Zone, Animal, Crisis, and so on.

One room contains nothing but crucifixions, including Bacon’s terrific 1933 Crucifixion, a white and grey Picassoid figure, now in Damien Hirst’s Murderme collection. The contrast between the Tate’s 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and a second version of this triptych, painted in 1988 and installed in the vestibule outside the exhibition proper, could not be more painful. The 1988 painting, like almost all late Bacon, is a tired and unnecessary display of hackish technical virtuosity.

But there are paintings I miss here, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Painting, 1946, and the painting Two Figures, 1953, a frank depiction of two men fucking on a bed, often described as "wrestling"; these two works seem to me essential. Much else is not.

I have been looking at Bacon for 40 years now, after being an adolescent fan — the grisly aspects of his art appeal to the teenage mind - and I still ask myself if he was the real deal. When asked about the proliferation of fakes of his work, Picasso said that he sometimes faked Picassos, too. Bacon, an authentic fake, whose debt to Picasso was enormous, spent over half his career producing Bacons rather than paintings. "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends," he said — more than once.

He is the single greatest artist that Britain has produced in the hundred years that have passed since his birth in 1909. There is no great secret to his success. Francis Bacon is quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters. And you don’t need to study the intricacies of art history or peruse complex philosophies to see why. You just have to look at those shocking, disturbing and sumptuous canvases. This was the man who (to steal a line from Paul Valéry) aimed to evoke sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul.

Tate Britain’s Francis Bacon is a classic show. It moves chronologically — except in a few cases where works have been reshuffled to thematic galleries — through the artist’s career, examining its principle phases through a succession of mostly superlative paintings. From the first thickly encrusted canvases of a maverick who, coming late to painting after an abortive career as an interior designer (you can still spot its legacy in the strange tubular steel furniture) at the age of 35, it moves through all the most famous images — the popes screaming in their gilded prisons, the howling baboons, the wrestling copulators, the haunting triptychs, the Furies, the handgrenade faces — to the late but still unflinching meditations on the futility of life.

This is a show that invites us to consider Bacon’s place in the postwar pantheon. It coincides with two other shows that offer an illuminating context: Mark Rothko at Tate Modern represents all that Bacon struggled against as, stubbornly resisting the forces of abstraction that were flourishing in America, he sought a place for the figurative in a disillusioned postwar world. Damien Hirst, whose glitzy spectacular is now at Sotheby’s, is Bacon’s closest successor. At his most powerful he translates it into 3-D.

But 15 years after Bacon’s sudden death in Madrid, neither the artist nor the critic David Sylvester, that impassioned purveyor of his reputation to the public, is there to put the works in their usual biographical context. Does the legacy need the legend? Or can it stand alone?

Straightforward correlations between life and art are reductive, but Bacon’s work, more than that of any other artist of his generation, has been illuminated by his infamous life story. It was, after all, through his upbringing as the rebellious son of a racehorse trainer in Ireland, the decadence of Paris and Berlin, the drinking and gambling and sadomasochist homosexuality of his “gilded gutter life” in Soho that he discovered his subjects.

The man whom his former friend (their paths later diverged) Lucian Freud described as the wildest and wisest person he had never known wilfully flouted convention, working to make himself as unnatural as he possibly could, espousing a philosophy of futility with an almost religious fervour. “We are born and we die,” he said. “But in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.” These were the drives — the lusts, the despairs, the cruelties and the loves — that lent frenzied life to the carcass of a creature that was fundamentally no more than meat.

This was the philosophy that, passed down by Sylvester like an article of faith, became the single most powerful shaping force on our perception of his work. 

But now we are asked to reconsider. A few years ago, great bundles of overpainted newspaper clippings and sketches were discovered in Bacon’s studio. And yet this was the artist who supposedly (remember that ludicrous biopic) hurled fistfuls of paint, swiped handfuls of rags and pitched buckets of turpentine at his canvases, allowing his creations to grow, or destroy themselves with complete spontaneity. He had always said that he didn’t draw; that he didn’t want the brain to interfere with “the inevitability of an image”, that accident was essentially at the heart of his vision, that he wanted to trap its vitality with “the foam of the unconscious locked around it”.

The likes of Dan Farson, John Deakin and Tom Baker were regulars, but the real lustre was given to the Colony’s gloomy interior by the presence of Bacon. I was roundly insulted by its then proprietor, Ian Board. However, I got to drink champagne with Bacon, and to go with him to “celebrate” the opening of Janus, the S&M porn shop on Old Compton Street that is still trading to this day.

I heard ideas and opinions expressed in the Colony that quickened the pulse of my own iconoclasm: there were no prisoners taken at the Colony — for a start, there was no room to keep them.

With the benefit of hindsight, the truth is that the Colony Room was in decline long before I started drinking there. It existed, under its original owner, the self-styled “Queen of Soho”, Muriel Belcher, as an avant garde of the sexual liberation and social promiscuity that was to come. Here, all orientations, ages and classes mixed. Almost the only criterion for membership was that you weren’t boring.

So intense was the impression made on me by the Colony that 30 years later I’ve written a novella set in the club, Foie Humain, which is part of my new book Liver. The overall title gives the lie, for while some may say the Colony represents the old Soho that is being killed off by smoking bans and other sanitising measures, the truth is that there was another criterion for membership: the hardcore members were first and foremost raging alcoholics. Ian Board died of cirrhosis; I suspect Muriel Belcher did too.

Tate Britain (sponsored by Bank of America), until 4 January 2009

A loner who loved parties, an atheist obsessed with religious subjects, a generous

friend who turned venomous in a trice — Francis Bacon’s character had as many

facets as his tortured pictures, which fetch stratospheric sums.

Richard Cork paints a portrait of the artist he knew for over 20 years

RICHARD CORK  |  FEATURE  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

As a young undergraduate at Cambridge in 1967, I visited Francis Bacon’s new solo show at Old Bond Street’s Marlborough Gallery. Writing a review for Varsity, the student newspaper, I described how the visceral impact of the very first painting, hung opposite the entrance to the exhibition, made me “bump into the cash desk”. I concluded by declaring that Bacon was “the finest painter this country has produced since Turner”.

Today, Bacon is more likely to appear in the press for commanding dizzyingly high prices at auction. In May this year, his 1976 Triptych sold at Sotheby’s in New York for £43m, the highest price ever paid for a postwar work of art at auction. The buyer, it turned out, was Roman Abramovich. But publicity about prices and collectors obscures why Bacon really matters. Hence the welcome prospect of the important retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, which opens on September 11 and will redirect attention to his turbulent vision of the world.

I first visited Bacon in October 1971, just before a monumental survey of his paintings opened in Paris. I wanted to find out how he viewed his own achievement, and what the man behind the work was really like. But I also felt very uneasy. His paintings, with their violent and obsessive emphasis on screaming or struggling figures, led me to imagine that Bacon himself might be neurotic, withdrawn or explosive.

The first surprise was the ramshackle state of his house in Reece Mews, South Kensington. The doorbell did not work, but once I began knocking, he opened it and smiled, confessing that “I don’t actually want the bell to work, because if it did, I’d have to see all sorts of terrible people I don’t want to see at all”. We climbed the steep, narrow wooden stairs to his studio. “Rather like a ship, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

To my astonishment, Bacon was warm, communicative and hospitable. But the studio was a small, shabby affair, heaped with detritus. The walls were festooned with wild brushmarks, and the windows all sealed up. Only a skylight prevented the room from looking ominously dark, and across the passage there was an enormous cracked mirror. The sense of mortality was reinforced by the ghostly presence of William Blake’s glacial life mask, perched on the desk like a warning. But Bacon himself exuded energy, gesticulating forcefully while he talked. “What I’m after is a seizure of life,” he declared, before insisting that he wanted to “make things as raw as possible”. He aimed to paint a nose “with all the violence of a real nose”. But his vision of life was complex. At one extreme, he told me: “I’m essentially optimistic, always grateful when I wake up each morning and discover I’m alive.” At the other, he admitted that “even when one is in a strong sun, casting a black shadow, death is always with you”.

Still, there was nothing morbid about this first meeting. Bacon uncorked our first bottle of champagne soon after my arrival, and later on suggested lunch at his favourite Soho restaurant. He insisted that we go by Tube, and I noticed how much he relished the speed and the din. After vast quantities of wine Bacon insisted we move on to the Colony Room, a legendary Soho drinking hole. As he entered, the red-faced regulars stirred, blinked, swung round, raised their arms excitedly and cried out, “Frrrrancis!” Waving back, he at once ordered champagne for everyone there. News of his arrival must have spread fast, for the Colony soon filled up with garrulous and inebriated characters, including one of his gay East-End gangster friends who, broken-nosed and flush-cheeked, described in vivid detail how men have sex, and stared at me in a very pointed manner. It was time to leave.

Three days after my interview was published, Bacon sent me a letter, written vigorously in brilliant purple ink, the words large and boisterous: “I enjoyed enormously meeting you.” He then admitted he felt “sorry there was not more about painting” in the article, “but I know editors always feel that doesn’t interest anybody. Perhaps they are right”. His letter ended by inviting me to a party in Paris, at the Gare de Lyon restaurant – “do hope you can come”.

Bacon could never have guessed that his exhibition in Paris would be coupled with gruesome tragedy. I remember the shock generated by the death from a drugs overdose of his lover, George Dyer, just before the Grand Palais exhibition opened. At first, Bacon vehemently denied that it was suicide, but he later told a friend to “think of the timing – of course it was deliberate”. The powerful, elegiac paintings inspired by Dyer’s death showed just how profoundly his sudden loss affected Bacon.

However much he relished the company of fellow artists, as well as a bizarre range of bohemians, charlatans, liggers and cheap crooks, he saw himself essentially as a loner, a man apart. At the Colony Room I had seen him hold court, making outrageous comments with immense theatricality and almost bellowing with laughter as he bestowed his largesse on everyone around him. But he could, without any warning, become waspish and venomous. Totally amoral, he had no hesitation in terminating a long friendship with one crushing remark.

Graham Sutherland, who had helped Bacon break through to his mature vision as a painter, received the full, merciless force of Bacon’s disapproval over dinner at Wheeler’s one night. Unaware that Bacon’s mood had shifted with no warning from warm to icy, Sutherland leant forward with an unguarded smile and said: “I’ve been doing some portraits recently. I think they’re rather good. Have you seen any of them?” Bacon’s response was cutting. “Yes, very nice,” he said, “if you like the covers of Time magazine.” Sutherland and his wife, Kathy, left and never met Bacon again. From then on, Sutherland referred to his former friend as “the monster”.

But Bacon was also capable of immense generosity. Daniel Farson, the writer and television producer, used the word “quicksands” in an attempt to sum up their long, turbulent friendship. Despite Bacon taking up with one of his ex-partners, Farson paid tribute to his “rare ability to give one money without making one feel wretchedly in his debt”. “I am sorry things are not going well, ” Bacon wrote to Farson just before Christmas 1985, “but I am sure they will. I enclose £1,000. I hope it will be some help.”

I experienced Bacon’s gloomier side the next time we met, to record a BBC interview in 1985. Dressed in a black leather jacket, he seemed preoccupied with thoughts of mortality. “I’m far too old… I’ve got an infinite number of things I long to do.” Then he rallied: “Painting is fortunately an old man’s occupation.” He insisted that the Tate show should exclude his earliest work from the 1930s, little of which survived – “any I could get I destroyed”. Bacon believed his painting career had only properly begun in 1944, when he was 34.

His childhood, in Dublin and London, was plagued by asthma, so he had no conventional schooling. He never attended art school, and struggled at first. Only after serving in civil defence during the second world war did he break through to his own vision. Dealing with dead and dying victims during the Blitz pushed him into maturity, and in 1944 he suddenly produced a nightmarish masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Focusing on monstrously deformed hybrids, half-human and half-beast, howling their grief against a vehement orange background, it set the course for Bacon’s career. Why did he want to tackle such a religious subject? He had never warmed to “depressing” Christianity, and lost his faith entirely at the age of 17: “I remember seeing a lump of dog shit on the pavement and thought, ‘Well, there it is, that’s how our life is, unless you make something remarkable of it.’” But his images also convey a sense of grandeur. When I asked about this paradox, Bacon quietly said: “I think perhaps grandeur is to do with loneliness. People who think clearly and directly and complicatedly about things are nearly always lonely people. You’d need to do that, wouldn’t you, to have any quality at all.”

In January 1991, still fascinated by this complex man, I again met Bacon in Reece Mews. He warned me about his door bell. “It still doesn’t work,” he said, “so I’ll leave the front door open and you can make your own way in.” Mounting the precipitous stairs and holding on to a rope slung through hooks on the left wall, I wondered why an 81-year-old asthmatic should have to negotiate such a hazard.

Bacon was by now deeply involved with John Edwards, a young East Ender. But he had vanished on a trip to Bangkok, and Bacon was anxiously phoning someone about him when I arrived at the top of the stairs. Standing by the cooker in a small kitchen area, Bacon looked fit and agile for his age. Rows of fresh shirts had been laid out casually on the sofas; the mews looked like a student’s digs. “Earning vast amounts of money doesn’t affect me one bit,” he said.

“I’d be quite happy going back to the income I had as a young man.” He did not even have any paintings on the walls. “At one stage I bought a Sickert. But like a fool, I gave it to Lucian Freud.”

Soon enough we were drinking champagne out of glasses inscribed with the initials FB – “the gift of an admirer in Germany”, he explained with a grin. Were his paintings more admired there than in Britain, I wondered? “Oh, they don’t like my work here at all,” he said briskly. “Maybe it’s the savagery they find in it, or maybe it’s the homosexuality. I don’t go about shouting that I’m gay, but Aids has made it all much worse, you know. People are very, very odd about it. The other day a telephone engineer came round, so I offered him a drink. He looked at me strangely and said, ‘You’re gay, aren’t you?’ ”

Bacon was unable to stop worrying about Edwards. Weeks had passed without any communication, and he was worried Edwards might have been arrested. His anxiety reminded me of a mother’s concern for an errant son. Then a handsome young Spaniard dropped in. He was clearly close to Bacon and treated him with an almost parental firmness. A special-delivery letter arrived from the Tate, following up on a promise Bacon had made to give the gallery his recent version of the Crucifixion triptych. Now he seemed unsure and asked both of us whether he should go ahead with the gift. I said it would be a marvellous idea. But the Spaniard reminded him that he often made promises at convivial parties. Eventually Bacon did give the work to the Tate.

Bacon’s mood lifted by lunchtime. As we walked to a nearby Italian restaurant, his gait seemed positively jaunty. The laced-up gym shoes, fawn pullover and corduroy slacks only accentuated the inner vitality of a man whose enthusiasm was undimmed. During our time together we touched on T S Eliot, Velazquez, Picasso’s sculpture, Stanley Spencer, Buñuel, Soutine, W B Yeats, Proust and, to my surprise, Constable (“I love the freedom and vitality of his oil sketches at the V&A, and often go there just to see them”). He also talked wistfully about Eric Hall, an intelligent, sensitive civil servant who gave Bacon’s great breakthrough Crucifixion triptych of 1944 to the Tate. Over lunch, Bacon said he owed Hall an enormous amount: with his support, he had become a serious, single-minded painter. He obviously missed Hall a lot.

Later in 1991, I recorded an interview with Bacon for Radio 4. He was convivial, as ever, but also still moody. Seeing a new Gilbert & George book on his table, I asked him if he admired their work. “No, I think they’re terrible, but for some ridiculous reason a friend imagined that I liked them!” When it was time to begin, I enquired if he was ready. “Ready for what?” he replied. “Well,” I said, trying to hide my puzzlement, “your radio interview, of course.” There was a dramatic pause, then Bacon erupted. “Radio interview?” he echoed in an astonished voice, as if we had never discussed it. I reminded him that he had promised to do this. Another pause. “Well, yes I did,” he admitted reluctantly, before adding impatiently: “But what’s the point?” Finally, he relented.

“Ideally one would like to pick up a lump of paint and throw it at the canvas,” he declared memorably. But then: “I’d like a very, very ordered chaos.” Later, he insisted: “I can’t draw.” He also remarked: “There’s a natural feeling that the human race is not continuing because of homosexuality. In a sense, it’s a dead end.”

When I asked him if the urge to paint was still strong, he replied without any hesitation: “Yes, stronger. The nearer to death I am, the stronger it gets.” Why? “I’ve no idea, but I just feel more inventive. I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.” Did he fear death? “Fear? I’ve got nothing to fear about it, because, as I believe in absolutely nothing, I know that I just won’t exist.”

Those words came back to haunt me when, only months later, Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid, aged 82. He had his last wish honoured when his body was cremated with the barest formalities. His friend Ian Board said: “We can remember Francis without a service.” And he was right: Bacon’s unnerving art will not be forgotten as long as the paintings themselves survive. 

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain from September 11-January 4, 2009. Four acclaimed paperbacks of Richard Cork’s writings on modern artists, including Bacon, are published by Yale

                                  Bacon’s bonhomie belied the sombre themes of his art.

                                   Here he is caught in genial mood by Snowdon in 1963.   

Freud’s Bacon Portrait May Fetch £7 Million at Christie’s 

BY SCOTT REYBURN   |   BLOOMBERG   |   SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) – A Lucian Freud  portrait of Francis may fetch up to 7 million pounds ($12.4 million) in a London auction, Christie’s International said today.

The unfinished oil-on-canvas work, one of only two oil portraits Freud painted of his fellow artist, will be offered in the Oct. 19 contemporary-art sale, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement.

Freud started the 14-inch-square portrait in 1956. By the following year, only the face of the planned head-and-shoulders work was completed. Bacon left suddenly, most probably to pursue his lover Peter Lacy in Tangiers, said Christie’s.

"It’s a painting of the most important friendship in 20th- century British art,'' said Pilar Ordovas, Christie's head of contemporary art in London. "Although it’s incomplete, Bacon’s whole face and presence is in the canvas.''

The picture hadn’t been finished because Freud requires his sitter to be present at all times during the painting process, said Ordovas in a telephone interview.

"It’s essential to his working method, she said. "He thinks the sitter’s presence influences everything around them.''

The work is being offered from a family collection, having been acquired from a London gallery in 1972. It has rarely been seen in public, said Christie’s.

Anonymous Collector

"It’s a striking image,'' Stephen Ongpin, a London-based dealer in drawings, said in an interview. "It’s a portrait of one icon by another.'' Since February 2007, Ongpin has bought and bid on behalf of an anonymous private collector for several Freud paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions in London and New York, he said.

"The unfinished aspect of it appeals to me as a drawings specialist, but I don’t know whether it will to others who want to spend, say, 5 million pounds on a Freud,'' he said.

Freud painted Bacon on only two occasions. An earlier completed portrait, dating from 1952, was stolen in 1988 when loaned by the Tate to a Freud retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It has never been recovered. Since then, Freud has forbidden colour reproduction of the missing painting, said Christies.

Christie’s auction will coincide with a retrospective of Bacon’s work at Tate Britain, opening on Sept. 11.

In May, Freud became the most expensive living artist sold at auction when his 1995 canvas, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, fetched $33.6 million with fees at Christie’s, New York, said the saleroom result tracker Artnet.

Saving Bacon’s bacon

A tiny, grimy drinking den frequented by artists and poets from

Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst is under threat of closure.

Euan Ferguson calls for a reprieve

TV & SHOWBIZ  |  THE DAILY MAIL  |  SATURDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER, 2008

Reality and champagne lead directly to Francis Bacon, whose paintings now sell for tens of millions of pounds but who lived in a dump and painted 'because I like doing it. I happen to be a painter, that’s all'.

The violence of his images not only rocks the salerooms but is probably the greatest of all influences on young artists today, Damien Hirst most particularly. I'd known Francis for more than 20 years. It’s too long a story but eventually he agreed to do a film and he went totally flat-out.

We met at nine in the morning in his studio — now transported to Dublin as a museum. It was tiny. The walls were crusted with dabs of paint — his palette. There was space for one easel, a few stacks of canvases propped against the walls. Half-spent tubes of paint littered the floor like fag ends. It was a real problem fitting in the camera.

'It’s a dump,' said Francis in that rather mincing, upper-class accent he had grown into. 'Nobody else would want it but I can work here. And live here.' There was a narrow galley kitchen and one further room that served as a bedroom and living room, every bit as small as the studio. That was it.

On the kitchen table we found heaps of photographs, all black and white, of boxers, rugby players, athletes at full stretch, faces and limbs distorted violently. We intercut them with some of his paintings and suddenly saw Bacon the realist.

I asked him what his work meant to him. Rather shyly he unzipped a pocket in his leather jacket and read out a prepared statement. 'I'm not interested in fantasy,' he said, 'I’m interested in reality ... I want to be able to remake in another medium the reality of an image that excites me ... to create images that are a concentration of reality and a shorthand sensation.'

After filming in the studio we went around the corner to the Italian restaurant in which Francis took his meal of the day. He had insisted we all drink the Bollinger he had lined up beside the sink and at the restaurant we drank rough red wine. I had been on the wagon for a few weeks in Cumbria working on a novel. This was an alcoholic waterfall.

After the restaurant cleared, Francis and I pretended to have lunch and did the interview. We ate nothing but we drank on.

We got very drunk. It showed. We slurred. Once or twice we all but stopped. Yet things were said by Francis that were utterly true to the man I knew. The optimist who believed in nothing. The man who despised almost all art save that in ancient Egypt, the mixture of courtesy and bitchiness.

Later that afternoon in Muriel’s, the Soho drinking club heaving with alcohol-loving artists, he ripped open the lining of the leather jacket to produce a comb to primp his hair in the mirror. A red-faced gargoyle offered a derogatory comment. Francis replied: 'I never use makeup. Keep your make-up to yourself, you old cow.' And then he laid into various American painters.

We went on to Charlie Chester’s gambling club next to some blurred drinking hellhole. At some time or other I found my way home, my liver leaping up to my ribs like a salmon. I saw what we had done a few days later. We were not entirely a pretty sight and there was plenty to laugh at but what Francis said was true to the devil in him and I kept it in.

Still today art students like to say 'Cheerio Francis, cheerio Melvyn' and lift an imaginary glass of rough red.

Analysis: No room for voyeurs — this was a private party

RACHEL CAMPBELL JOHNSTON  |  THE TIMES  |  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

BY BRIAN SEWELL  |  ARTS & REVIEWS  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  FRIDAY 05 SEPTEMBER 2008

Francis Bacon died in April 1992, to the very day six months short of his 83rd birthday, and Tate Britain is about to open a centenary retrospective exhibition of his inseparable art and life. Long in the planning, this is to be shared with the cities of Madrid, where he died of the cumulative effects of pneumonia, asthma and a heart attack, and New York, where he had his most profitable success.

Inseparable art and life? For most of his many years it was simply not possible to speak or write of Bacon’s private life, whispered to be not merely disreputable but punishable, at least in his first half century, by sanctions almost as harsh as those for treason and murder. Though to critics of any sensibility it was obvious that this private life was largely the source of imagery and energy in his paintings and unquestionably crucial to his aesthetic development, there were others who — through overwhelming prominence on the Arts Council and our television sets, almost as celebrated as himself for their performances as his interpreters — gave us a Bacon distorted and bowdlerised. In their constructs he could discern little of himself, but in a sense he was content with their dissembling, for it kept him camouflaged and his private life remained largely private to the end. Though he knew them to be in error, his conviction was that in time their interpretations would be recognised as fraudulent, then discarded, letting his paintings at last speak for themselves — “painting is its own language and is not translatable into words”.

I first encountered Bacon’s paintings when I was a schoolboy and am convinced that at the Hanover Gallery, Erica Brausen, his first dealer until 1958, showed paintings that I have not seen since, either in the flesh or published in the many books produced by Johnnies-come-lately; this is true, too ,of an exhibition at the old Beaux-Arts Gallery, where Helen Lessore had his paintings in 1953. It is therefore with great interest that I await the publication of a catalogue raisonné. In London in the Fifties it was impossible not to be aware of Bacon; and after his transference to the Marlborough Gallery and the Tate’s first retrospective of his work in 1962, it seemed to me from then on that no matter where I went in Europe and America I ran into more or less the same travelling Bacon circus — in Chicago and New York, inTurin, Kassel, Mannheim, Zurich — and it became increasingly evident that the formerly slow-thinking and slow-painting painter, in abandoning the considered, deliberate and frequently revised terribilità of the early works, was at risk of becoming slick and habitual, even intellectually easier and emotionally shallower, and that the output of his pictures of ambitious scale was mightily increased, raised to some 20 canvases a year instead of two or three.

It was at this point of sudden but shrewdly engineered success that I first encountered Bacon. I was to know him for 30 years or so. Our acquaintance developed from an enquiry I had to make when a painting said to be by him was delivered to Christie’s and I doubted it. Bacon was not then the sort of painter whose work Christie’s liked to sell, but was nevertheless one whose work I thought they ought to sell — though not if it was a forgery, and I knew that in Milan a forger was producing, even at that early stage, almost plausible pastiches. As Bacon answered neither telephone nor letter, I risked knocking on his door on my way home, was kindly, if briefly, received, and the picture’s authenticity denied. Milanese forgeries again came into play in the later Sixties (a small London dealer was importing them, their quality menacingly improved), and again I had reason to see Bacon, the acquaintance cementing to the point where Bacon felt that he could, for example (since I lived only half a mile away), telephone at crack of dawn and ask me to drive his lover, John Edwards, disablingly hungover, to a family conclave in Long Melford.

For me the most fruitful period of our relationship began when Harrods opened a juice bar in a corner of the food department. Thither went Francis almost every morning and if our paths crossed I joined him for his breakfast. Chipper in mood, no matter how little sleep he’d had, spruce in clothes a shade too bright to be described as dapper, his cosmetic adjustments perfect, he often carried a brown paper bag containing a kohlrabi or other exotic vegetable just bought from the family greengrocer on the corner of Glendower Place; this the girls behind the bar then reduced to a slush that could be added to more common brews. Asked why, he told me that he liked to fart and to this end would drink any foul concoction. And there at the juice bar he held court, with me the only courtier, confiding his contempt of Rothko, De Kooning and Matisse, and of such panjandrums as John Berger, who early expressed his loathing, and David Sylvester and Melvyn Bragg, his notorious apologists.

All this was long before I began to earn my living as a critic and, naïve, as I neither took notes nor made recordings to publish as a precious interview, I recall only disconnected jottings, as it were, with the occasional interjections of let wind. I formed the opinion that we spoke of two honest Bacons, with an unmentionable commercial third Bacon waiting in the wings; the first was the kaleidoscopic, fragmentary Bacon, wit, gossip, gambler, drinker, traveller, willing supporter of such unlikely young painters as Anthony Zych and Michael Leventis, social performer and frivolous lost soul, and, in strong contrast, Bacon the found soul, the melancholy painter, utterly intense, the one a relief from the other, though the onlooker could never quite tell which of these lives he found the more unbearable. The third Bacon was the painter preparing for the next commercial exhibition, the repetitious Bacon, the Bacon who had done it all before, the idea and image stale, the clashing fields of colour too much assured with practice, the drawing and construction occasionally so casual as to deprive the painting of any intended significance. The third Bacon resorted to tricks and cyphers without meaning in the early Eighties to flat arrow-heads in black or white or red that seem to act as jarring indicators (but of what?), and in the late Sixties to splashes of dense white paint strung across the surface.

In his Study of George Dyer in a Mirror, a portrait that is as carefully calculated as could be in terms of space and composition, in the suggestion of movement, in the delicate fusion of oils and water-based pastels that give us the immaculate surface, caressed with the fingertips as colour is rubbed into the texture of the canvas, we have the perfect example of this assault, disruptive, assertive, violent, irrelevant, futile, an act of vandalism, an ejaculation in the face. This was in 1968, exactly a decade after telling his close friend Daniel Farson that the only interesting thing about splashes of paint on the canvases of Jackson Pollock was that they had “more vitality than the inanities of academic art”. But this picture is neither academic nor inane; in destroying his unfinishable canvases with slashes of the knife he has my sympathy, but in smirching this fine finished painting he played the deplorable iconoclast.

acon had no formal training as a painter and for some time worked as an interior decorator, maker of furniture and, occasionally, as a gentleman’s gentleman. Little is known of his early paintings, rejected by English Surrealists (whom he would otherwise have joined) as not sufficiently surreal, and he destroyed most of them before exhibiting, in 1945, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, one of the disappointingly few works in the permanent collection of Tate Britain. With this, a work as important to Bacon as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Picasso, he emerged as a painter of pessimistic imagination, his images coldly barbaric, in full command of the techniques of oil painting, to assault the nervous system of the orthodox and frivolous art world of post-war Europe. Orthodoxy capitulated and Bacon became the most exhibited of British painters. Successive directors of the Tate described him as Europe’s or Britain’s greatest living painter, though none in America or any other continent was greater.

Bacon continued the line of ancestral European painting, the descent from the grandeurs of the High Italian Renaissance and the bloodstained violence of its German equivalents — two years before his death he went again to Colmar to Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece — when all about him the aesthetic nonsense of abstraction and a host of pretentious transitory fashions were the norm. He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir, running with blood. He took the mouth, made it obscenely genital and used it exclusively as a feature of violent expression, deafening us with its screams. He took the portrait and, refusing to chart features or delve into character, became the harsh interrogator provoking the betrayal of body language, the man outside the ring of light, the man with the lash and cigarette butt, the man with his finger on the button that sends fierce currents into the electrodes buried in the private recesses of the body and the mind. His prisoners, presidents popes and lovers squirm. All are, in a sense, himself. To women, however, always on a smaller scale, he applied only the torments of his style.

He was capable of an extraordinary fusion of intellectual and painterly devices that are spatial, flat, abstract and narrative, the logic of their complexities never failing even at the end — not for Bacon the empirical incompetence of Picasso’s dotage, the last years as an idiot in the antechamber of death. He used the image of the trap, the cage, the cell, the X-ray field and the heavy fall of light from the single naked bulb to imprison and torment his subjects, to distil and heighten the violence of sexual contiguity in his coupling nudes, and to assault complacent senses with graceless nakedness on the lavatory pan and vomit in the washbasin. His insistence that his pictures be protected with plate glass instead of varnish deliberately added a disturbing layer of illusion when the visitor inevitably found his own reflection between himself and the subject within, seeming to play some part in the sordid drama, spectator become participant.

Bacon and his images were nourished by his extensive knowledge of paintings by old masters, Cézanne, Degas and Picasso, by his interest in the subconscious development of images, his enquiry into the quasi-supernatural field of the emanations, auras and energies of his subjects, by his interest in crime, violence and disease, by his collection of the horrible in medical publications. He took the vile, the shudderingly visceral, the sexually and politically obscene, and so lifted them with paint that we can contemplate ferociously profane images of sodomy and torment, cruelty and despair, even the vulgar commonplaces of the lavatory, and perceive in them an inheritance from the great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power, the classical pantheon of ancient gods, the Christian pantheon of martyrs. Titian, Rembrandt and Velázquez, were they to beg entry to this latest exhibition, might not care for Bacon’s personal pantheon, but I have no doubt that they would recognise kinship in his mastery of paint and the profound pessimism of his images. As an atheist and as an artist for whom money was at least as important as the message of his work, far too often letting loose the second rate (as well as farts), he was the perfect mirror of the spirit of his age.

   Man of contrasts: Bacon in 1974. His famously frivolous

   wit masked the intense melancholy of much of his work

Francis Bacon opens at Tate Britain (020 7887 8888, on 11 September and runs until 4 January 2009.

Open Sat-Thurs 10am to 5.40pm,

last admission 5pm; late night Fri, last admission 9pm. Tickets £12.50 (concessions available).

                Inside the box ... Francis Bacon   Photograph: Jane Bown

The Bacon–Marlborough Dispute:

A Case Study in Mediation

THE CPA IN MEDIATION AND ARBITRATION

BY ALIDA CAMP  |  THE CPA JOURNAL  |  VOLUME 73  |  NUMBER 9  |  SEPTEMBER 2008   

The recent dispute between the Estate of Francis Bacon, one of England’s most important 20th-century painters, and the prestigious London gallery Marlborough Fine Art—described in the British press as “one of the most bitter art wrangles in decades” and “the most sensational legal spat the British art world has seen”—illustrates the limitations of traditional dispute resolution through litigation. Marlborough represented Bacon from 1954 until his death in 1992, and possessed exclusive rights to sell and reproduce Bacon’s work.

The Estate of Francis Bacon brought suit against Marlborough alleging breach of fiduciary duty, failure to account, and even blackmail. Significant discovery and motion practice ensued. Counsel for the parties anticipated a 12-week trial. Litigation cost estimates were in the millions of pounds. Success would have meant as much as £100 million for Bacon’s estate. In addition, English law generally requires the loser to pay the victor’s legal expenses. The case abruptly settled days before the trial was to begin.

Attorneys for Bacon’s estate announced, in their press release following the settlement, “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.”

Although the settlement resolved some issues between the parties, litigation left behind a damaged relationship, much negative publicity, a number of still unresolved issues, and legal fees in the neighborhood of £100 million. Had the parties instead engaged in mediation, the results might have been dramatically different.

A Role for Mediation

Mediation involves a neutral third party—the mediator—and allows the parties to resolve their dispute directly. Unlike litigation, where a third-party factfinder reaches a decision regarding the past conduct of the parties and the remedy, if any, to be applied, mediation requires the parties to take responsibility for their dispute’s outcome. They work with a mediator, who facilitates their negotiations and analyzes their situation and the potential court results. The costs, not just financial, of proceeding in court, and the benefits, also not just financial, of an amicable resolution, are also investigated. While attorneys frequently participate in mediations as advocates, the true responsibility for participation and settlement lies with their clients, the parties to the dispute.

By working collaboratively to reach a joint agreement, rather than maintaining adversarial positions until a “winner” is selected, mediation enables the parties to maintain their relationship, or even to restore a damaged one. Unlike litigation, in which the parties’ goal is to destroy credibility and refute each other’s evidence, mediation is conducted in a cooperative environment.

If they had used mediation, both the Bacon estate and Marlborough would have worked together, with their mediator’s and counsels’ help, to reach a solution. By not using mediation, the result was that “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” (Art Newspaper, issue 123). Rather than the damaged relationship that arises when each side is attacking the other to establish its own veracity, an improved relationship often results during mediation precisely because the parties work together. Trust is essential to the negotiation process. Restoration of trust that has been harmed through events up to and including litigation can and often does assist in rebuilding the relationship. The parties can choose to continue their business relationship, enter into a new agreement, or terminate their relationship more amicably

Mediation focuses on the parties’ underlying interests—what is truly important to them—rather than their positions, the strategic posturing of their litigation stances. Addressing their true interests helps them understand each other and reach a mutually acceptable solution. After all, while each side may want to maximize its final position, in the end it is the other’s willing consent that is essential for effective agreement. Any agreement must address the concerns of both sides.

In the Bacon–Marlborough dispute, had mediation occurred early on, each side would have benefited from a more constructive relationship. In particular, as Art Newspaper noted, the Bacon estate might have benefited from open access to Marlborough’s records of the artist’s work, while Marlborough might have been granted rights to create and offer for sale Bacon reproductions. Unfortunately, the broken relationship resulting from costly and drawn-out litigation now makes it difficult if not impossible for them ever to reach an amicable agreement on these, or any other, points.

Mediation enables parties to reach business solutions by allowing them to make any legal agreement to which they concur. Moreover, they are free to address and resolve all issues, including those not necessarily involved in a particular legal proceeding. Creativity counts in this process. Parties often look to their future, structuring a solution to include nonmonetary business agreements that depend on their continuing relationship. They may even enter into a broader or longer-term agreement than the one in dispute. The goal is to create a win-win solution, rather than litigation’s win-lose resolution

The Bacon estate and Marlborough might have been able to reach an agreement covering not only the contested legal issues but also any other outstanding issues, such as ongoing access and reproduction rights. Mediation would not, however, establish the public precedent that a legal decision can. Some commentators noted that a judicial decision in the Bacon–Marlborough case could “bring about some much-needed change [in the balance of power between artist and well-established gallery].” With a mediated resolution, there would have been no impact on similar artist–gallery relationships

Apart from the foregoing, mediation in the Bacon–Marlborough case likely would have resulted in substantial savings of time and legal fees. Mediation is often a relatively short process, with disputes often resolved in a day or two. Even where they are resolved at the end of a series (not necessarily contiguous) of mediation sessions, the cost savings are significant. While the Bacon–Marlborough dispute’s complexities might have precluded a quick mediated settlement, mediation almost certainly would have resulted in significant savings of time and expense. After the Bacon–Marlborough case settled, each party indicated relief that it did so and that they could get back to their respective work. The Executor of the Bacon estate, Professor Brian Clarke, noted that “[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.” Marlborough stated that it was “glad that we can ... get on with our real business, which is promoting the work of some of the world’s finest artists.” Mediation would have enabled each party to get on that much sooner.

To illustrate, the substantial delay and expense of document production, depositions, motions, and hearings can often be avoided altogether. Even where the parties desire an exchange of information, they can work together to narrow their requests, thereby minimizing the attendant expenses of discovery and discovery-related disputes. The estimated £100 million of legal expenses during the Bacon–Marlborough litigation would almost certainly have been reduced had the parties chosen to mediate. In particular, the Bacon estate might not have been forced to sell some of its paintings to meet its legal fees.

Even where mediation does not produce quick results, settlement of the ensuing litigation is often facilitated by an earlier mediation process. This is largely because issues can be narrowed, facts can be agreed upon, and the parties can begin to think about successful resolution. In any event, even if mediation efforts do not result in resolution, the parties have not been prejudiced in their right to pursue litigation to the same extent as if no mediation had occurred.

Mediation is equally effective in many types of disputes, even prior to the initiation of an adversarial proceeding. For example, mediation can be used to resolve fee disputes between accountants and their clients, professional malpractice disputes, and disputes pertaining to the scope of services for which an advisor has been engaged. The significant benefits of mediation warrant that parties and their attorneys consider mediation as an early alternative to the lengthy, expensive, and adversarial litigation process.

Bringing home a Bacon

London Evening Standard  03 September 2008

 COMING SOON — ART

Get a grip — Bacon’s back in town

Critic Charles Darwent looks ahead to exhibitions

which shed light on modern masters

CHARLES DARWENT | THE CRITICS | THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | 31 AUGUST 2008

There may be a bigger Big Three of modern art than Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol, but I can’t instantly think who they’d be. Which is good news for anyone visiting London in the next few months, all members of the unholy trinity having monograph shows there.

Bacon (pictured) swore that his taste for sado-masochism was piqued by a horsewhipping administered by his father on catching the young Francis in flagrante with a stable boy. You can see the outcome of this imaginative parenting at Tate Britain’s Bacon centenary (020-7887 8888, 11 September to 4 Jan 2009).

While the rest of the world was going abstract in the 1940s, Bacon was doggedly (and brutally) figurative, painting men like sides of beef and vice versa.

Bacon show for Zhukova and Abramovich’s CCC Moscow

Having set a record for the artist at auction, the collectors put the art to work

SARAH THORNTON  |  THE ART NEWSPAPER  |  SUNDAY 31 AUGUST 2008   

CCC Moscow, the new gallery set up by Daria Zhukova, girlfriend of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, will host a Francis Bacon exhibition in 2010.

Entitled “Death Shadowing Life: Francis Bacon: The Late Paintings, 1971-92”, it will be curated by Martin Harrison, author of the artist’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné and will travel to the Hermitage in St Petersburg. The forthcoming show may explain why Mr Abramovich paid $86m on 14 May for a 1976 triptych at Sotheby’s New York—setting a new auction record for a post-war work of art.

To coincide with the opening of a major Bacon show at Tate Britain this month, we publish an in-depth investigation into the market for the artist and reveal other collectors including Tottenham Hotspur majority owner Joe C. Lewis and artists Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst.

Horrible!

When Francis Bacon died in 1992, he went out on a high note of fame.

So is a further retrospective deserved?

Absolutely, says Robert Hughes.

It reveals more about the artist and his motivations than any other

MICHAEL GLOVER   |   ARTS & BOOKS REVIEW   |   THE INDEPENDENT   |   FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 2008

By this time, and displaying an uncanny ability to identify women who would prove useful, Bacon had discovered Muriel Belcher. Or rather she had discovered him. Muriel, a wildly extrovert lesbian of Jewish descent, had opened the Colony Room in Soho in 1948. The idea was to provide a place for artists to drink during the desert afternoon hours when pubs were closed. Muriel quickly saw that the puckish, sandy-haired Bacon was exactly the kind of protégé who could be good for business. She offered him £10 a week and free drinks to bring his high-spending artist friends up the tatty stairs and into the cupboard-sized bar. It was here, for the next 30 years, that Bacon would hold court to a clique of boozed-up artists including Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach. As he grew ever more successful (by the end of his life his paintings were selling for multiples of millions), the always-generous Bacon was happy to stand drinks for the entire club, often to his favourite rallying cry of 'champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends'.

But if Bacon was the main turn at the Colony Room, it was Belcher who remained the ringmaster. Calling all her male customers, whether gay or straight, Miss, she could also be heard to shout, 'Get your bead bag out, Lottie,' if she thought that a regular was slow to stand a round of drinks. If she really liked you she’d call you 'c-y' or maybe 'Mary'.

Bacon painted Belcher several times. While not conventionally beautiful, her handsome features provided the kind of strong bone structure that always inspired him. At a time when fashionable abstraction held sway in painting, Bacon persevered in his enduring fascination with the human form, albeit stripped down to its most grotesque elements. His most famous portrait of Belcher is from 1966, her horribly distorted face a sinewy mixture of reds and whitey-greys.

 Women were allowed to drink at the Colony Room, which is how two of its habitués ended up becoming regular Bacon models. Henrietta Moraes (born Audrey Abbott in 1931) was blessed with the kind of looks that excited men, whether for sex or a session in the studio. Unlike Lucian Freud, who was Moraes’ sometime lover, Bacon seldom drew his sitters straight from life. Instead he relied on his friend John Deakin, another Colony regular, to take photographs of his intended subjects. Although Deakin was a Vogue photographer, he wasn’t above making extra income on the side: Moraes was appalled to learn later that he’d been selling his nude studies of her to sailors for 10 shillings. Bacon’s 1966 portrait of Moraes, based on Deakin’s photographs, shows her magnificent form curled around itself in ways that, while anatomically impossible, seem to extend our understanding of what the human body can be.

John Russell, journalist, art reviewer, art historian, exhibition organiser, writer and man of letters, wrote more than 20 books and exhibition catalogues and contributed essays to several more. He organised five major exhibitions and wrote many thousands of articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, covering literature, music, drama, architecture, travel and history, besides his main topic, art — art of whatever sort or period.

He became a regular contributor to The Sunday Times in 1945 (he was recommended by Ian Fleming) embarking in 1949 on a 25-year stint as its art critic, until 1974 — when he launched with renewed vigour on a career in America (where there were still art heroes) as an art critic for The New York Times; becoming the newspaper’s chief art critic in 1982, and critic emeritus in 1990. From 1957 he also served as the London representative for the American magazines Art News and Art in America.

In another age Russell might well have been a diplomat who wrote elegant belles lettres in his abundant spare time; diplomacy was always his strong point publicly, if not always in his private life. As it was, he was writing in an era when Europe was re-learning its past and re-establishing a culture of the present — with Britain needing to catch up as much as any. It was a time for general mental expansion and this suited Russell, who was more interested in the mind behind the art than in evaluating the image. He was an art critic who seldom criticised. For him, writing about art was writing about life in its entirety

It was perhaps his stutter that — as with some other notable writers — spurred him to that extra touch of elegant fluency, the choice phrase displayed, the magisterial (one of his favourite words) diction of the thinking man and patrician elder statesman of art. A reviewer of his survey of modern art published in Britain in 1981 commented that there were for Russell “no failures, no frauds, no heretics”. He would now be designated “Establishment”. Rather, he was a civilised and erudite man, at ease in at least three European literatures and most of the arts, addressing himself to the reader as to another equally civilised but less well-informed person, and assuming that a consensus of professional admiration indicated that there was something in an artist worth admiring and elucidating. He would pass diplomatically over controversy or the dark recesses; one of his fellow writers christened him “Our Man in Bohemia”.

He was not incapable of being acerbic or waspish — for instance in his assessment of the painter Christopher Wood, whom he could see only as an immoral careerist. He was tentative at first in his assessments of young contemporary artists; but sent a fiercely supportive letter from New York at the time of the hullaballoo over the Tate Gallery’s purchase of Carl Andre’s bricks. He championed early in their careers a number of artists who have since entered the modern canon, including David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin and Antony Caro.

On arrival in New York in 1974 the zest and tempo of his writing accelerated; he felt more inquisitive, more alert, and vastly more energetic and was encouraged by his newspaper to cover the widest field. The level of encouragement and support, he said, was a hundred times higher than he had previously received.

John Russell was born in 1919 in Fleet, Hampshire, and educated at St Paul’s School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he edited Cherwell magazine. On coming down from university, he joined the staff of the Tate Gallery in June 1940 as an unpaid assistant. Two days later the building was seriously damaged by enemy bombing. Russell was evacuated with a number of art historical treasures to Worcestershire. Call-up diverted him into the Ministry of Information from 1941 to 1943, and then into the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty from 1943 to 1946. However, the war did not hinder an early start to his writing career: by 23 he had already published for the famous Batsford series of evocative British themes, a nostalgic and richly ecclesiological Shakespeare’s Country in the emotive and perilous year of 1942, and a lightly argued British Portrait Painters in 1945.

It was during these years that he began to write art and drama reviews, becoming a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and to the magazines Cornhill, Horizon (then edited by Cyril Connolly) and The Listener. When he took up regular art reviewing, he turned his pen, as a balance to the miniaturisation of press comment, to longer pieces. His stylish book on the writer Logan Pearsall Smith appeared in 1950; in the same year, an unenthusiastic travel book on Switzerland; in 1956, a respectful account of the conductor Erich Kleiber; and in 1960 he wrote romantically of Paris (and informatively of its architecture) — a book that survived to be enlarged and reprinted in 1983.

Then in 1965 Russell reverted to writing substantially on the visual arts, with his perceptive book on Seurat (the best received of all his books, and which remains in print). Then in the same year came the first “coffee table” luxury tome on the contemporary art scene in Britain, Private View, in collaboration with the gallery director Bryan Robertson and with Lord Snowdon’s photographs excellently printed. With his 80 artists written up as a lengthy addendum to its glimpses of the personalities of the art scene and their activities, this has become a document of the times, typically ignoring all the art scene except the West End oriented; it would be described nowadays as “seriously fashionable”

This was a busy period for Russell, for he also organised the Arts Council exhibitions of Modigliani in 1964, Rouault in 1966, Balthus in 1968 (to the distaste of some) and Pop Art — in collaboration with his friend Suzi Gablik — in 1969; this was accompanied by their misleadingly titled book Pop Art Redefined. He continued to write monographs at the same time, at the rate of one or more a year: a eulogistic Max Ernst in 1967, a serviceable Henry Moore in 1968, an extended introduction to Ben Nicholson in 1969, The World of Matisse in 1970, a respectful Francis Bacon in 1971, and in the same year a book on Vuillard that accompanied the exhibition of that artist, which Russell organised and which was seen in Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco.

In 1970 Russell was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Book of the Month Club to produce a survey of modern art, which was published in 1974-75 in 12 monthly parts by mail subscription only. This was reworked and published in book form in 1981 as The Meanings of Modern Art; it aimed to be more a history of modern ideas than of modern art alone, in keeping with its author’s belief that “the history of art, if properly set out, is the history of everything”. The book was praised as the best of its kind by Sir Kenneth Clark, though sniped at by combative critics of the day. The College Art Association of America gave Russell the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, citing his enormous erudition and subtle, sprightly prose. In 1989 an anthology of excerpts from his writings was published under the title Reading Russell.

The 53 essays in it reflect the vitality and range of Russell’s writing after he left Britain for America. A rich tapestry of quotation, reference, reading and reminiscence, by a European who found himself in a land of lively fellow immigrants and amid an appreciative audience, it is the summation of a happy life — of a man forever grateful for the good fortune of being allowed to “conduct his education in public” as journalists do; and he quotes John Updike as expressing his own attitude: “Better to praise and share than blame and ban.”

John Russell, Art Critic for The Times, Dies at 89

BY WILLIAM GRIMES   |   THE NEW YORK  TIMES   |   SUNDAY, 24 AUGUST, 2008 

John Russell, who contributed elegant, erudite art criticism for more than a half-century to The Sunday Times of London and The New York Times, where he was chief art critic from 1982 to 1990, and who helped bring a generation of postwar British artists to international attention, died on Saturday. He was 89 and lived in Manhattan.

His wife, Rosamond Bernier, said he died at a hospice in the Bronx.

Mr. Russell, an Englishman, joined The New York Times in the mid-1970s after contributing occasional reviews from London. He won a devoted readership for his literate style, his capacity for passionate appreciation and the breadth of his interests. “Reading Russell,” a collection of his journalism published in 1989, included essays on Pushkin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Beatrix Potter, the many meanings of luggage and the beauties of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.

Most of his prodigious output was devoted to art, notably his monographs on Seurat, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Max Ernst and the multivolume series The Meanings of Modern Art. But he also produced travel books on Switzerland, London and Paris, a biography of the conductor Erich Kleiber and several highly regarded translations of modern French novelists.

“Working for The New York Times, I found myself writing about art, as had already been agreed,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “But I also found myself writing about the centenary of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the bicentenary of the Battle of Lexington, the special properties of the colour green, and the fact that wisteria rhymes with hysteria.”

In 1984 editors at the newspaper sent Mr. Russell to offer a different perspective on the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

Effortless, high-volume production was his hallmark. Strolling into the old Times building on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, attired in a boldly checked jacket and violently contrasting red socks, he would say a few hellos to colleagues sweating over deadlines, lightly apply his fingers to the keyboard and rise, perhaps an hour later, having composed a feature-length article with not a word out of place.

By temperament an old-fashioned man of letters, Mr. Russell was an appreciator who liked to share his enthusiasms; as a consequence some readers and fellow critics found him too genteel.

“I do not see my role as primarily punitive,” he wrote in “Reading Russell.” “There are artists whose work I dread to see yet again, dance-dramas that in my view have set back the American psyche several hundred years, composers whose names drive me from the concert hall, authors whose books I shall never willingly reopen. But it has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing.”

John Russell was born in 1919 in Fleet, near London. He was reared by his grandparents in Strawberry Hill, a London suburb, and attended St. Paul’s School in London. There, he recalled, he impressed his headmaster, who, befuddled by the term “Surrealism,” asked a classroom of students if anyone could explain it. The future art critic raised his hand, went off to write an essay and, after handing it in, was told the next day, “Russell, you can make a living doing this.”

After studying philosophy, politics and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, Mr. Russell began working as an unpaid intern at the Tate Gallery in 1940. Soon after he started, the Germans bombed the museum. Museum employees were relocated to Worcestershire, where Mr. Russell wrote his first book, Shakespeare’s Country, at the age of 23. In 1944 he published his first art book, “British Portrait Painters.”

During the war Mr. Russell worked for the Naval Intelligence division of the Admiralty. He also began writing for Peter Quennell’s Cornhill Magazine and Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, encouraged by the eccentric American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, whose sharp eye for rising talent had already spotted the art historian Kenneth Clark and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Mr. Russell, he wrote to a friend, “is a most accomplished journalist, but I think will turn out a fine critic as well.”

And so he did. Ian Fleming, who had also served in Naval Intelligence, put in the good word to the editors of The Sunday Times of London, and Mr. Russell began reviewing books, plays and musical performances.  

In 1945 he married Alexandrine Apponyi. The marriage ended in divorce in 1950. Their daughter, Lavinia Grimshaw of London, survives him, along with Ms. Bernier, two grandchildren and a great-grandson. A second marriage, to Vera Poliakoff, also ended in divorce, in 1971.

In 1950 Mr. Russell was pressed into service as art critic for The Sunday Times after the incumbent was summarily fired for criticizing an exhibition at the Royal Academy.

It was a pivotal moment for British art, one that Mr. Russell influenced in several ways. Unusually open to new talent, he threw his considerable weight behind emerging artists like Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Howard Hodgkin, R. B. Kitaj and Bridget Riley, not only in the pages of The Sunday Times but also in prefaces to exhibition catalogues.

“When I first began writing, my aims as a critic were simple,” he told The Art Newspaper in 1999. “I wanted to persuade people to go and see things that I myself liked.”

The art historian John Richardson said that Mr. Russell “did a huge amount for English art at the time,” adding, “He helped English art climb out of its pre-1939 provincialism and put it on the map.”

A reflection of his taste and influence can be seen in the book Private View, a comprehensive survey of the British scene in the mid-1960s, written with Bryan Robertson and featuring photographs by Lord Snowdon.

In addition to promoting new British art, Mr. Russell organized exhibitions devoted to Modigliani, Rouault and Balthus at the Tate, and, with Suzi Gablik, a survey of Pop Art at the Hayward Gallery in London.

In 1974 Mr. Russell was brought to New York by Hilton Kramer, chief art critic of The New York Times. The invitation could not have been more opportune. Mr. Russell was eager to join Ms. Bernier, whom he had first met, and been smitten by, in the mid-1950s when she commissioned him to write for L’Oeil, the Paris-based arts magazine she founded with Georges Bernier, her husband at the time. For years he worshiped from afar. After she and her husband separated, the distance narrowed, and in 1975 the two married.

The wedding was a lavish production. Held in Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., it was attended by the likes of Aaton, Pierre Matisse and Stephen Spender and set to music composed for the occasion by Leonard Bernstein. At the time Ms. Bernier was well on her way to establishing a new career as a writer and as a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At The Times Mr. Russell’s fluent, generally laudatory reviews offered a stark contrast to Mr. Kramer’s more combative style.

“He was never mean-spirited, dismissive or brutal,” Mr. Richardson said of Mr. Russell, recalling a deft instance in London in which Mr. Russell was called upon to review the work of a well-born but talentless English painter. “He got around it by saying, ‘We have all wondered what the painting of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited might have looked like, and now we know with absolute precision.’ ”

At his best Mr. Russell exhibited sinew and vigour in his appraisals. The art that mattered to him mattered in a highly personal way, and there was something almost tactile in the way he traced the contours of an artist like Bacon or Freud.

“Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image,” he wrote in a characteristic passage in Francis Bacon, a monograph first published in 1971. “The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting.”

If cornered, Mr. Russell could draw his sword and use it to lethal effect. His review of a show by the sculptor Beverly Pepper in 1987 remains a model of take-no-prisoners criticism. “In its cumulative effect this may well, in fact, be one of the most debilitating, hyped-up and deeply offensive exhibitions of the postwar era,” he wrote in The Times. “This is not because the work is ‘bad,’ but because it does not reach that level of achievement at which the words ‘bad’ and ‘good’ have any meaning.”

The slashing attack, however, he generally left to others. Art, for him, remained a glorious love affair and a lifelong adventure. “When art is made new, we are made new with it,” he wrote in the first volume of The Meanings of Modern Art. “We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.”

Francis Bacon: chronology

The Real Francis Bacon

The power and the passion

        Francis Bacon, one of our greatest modern artists, was a man of bewildering contradictions–he made high art but embraced lowlife;

he could be disarmingly kind but utterly cruel; he had loving affairs but craved casual, anonymous sex.  On the eve of a major exhibition,

Peter Conrad talks to Bacon's friends to find out what he was really like and how his fascinating life fuelled his brutal, transcendent art

PETER CONRAD  |  COVER STORY  |  ART  |  THE OBSERVER REVIEW  |  SUNDAY AUGUST 10 2008

I saw Francis Bacon once in passing 30 years ago, on the gilt and velvet staircase at the Royal Opera House. Even if I hadn’t known who he was – the most celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his voluptuous taste for pain – I would have found him unforgettable.

His face was a painting. Boot polish had been applied to his teased hair, with a quizzical wisp of a fringe fixed over his forehead; a thick application of make-up gave his cheeks a feverish heat. His eyes kept watch from inside asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted. His smile showed off teeth scoured with Vim, and inside his oddly circular mouth his tongue darted as if it were a lizard jabbing at its prey. He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream on their thrones in his early paintings.

As the novelist Paul Bowles wrote, Bacon’s head always seemed liable 'to burst from internal pressures'. Or perhaps that head was likely to liquefy, melted like wax by some combustible fantasy within. I could imagine a puddle of boot polish, mascara, rouge and granulated ammonia on the plush Covent Garden carpet.

After a few more years of furious creativity by day and self-destructive indulgence by night, Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 in Madrid. As his centenary approaches, oligarchs and arms dealers compete for possession of paintings in which feral, rutting men and mutant women reel through life in a mood of what Bacon thought of as tragic gaiety, exhilarated by their lack of hope: last May, Roman Abramovich broke the record for contemporary art auctions by spending $86 million on Triptych, 1976.

A few surviving acolytes and cronies - veterans of stupefied afternoons in Soho clubs, resilient victims of Bacon’s vitriolic temper – cling to their memories of revelling with him, though as time goes on it becomes harder to separate the man from the mythic figure he has become. The French critic Michel Leiris likened Bacon to a pantheon of legendary heroes: Orestes guiltily pursued by the furies, Hamlet grappling with a censorious ghost, Don Juan driven by sexual demons.

Hoping to demythologise him, I talked to two fellow artists he encouraged, Peter Beard and Michael Clark; to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, who was a 19-year-old student when they first met in 1963; and to the Irish photographer John Minihan, who, after snapping Bacon in 1971 outside a magistrate’s court where he was facing a trumped-up drugs charge, became obsessed with documenting his irregular existence. What I found was that even those who knew Bacon well were unsure who or what he was: a human being or a self-fashioned artefact? A bilious ogre or a suffering god?

As Peppiatt recalled: 'Francis used to say, "I’m the most artificial person you’ll ever meet." He followed the example of an old whore in Paris, who said to him, "Je me fais jeune" – I make myself young.' 'He did a lot of work on himself,' Clark agreed, hinting that Bacon’s jowls had been tidied away by cosmetic surgery. Peppiatt likened him to a devil, an irresistible tempter, and Clark described him as a phantom, a noctambulant wanderer noiselessly circulating on crêpe-soled shoes. 'I’d say he was a sacred monster,' smiled Minihan. 'He was Prometheus,' said Beard, 'with the eagle picking at his liver every day. He had a mantra that he got from Nietzsche. He was always repeating it: "Since everything’s so meaningless, we might as well be extraordinary."'

One thing they don’t deny is Bacon’s centrality to their lives. 'I had my best times with Fran,' Beard told me. 'The drunker he got, the more sense he made.' 'That was a life-determining encounter for me,' said Peppiatt about buttonholing Bacon in a Soho pub to interview him for a Cambridge student journal. 'Francis immediately became essential to you, like an addiction. It was so exciting, so exalted to be with him.'  

'I love talking about him,' Minihan burbled, before leading me off on a nostalgic tour of Bacon’s South Kensington haunts — the mews studio where he painted in a swamp of composted squalor, the cornershop where he bought his smoked salmon, the automated booth in the tube station where he took the grimacing photographs he used for his self-portraits, the bus stop where he was patiently standing when Minihan saw him for the last time.

In all these relationships, adoration was mixed with anxiety, even dread. Valerie Beston, the Marlborough Gallery employee who looked after Bacon’s chaotic business affairs, once said to Peppiatt, 'I can’t think of a worse fate than being loved by Francis.' An early partner, Peter Lacy, fantasised about keeping Bacon chained to the wall and buggering him with a gang of accomplices; when they split up, Lacy sullenly drank himself to death in Tangier.

Bacon’s East End boyfriend George Dyer, a petty crook whose intimates included the Kray twins, died in 1971 of an overdose of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel two days before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective show at the Grand Palais: the doomed relationship is the subject of John Maybury’s 1998 film Love is the Devil, with Daniel Craig as the befuddled Dyer and Derek Jacobi as an evilly epicene Bacon. Clearly, Bacon was dangerous to know.

For both Peppiatt and Clark, to enter the dives he frequented was like descending into an underworld, a realm of arduous tests and trials where young lads were despoiled of their innocence. Or perhaps it was a dizzier, more vertical rite, climbing into a rarified atmosphere of bohemian decadence.

Clark remembered the staircase that led up to the studio in Reece Mews, with a rope to clutch instead of a banister. 'It was as steep as a ladder, and so narrow that his paintings had to be squeezed out with not an inch to spare, so the edges always got scuffed. He’d leave the downstairs door open for me. I’d haul myself up with one hand on the rope, preparing for some great experience when I got to the top.'

The initiation could be hazardous. Peppiatt was at first rebuffed by Bacon’s pet photographer John Deakin, who flapped his wrist and — using the feminine pronouns that were obligatory for Bacon’s camp courtiers — said 'Oh no dear, she's become so famous she wouldn’t deign to meet a student!' In 1977 Muriel Belcher, the dragon-like proprietor of the Colony Room in Soho, told Clark he was a 'cheeky cunt' when he gatecrashed her drinking club; another of Bacon’s witchy guardians said, 'You’re too young and pretty, you’ll need to get your face bashed in a bit before my daughter takes an interest in you'.

'I was a bit naïve,' Clark primly added. 'Valerie arranged for me to make a portrait of Francis, but I wasn’t a lackey — maybe that’s why he trusted me.'

'Yes, I was playing with fire,' Peppiatt admitted. 'There was always some foreboding when I went to meet him, I knew I’d be X-rayed down to the bone. You remember in that South Bank Show when he keeps on pouring out red wine and says to Melvyn Bragg "Are you real?". You can feel Bragg flinching off-camera. Francis probed you like that, but it was more fun than studying for my Cambridge exams. I suppose he was attracted to me: he liked the challenge of a strapping young heterosexual. But I felt protected by him, never exploited. With George Dyer, it was trickier. He enjoyed the idea of luring me out of my respectable background into something criminal.'

Peppiatt brilliantly mimicked Dyer’s adenoidal, glottal-stopped cockney grunt: '"Fuckin’ college boys, ain’t got the guts for a proper job." He dared me to turn up at some midnight rendezvous to rob a house or something. I was there on the dot, it was George who didn’t keep the date! Francis had a subtler way of corrupting people. He loved to be ripped off, he’d leave bundles of money lying round to see if the rough trade he picked up took the bait — and they always did. He wanted to prove people to be rotten, himself included. "Rotten to the core," he’d say about himself, and he said it with pleasure and a kind of pride.'

Knowing Bacon enabled Peppiatt to walk on the wild side, trifling with illegality; for Clark — a fey, slightly haunted character, who told me in a paranoid whisper that he was 'breaking silence for the first time after 30 years' by discussing Bacon — the experience was an induction into mysteries that resembled the arcane ceremonies of a religious cult. 'He gave me access to everywhere in the studio. There'd be underwear strung up to dry in the bathroom, and frying pans full of pigment in the kitchen. For me, it was like those labs where the alchemists conducted their experiments — a cabbalistic place. There was a charm on the door, a secret symbol to warn that you were entering somewhere hallowed. He had a mirror that was smashed when someone threw an ashtray at it; it was pitted all over, and the silver backing had corroded. It was a black mirror, like seers use. It didn’t reflect reality, it showed you visions. You can say it’s all hocus-pocus, but what Francis did was esoteric: he was playing with very powerful, violent forces when he made those images.'

Peppiatt too acknowledges that he was 'spellbound' during his time with Bacon. Hero-worship usually compensates for some psychological need in the eager worshipper, and in Peppiatt’s case, as he said, 'Francis was a father-substitute. I didn't get on well with my actual father, and here was this charming, devious replacement. In return he told me about his problems with his own father. He hated him, yet felt sexually attracted to him. And Eddie Bacon so despised this effeminate son that he got the stablehands on their horse-breeding farm in Ireland to flog Francis to toughen him up! Trust Francis to combine pleasure with pain by having affairs with the grooms who were told to whip him.'

The lurid Oedipal scenario may explain one of Beard’s reminiscences. 'Fran loved his Shakespeare, and he was always reciting that song from The Tempest, "Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made".' It sounds like a joyfully lyrical revenge, on behalf of wishfully patricidal boys. Yet when Peppiatt’s father died, Bacon was tenderly solicitous. 'He took me out to dinner to console me, and we ended up at Annabel's having a second supper at one in the morning. "Why don’t you dance?" he said, but I told him I didn’t feel like it. So he went over and told a girl I’d had an eye on that I was too shy to ask her to dance. He pimped for me! When we got on to the dance floor, I looked around and he’d gone — he’d left me to enjoy myself. That was so healing: it reintroduced me to the fun of life.'

While Bacon supplied Peppiatt with an alternative father, to the homesick Minihan he represented a lost fatherland. 'I was born in Dublin, like Francis, though his family was grand and mine didn’t have a pot to piss in. My mother went off to England and gave me to her sister to be reared. Francis was sent away by his father when he was 16; a friend of the family took him to Berlin, so he completed his education in the gay bars and cabarets that Auden and Isherwood went to. I was even younger when I escaped. I left school at 11, came to London and got a job as an office boy in Fleet Street. You could say I finished school at El Vino!

'It wasn’t fashionable to be Irish in London in the 1970s, as the IRA were blowing the place up, but I always wanted to photograph my own people; I was working for the Evening Standard in the Seventies and I volunteered to go to the magistrate’s court because they told me some Irish painter was up on a cannabis charge. That’s all I knew about him. He let me take his photograph, and after they acquitted him — it was Dyer who planted the drugs and tipped off the police after some tiff they’d had — we walked off to Soho together. He was very gracious and kind, that was one of his Irish qualities.'

Bacon’s grace and hospitable generosity are evident in Minihan’s photographs of him squiring William S Burroughs around town: upstaged for once in his life, he fusses over his frail, bewildered companion. Minihan’s photographs also capture a sociable exhibitionism that counteracts tales about Bacon’s maniacal rages and his morbid gloom.

Michael Clark’s portraits of Bacon emphasise the sad preoccupation of his sagging face, with eyes deep in concussed hollows grimly contemplating mortality; Minihan’s Bacon, by contrast, looks quite different: dapper, dandified, irrepressibly larky. In one photograph, he preens in a PVC mac, no doubt relishing the snug feel of the female panties and fishnet stockings that he customarily wore as undergarments. 'Ah yes,' said Minihan, 'that’s Francis throwing me some shapes, as we say in Ireland. He loved clothes, and so did I. He liked to pose and swagger when he had something fancy to show off, just like Oscar Wilde with his green carnation.'

Perhaps there was more to this fashionable flaunting than Minihan suspected. 'His clothes were always so tight,' Peppiatt remembered. 'Pegged trousers, leather jackets with epaulettes, those belted macs — he liked the sense of constriction, as if he was in bondage. And he wore a necklace that was so tight it often seemed to be choking him.'

Clark also recalled the choker, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the self-asphyxiating games of those who seek the perfect orgasm. In Bacon’s paintings, a live, captive being often writhes in a steel cage; he created the same agonised entrapment for himself when he got dressed. The fetishistic gear also disciplined him. His afternoons and nights may have been devoted to the sloppy satisfaction of desire, but his mornings in the studio were a triumph of the strict, self-punishing will. Peter Beard noticed Bacon’s weakness for uniforms made from animal skins and polished to a high shine, and drew the obvious conclusion: 'Fran sure as hell loved the Third Reich!' Bacon once gave a figure he painted a swastika armband; he disingenuously claimed that he liked the crooked shape and had no interest in what it signified.

Minihan, chatting to Bacon about home, enrolled him in his own nostalgic psychodrama. 'My great ambition was to introduce Francis to Samuel Beckett, so I could photograph the meeting of two great Irish exiles. But Beckett was a recluse, and eluded me for years. And Francis wasn’t keen, he said he couldn’t see what the two of them had in common: he was nervous of meeting someone whose view of things was even bleaker than his own. I suppose it’s true that he’d listen to me rattle on about Ireland, without contributing much himself. Most of what he said about it was dismissive. In 1977 I showed him some photographs of a wake that lasted two days and three nights in a village in the west of Ireland. I was so proud of this work: it was a family of Beckett characters, and the whole thing demonstrated, like Bacon’s paintings, that death is the only reality. But Francis screeched "Aaargh!" and looked away. He didn’t like the photographs, but wouldn’t give a reason. He was consumed by himself, in his own world.'

Like all who knew Bacon, Minihan had come up against a barrier, concealed by his boozy conviviality. Peppiatt’s biography is subtitled Anatomy of an Enigma. When I asked Peppiatt what the enigma was, he immediately replied, 'His secretiveness. He had an almost magical gift for slipping away, for suddenly becoming someone else. And if you got too close, he warned you off by turning nasty.'

The pub crawls, the sessions in casinos, even the bouts of sadomasochistic sex were all a diversion and an evasion. Bacon was only himself when he was alone in his studio, accompanied by the private incubi he painted. Even if he was painting a friend or a lover, he worked from photographs and debarred the living model: his solitude could not be shared, and the secrets of the image-making that contorted and even crucified reality were never imparted.

'No one was allowed to see him at work,' Peter Beard remembered. 'The process had to remain out of sight. Once when he was drunk he spilled a bit too much. He said he added texture by sweeping up the mess on the studio floor and blowing it on to the wet painting: it was a kind of blow job! Then he got annoyed with me, because he regretted telling me.'

Michael Clark saw the shutters drop when, invited to look at a new painting, he noticed a patch of pastel and asked Bacon how he had fixed it. 'There was a pause, then he said "By the usual method". He wasn’t about to give away a technical tip; I realised I’d gone too far.'

Confronted by this disappearing act, Bacon’s friends were free to see him as whoever they wanted him to be, or as an ideal projection of themselves. This, I found, had happened to Bacon in the befogged memory of Peter Beard. 'My mind is fucked,' bawled Beard when I arrived to talk to him in Cassis, the resort near Marseille where he lives in a seaside villa. 'It’s my attention deficit disorder — and the drink! Hey, that reminds me, can I get a kir? Then I can claim I was drunk during the interview. You gotta try one too, it’s the local specialty.'

While waiting for his solicitous young wife to bring the sweet blackcurrant cocktail, he ripped open a can of beer, chomped on a steak sandwich known as an Al Capone, and treated me to a hallucinatory anecdote about leafing through a book of Bacon reproductions while on an LSD trip in New York during the 1960s.

'I’d recommend it,' he said. 'When you’re full of the magic mushroom, you can see all those clouds of gaseous, tumultuous air that Fran painted.' Had I come to the south of France, I wondered, to talk about Bacon, or to meet Bacon’s staggering reincarnation?

Beard, now 70, inherited a fortune from a clan of American railway entrepreneurs; he spent his youth cavorting with supermodels and rock bands, and possesses the eroded remains of a handsome profile that Bacon often painted. When not lolling beside the Mediterranean, he lives on a property in East Africa, fondly named Hog Ranch. His Kenyan connections make him a Hemingwayesque character, boisterously virile — although, unlike Hemingway stalking big game, his obsession is protecting imperilled species rather than gunning them down.

As a photographer, Beard has documented the slaughter of elephants and rhinos, which he sees as rehearsals for our human fate. 'Yeah, mankind is doomed,' growled Beard. 'I often talked to Fran about population dynamics, about how we were going the way of the elephants.' I wasn’t sure about that meeting of minds: Bacon certainly thought that men were beasts, but he hardly shared Beard’s ecological conscience.

Nevertheless, Beard considers Bacon — whose mother and sisters moved to South Africa and Rhodesia after his father’s death, and who went on a photographic safari to Kruger Park in the early 1950s — to be an honorary African. 'He was always planning to come stay on the ranch in Nairobi. He never made it, but the realities in his paintings are primitive, primordial, so to me they evoke Africa. All that bleeding meat, and the dry grass: he’s the greatest painter of grass, and it’s African grass, not a wet English lawn.

'He was really into my dead elephants, and we had plans to collaborate on some sculptures. He was gonna mould the corpses and twist them over these immaculate chrome rails — he liked chrome because it reminded him of the car JFK was riding in when he was shot in Dallas — but there was a problem with the gallery in New York, some crap about keeping Brits out, and the dealer cancelled the show.'

Beard’s own work pays homage to Bacon’s carnivorous art. On the roof of his Mediterranean villa samples of elephant blood coagulated in the sun, waiting to be smeared on photographic collages that include snapshots of Bacon, transcriptions of his talk, and excerpts from Beard’s African diaries, speckled by vulture shit. Images, as in Bacon’s paintings, emerge from an abattoir, and paint — which Bacon once likened to the slimy track of a snail - is one of the fluids that spurt from a live, dying body. According to Beard, a thug Bacon once picked up in Monte Carlo stumbled into an unfinished painting in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. 'He decided he wanted to add something to it, so he whipped out his prick and jerked off on the canvas. You can still see the jism dripping down it. Fran didn’t mind sharing the credit!'

A tough guy himself, Beard attributes the same machismo to Bacon. 'I hate the way Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie. I never saw one homosexual bone in Fran’s body!' (At the very least, this counts as an original view.)

'He was strength on strength,' bellowed Beard. 'He was the Rock of Gibraltar, the best of British. Hell, he wasn’t camp, the guy used to take a leak in the sink! One time when we were walking through Paris, a car ran over his foot. The driver jumped out to help, but Fran just shrugged like the stoic he was. Next day his foot was so swollen he could hardly walk: that’s what Hemingway called grace under pressure. It’s like Andy Warhol when he was shot in the guts by that nutty feminist [Valerie Solanas]. When they carried him out on the stretcher, all he said was "Now don’t make me laugh!" Of course they were different guys. Andy was an idiot savant, but Fran was a fucking genius.'

The genius was a generator, transmitting an electrical charge to those around him. 'Francis used to say that 99 per cent of people weren’t activated,' Michael Clark recalled. 'He switched you on.'

Near the end of our long lunch at Green’s, a fish restaurant in St James’s that Bacon often patronised, Peppiatt gave me an example of how this vitalising influence worked. A morose waiter brought us our coffee, then wearily retreated. 'You see what an automaton he is?' asked Peppiatt. 'Francis would have twinkled at him, flirted with him, made him a player. I remember once in Paris he ordered, as usual, a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. The waiter poured it out with tremendous care, and Francis offered him a glass. "Oh no, monsieur," he said, looking over his shoulder, "la direction!" But Francis wouldn't allow the management the right of veto. He gave the waiter a glass and told him to sneak into the kitchen with it and drink it later. After a while, the door from the kitchen opened, the waiter peeped out, raised the glass and toasted us. That was Francis: he created excitement, mostly by transgressing the rules. That’s what’s missing from Love is the Devil. Jacobi doesn’t convey Francis’s geniality, his love of fun.' Our waiter eventually returned with the bill, hoping to speed our departure; I decided to leave him unactivated.

Bacon could deactivate people just as abruptly. 'He thought that friendship gave people the right to lacerate each other,' said Peppiatt. 'He did that to me once. He spent an entire night doing down Hockney, going on and on. "Leave it alone," I said. "Well of course," he shrieked back, "you with your pathetic taste would think Hockney was worth something." I told him off for it when he sobered up the next day.'

Beard witnessed another gratuitous outburst, directed at Jerry Hall during a party in a gay disco in Paris. 'I’d introduced Fran to Mick [Jagger] and that was fine, but when Jerry turned up he aimed this thunderball at her. "You fucking old cow," he said, "you grotesque cunt, you hideous bloody witch." He just wouldn’t stop; it was this wave of bad vibes. The rest of us went down into some dark pit behind the dancefloor and hid. You can imagine what was going on there, but it was better than being within range of Fran.'

When Bacon died, the critic David Sylvester paid him a provocative tribute. Quite apart from Bacon’s achievements as an artist, Sylvester described him as 'the greatest man I’ve known, and the grandest', and listed his staunch moral virtues: honesty, generosity, courage.

'I think that’s a bit solemn,' said Peppiatt. 'He was mostly wonderful, but his shenanigans could be a pain in the arse. Yet he played up superbly, and he could be very suave when he took the piss. His rudeness was a by-product of his searing determination to tell the truth. He was a great possessor of people, and some of them were swallowed whole.'

Or else they swallowed Bacon whole and can still disgorge him on demand, which happened when Michael Clark staged a creepily vivid simulation of his antics in my London sitting room. Clark, channelling Bacon, primped his forelock with a non-existent comb, and freshened his makeup with sideways glances at an imaginary pocket mirror. Having titivated himself, he then nimbly removed an unseen £50 note from his pocket to press it into an open, needy hand that supposedly belonged to Jeffrey Bernard. Groping towards a bar that wasn’t there, he wheeled across the floor in a re-enactment of Bacon’s swooping gait, which made him look like a dipsomaniac question mark. Clark, in common with Beard, thinks of Bacon as a shaman who painted in a state of trance; during this impersonation, Clark was the shaman who conjured Bacon up before me. The spectacle was ghoulish but somehow touching: by such performances, Bacon’s loyalists keep him alive.

Even in Bacon’s absence, his images retain their terrifying power, a vampirish capacity to imbibe life from those who look at them. For a while, Peppiatt had a portrait that Bacon gave him hanging above his desk. 'It stared at me, and I could never face it down. Nothing in the head had settled, there was unfinished business going on inside the frame. It was so incredibly alive, and it made me feel — how can I say this? — so static. It seemed to be asking me if I was real, and I never knew what to answer.'

Peppiatt eventually sold the painting, and ever since has felt an aching regret, combined with relief at having escaped its mute interrogation. The story sums up the impact of Bacon’s personality and his art. To know him was to be enraptured, to lose contact with the safe, stable norm; it made the rest of your existence, when you had to return to it, a mournful anticlimax.

Biography: From furniture to fine art

Early life

Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. Caught wearing his mother’s clothes, he is banished from home aged 16. Settles in London in 1929. Chronic asthma causes him to evade enlistment for the Second World War.

Career

1929 Works briefly as an interior designer. A first exhibition of his work features mainly furniture but includes one painting, Watercolour. Meets Eric Hall, who becomes his patron and lover.

1934 Holds his first solo show. Disappointed by the reviews, he destroys most of the work.

1945 Shows Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now considered his masterpiece, in a group show in London. Later donated to the Tate by Eric Hall.

1948 Erica Brausen represents Bacon. She sells Painting (1946) to MOMA, New York, for £280.

1949 One-person exhibition at the Hanover Gallery is a commercial success. Robert Melville writes an influential article about Bacon in Horizon.

1952 Lucian Freud paints portrait of Bacon.
1953 First solo exhibition in the United States features eight Studies for Portrait after Velazquez’s Innocent X. Bacon represents Britain at the Venice Biennale, alongside Freud and Ben Nicholson.

1962 Bacon paints Three Studies for a Crucifixion for his first retrospective at the Tate Gallery, a career-defining show.
1971 Lover George Dyer dies. Bacon begins the first of his 'memorial' triptychs.

1985 Major survey at the Tate.

1992 Dies of a heart attack, aged 82, while holidaying in Spain. Leaves entire £11 million estate to his friend Jonathan Edwards who in turn, donates Bacon’s studio contents to Dublin’s Hugh Lane gallery.

2007 Bacon’s old studio junk, salvaged decades earlier by a contractor, fetches almost £1m at auction. The paintings, diaries and photos had been destined for the skip until electrician Mac Robertson persuaded Bacon to give them to him.

Imogen Carter

Winning streak: The rising price of Bacon

£200, 1946
The dealer Erica Brausen, introduced to Bacon by artist Graham Sutherland, buys Painting, 1946 for £200 and shows it at the Redfern Gallery.

£280, 1948
Brausen sells on Painting, 1946 to MOMA, New York, where it remains today.

£10,558, 1967
Sotheby’s London sells Seated Figure.

£67,067, 1975
Sotheby’s London auctions Study for a Pope.

£33,979 (US $66,371), 1984
It is alleged that Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that represented Bacon, pays him $66,371 for Statue and Figures in the Street; it had valued it earlier at
$250,000.

£3.53mn (US $6.3m), 1989
Bacon becomes the world’s most expensive living artist when his Triptych, May–June, 1973 sells at Sotheby’s in New York.

£26.6m (US $52.7m), 2007
Study From Innocent X, 1962 breaks Bacon’s record at auction in New York.

£44m (US $86.28m), 2008
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich buys Triptych, 1976 making it the world’s most expensive work of contemporary art. Art market monitoring agency Artprice declares Bacon to be the top-selling painter on the planet.

         Francis Bacon photographed at his show at the Claude Bernard Gallery Paris 1997. © John Minihan 

· The Francis Bacon exhibition is at Tate Britain from 11 September to 4 January, sponsored by Bank of America. The Observer is media partner. Observer readers can book two tickets for the price of one. Call 020 7887 8998 and quote 'Observer Offer' before 6pm on 31 August 2008. A booking fee will apply per transaction; the offer is only available on full-price tickets (usually £12.50 each).

Pre-order your copy of Francis Bacon the accompanying exhibition catalogue now, for the exclusive price of £29.99 (RRP £35) with free UK p&p. To order call Tate Enterprises on 020 7887 8869 (during office hours) and quote 'Observer Bacon offer'. Offer ends 31 August 2008. (Orders dispatched September 2008.)

The Fan: Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon

‘He’s one of the greatest painters of all time’

INTERVIEW BY SEAN O'HAGAN   |   THE OBSERVER   |   SUNDAY, AUGUST 10,  2008

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He’s up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He’s complicated. It’s not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It’s about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way though it by sheer will. That’s what’s inspiring to me, alongside the sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the human psyche.

If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it’s obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn’t do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they’re bloody awful. He can’t do boots. [Laughs] But it’s so bloody powerful. His work always veers into the imagination. There’s always this raw, dark power, this visceral energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.

Great art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said ‘fuck off’ to what went before. He didn’t go the traditional route that the great painters went. He didn’t have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to look to these guys, but he just didn’t have the patience to be like them and do what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there, bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.

He talked about the brutality of fact. It’s incredibly brave to take that on, to face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I’ve made maybe four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn’t like that. He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time. They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early on and he decided to take it on.

I saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It’s from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There’s a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It’s like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

I went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie [cocaine]. John Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It was palpable.

I was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon. He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15 because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped wanting to be a painter. I stepped aside into sculpture. I’ve gone back lately, though. For the last two years I’ve been in the shed slapping paint on canvas. Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, triptychs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He’s a supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.

I have five Bacons now. They’ll end up in the Manor [Hirst’s country estate in Toddington]. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the TV. You can’t not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It’s just unbelievable to me that I own them.

He popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said, 'Bacon’s been in, he was here for about an hour.’ I didn’t really believe them but then here’s this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter, where he says, ‘I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.’ I still can’t quite believe it.

Usual Boys and Girls Sell High at Sotheby’s

By Judd Tully, ARTINFO, Wednesday, July 2, 2008

LONDON—The contemporary art market boomed at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening in a marathon two-and-half hour sale, achieving a total of £94,701,550 ($188,853,831), just shy of its £96.6 million pre-sale high estimate. Only four of the 75 lots offered failed to sell, translating to rates of 5 percent unsold by lot and 10.5 percent unsold by value.  

Three works sold for over £5 million pounds, 27 for over £1 million, and 48 for over $1 million. The average lot price was £1.33 million, the firm’s highest ever in Europe in the category. In terms of the global breakdown of buyers, 49 percent were European, 39 percent were American, 3 percent were Asian, and 8 percent were other.

“I think the market is continuing its onward march, blissfully ignorant of all the turmoil in the financial markets,” said New York private dealer Christopher Eykyn. “It certainly hasn’t been a bad investment so far.”

Not surprisingly, the evening’s top lot was Francis Bacon’s small-scaled but potent Study for Head of George Dyer from 1967, which sold to a telephone bidder for £13,761,250 pounds ($27,442,685). The pre-sale estimate was in excess of £8 million, and the work was guaranteed. The seller acquired the work from Marlborough Gallery in London in March 1967 for £2,000, according to Gilbert Lloyd, head of Marlborough in London.

One of the evening’s few casualties was Bacon’s underwhelming Figure Turning from 1962 (est. £10–15 million), which was not guaranteed; the bidding flopped at £7.75 million.

GODFREY BARKER   |   ART & ANTIQUES   |   THE FIELD   |   TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2008

By CAROL VOGEL  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  TUESDAY 1 JULY 2008

LONDON — Works by Francis Bacon have been big sellers at auction recently, and Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art here on Monday was no different. Four tenacious bidders vied for his Three Studies for Self-Portrait from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up the price, even as it passed $30 million. The final tally was $34.4 million.

The Bacon triptych, made up of 14-by-12-inch panels, went for well above its $20 million estimate. The artist began painting self-portraits in the 1960s, and by the mid-’70s, after the death of his lover, George Dyer, he had begun a series of self-portrait heads. “I loathe my own face, but I go on painting it only because I haven’t got any other people to do,” he told David Sylvester, the British art critic and curator, at the time.

The work’s strong showing followed the $86.3 million paid for a far larger triptych — each of those three panels measured about 6 ½ feet by 5 feet — from 1976 that sold at Sotheby’s in New York in May. It was a record price for the artist at auction. The sale on Monday paved the way for potentially high prices for two other paintings by him, each from the ’60s, being offered at Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art on Tuesday night.

After the sale Brett Gorvy of Christie’s said, “This is a market where people want to be able to tick all the boxes, the right artist, the right painting, a fantastic provenance.”

Christie’s London Bests Own Contemporary Record

By Judd Tully, ARTINFO, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 

LONDON—Powered by a trio of artworks that exceeded £10 million apiece, Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary Evening sale reached £86,241,600 ($171,879,508), its highest tally for a European auction in that category. The result fell within its pre-sale estimate of £80–115 million.

“Almost all of our guarantees were profitable,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s. “The market ended up being as strong as we hoped it would be.” The evening's top three lots all had guarantees.

Eighteen lots exceeded £1 million, and 30 made over $1 million. Only ten of the 58 lots offered failed to find buyers, for a svelte 17 percent buy-in rate by lot and 16 percent by value.

The casualties included Lucio Fontana’s fantastic but pricey celestial Concetto Spaziale from 1964, for which bidding cracked at £8 million pounds (estimate on request, in excess of £8 million). The work last sold at auction at Christie’s London in December 1996 for £397,000.

But the huge price for Francis Bacon’s small-scale but power-packed and uber-distorted triptych Three Studies for Self Portrait from 1975 sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £17,289,250 ($34,457,475) against an estimate on request in excess of £10 million, making it the seventh-most expensive Bacon sold at auction. Tonight’s seller bought the work from Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in 1976, and it carries the pedigree, rarity, and quality that this market responds to.  

The action resumes tomorrow night at Sotheby’s.

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art & Auction.

Is Bacon in more demand than Picasso?

CITY A.M.  |  FRIDAY 27 JUNE 2008

AS Sotheby’s and Christie’s gear up for their famously extravagant summer contemporary art sales, the mood is mixed.

Last October’s evening sales at Christie’s saw earnings of £34.87m for the auction house and the art world was paddling about in a Frieze-Week sea of champagne; last June the credit crunch was a distant rumour and the sales at Sotheby’s made £72.43m.

Now, despite the credit crunch, experts at the two auction houses maintain that the market is stronger than ever — indeed, the February 2008 Contemporary Evening sale made Sotheby’s a whopping £95m.

Both houses have got their hands on paintings by Francis Bacon, the most sought-after artist on the market at the moment. Christie’s has Three Studies For A Self-Portrait, the first time the work has been seen at auction. Sotheby’s has been trumpeting its Study For Head Of George Dyer for weeks — so hot is this haunting, enigmatic portrait set against a solid green background, that the catalogue says the price estimate is only available on request. Figure Turning from 1962 should go for between £10m and £15m at Sotheby’s.

Of the Baconian frenzy, Oliver Barker, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, says: “In many people’s minds, Bacon is now surpassing Picasso. A Bacon is a very strong blue chip.”

The positive spin churned out by the big houses at sales time should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; for example, results from the recent Russian sales were mixed at best, despite glowing tributes from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. As the record-breaking February figures show, it does seem that contemporary art operates independently of economic cycles.

It may seem contrary to the spirit of the times, but collectors are seizing the opportunity to sell to a keen market. Barker adds: “The mood is very good. Yes, there’s a credit crunch, but there’s also a lot of wealth in the world.” 

And he says supply has never been better in contemporary art: “There is a steady flow of fresh works coming to the market and great opportunities for collectors putting together superb portfolios.”

One reason is the increasing globalisation of the art world — artists from hitherto less-known areas are being noticed, too. “Indian and Iranian art has become more collectible,” Barker says. “This is the first time we’re selling it so prominently — there’s a growing demand in terms of interest and collectors.”

Biography of Bacon

By The Literator | The Independent | Friday, 27 June 2008

Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of De Kooning: An American Master, are to write a major biography of Francis Bacon — due for a blockbuster show this autumn.

HarperCollins has bought rights after a heated auction. 

The pair has interviewed the artist's surviving sister and will research in France and Morocco, as well as London.

Bacon rarely discussed his art; this book will draw on material discovered since his death to bring both the artist and the work to life.

Monet grabber?

Roman Abramovich brings home the $86.3m Bacon and the $33.6m Freud

The London-based Russian billionaire has bought the record-breaking works;

he has not previously been known to collect art

BY CRISTINA RUIZ & SARAH THORNTON  |  COLLECTORS  |  THE ART NEWSPAPER  |  SATURDAY 31 MAY 2008 

Both works made auction history: the Bacon set the highest auction price ever for a post-war work of art, while Lucian Freud became the most expensive living artist, snatching the title from Jeff Koons.

Neither Sotheby’s nor Christie’s disclose information on buyers but sources close to the market confirm that Mr Abramovich, whose fortune is estimated at £11.7bn according to The Sunday Times’s Rich List, purchased both lots, apparently for display in his London home. He has not previously been known to purchase works of art at this level.

These acquisitions demonstrate how the balance of power in the art world is shifting away from the US. Last month we revealed that the so-called Rockefeller Rothko, which sold for $72.8m at Sotheby’s New York in May 2007, has been bought by the Royal family of Qatar whose other recent purchases include works by Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst.

The Bacon Triptych purchased by Mr Abramovich was consigned to Sotheby’s by the Moueix family, owners of Château Pétrus, one of the world’s most expensive Bordeaux wines. In March we revealed that they had owned it since it was bought from a show in Paris at the Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977, where it was illustrated on the cover of the catalogue. It has figured in many major exhibitions of Bacon’s work.

While Mr Abramovich has not previously been known to be interested in art, his girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova, is to open a new gallery in Moscow in a 1927 bus depot designed by Konstantin Melnikov. CCC Moscow will be inaugurated in September with a Kabakov retrospective. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Ms Zhukova said she hoped “to start a dialogue with a Russian audience. We hope to attract all kinds of people to the gallery, even those who know nothing about contemporary art.” She also said that CCC Moscow had long-term plans to build a permanent collection.

That’s the way Russians bring home the Bacon

BEN MACINTYRE   |   COMMENT   |   THE TIMES   |   FRIDAY  MAY 30 2008

When, exactly, did Russia become the new superpower of the art market? Was it earlier this month, when Roman Abramovich spent £60 million on two paintings by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud? Was it in 2004, when Victor Vekselberg, a Ukrainian oil and aluminum magnate, acquired the entire Forbes collection of gold-and-jewel-encrusted imperial Fabergé eggs? Did the turning point come last September when Sotheby’s called off the sale of the £20 million art collection amassed by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich after the Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov bought the lot?

Or was it, more subtly, the moment last May when Christie’s auction house in New York quietly added Russian roubles to the list of currencies displayed during bidding? The Russian billionaire now bestrides the art world just as the American tycoon did a century ago, with limitless resources and limited taste, provoking precisely the same combination of awe, envy, snobbery and quiet admiration. 

Two years ago Russian buyers accounted for just 3 per cent of Impressionist artworks sold at auction. Today, some 40 per cent are bought by Russians. Last year Sotheby’s sold $180 million worth of Russian art, a 22-fold increase since 2000. 

The new Russian collector emerges from an economy that has grown for nine years in succession; his fortune is made from commodities and energy resources, largely immune to the credit crunch; the weak dollar has further fuelled his buying spree. He is determined, showy and, in some eyes, irredeemably vulgar.

For many in the art world, the new-minted tycoons buying up Picassos by the yard are merely monied barbarians, accumulating art as “the latest fashion accessory”. Reporting on the opening of the Moscow Fine Art Fair this week, one British newspaper described with ill-concealed disgust the nouveau-riche Russian art buyers, with “their trophy wives, draped in diamonds and Gucci, tottering dutifully by their sides”. The same disdain accompanied Mr Abramovich’s purchase of Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 and Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. Along with three yachts, two submarines and Chelsea Football Club, Abramovich has also recently acquired a new girlfriend, Daria “Dasha” Zhukova, who is believed to be interested in opening an art gallery in Moscow. With a sniff audible in Moscow, British newspapers described Zhukova as the 25-year-old socialite daughter of a former cinema projectionist with an interest in homoeopathy: not exactly Peggy Guggenheim, then. 

Yet precisely the same air of bemused condescension was once aimed at the newly rich American magnates whose art-buying more than a century ago formed the basis for some of the greatest art collections in the world: Frick, Mellon, Rockefeller, Harriman. 

John Pierpont Morgan’s eclectic collecting was derided at the time, his spending on art comparable to “a tipsy dowager with unlimited credit moving down Fifth Avenue on a riotous shopping trip”. New money from the New World struck fear into the cultural avatars of the Old World, who saw the American collectors as asset-strippers, steadily hoarding the stock of treasured things. In his 1911 novel The Outcry, Henry James created the fictional Breckenridge Bender, an American millionaire buying up Britain’s art treasures with a large cheque book and little discrimination. 

A century ago the artistic aspirations and extravagances of the newly rich Americans were mocked just as mercilessly as the Russian oligarchs at the Moscow art fair buying up diamond-encrusted gambling chips made from an 800,000-year-old meteorite. 

Yet the power-shift in the art world towards Russia is really only the latest evidence that great wealth is ineluctably drawn to great art as its ultimate adornment. Buying a football team confers one sort of cachet, but the possession and collection of art is the ultimate validation for the self-made magnate.

Of nowhere is this more true than Russia, where the traditions of art collection run deep. Catherine the Great made collecting art fashionable in the 18th century and founded the great Hermitage collection; the aristocracy, and then the merchant classes, followed suit. It was another Abramovich, Ivan Abramovich Morosov, who, with his fellow textile merchant Sergei Shchukin, amassed Russia’s unrivalled collections of French Impressionist and early modern French painting before 1914. 

The revolution forced many aristocrats to flee with their collections. Soviet restrictions on art that was not state sanctioned effectively suppressed the Russian collecting urge. Much non-approved art was smuggled out of the country and into American and European collections, while the Soviet regime sold off art to raise hard currency.

Some of the new breed of Russian art buyers, such as Vekselberg, seem impelled by a desire to repatriate Russia’s artistic heritage. But whether driven by artistic patriotism, mere acquisitiveness, financial acumen or exhibitionism, the new Russian collectors are doing a service to art. By putting their money on the wall, they are once again demonstrating that art has the power to transcend time, taste and economic cycles. In the end it is more important than yachts, or investments, or even football.

Whereas Chelsea Football Club is unlikely to be donated to the public any time soon, there is a strong likelihood that Abramovich’s Bacon and Freud — respectively, the most expensive postwar work of art ever sold at auction and the most expensive work by a living artist — will eventually be put on display. For what is the point of bling unless you show it? The art market may be nervous, but Russian contemporary art is booming, Russia is amassing great art once again and the emergence of a new superpower with a big bidding paddle is revitalising the art world, as it has done repeatedly through history. 

Today we sneer, enviously, at the nouveau-riche tycoon bringing home the Bacon, but one day we will visit the Abramovich (or perhaps, depending on how things progress romantically, the Daria Zhukova gallery) in Moscow, just as we visit the Tate in London or the Frick in New York, and wonder at the strange industrial and financial process that turns filthy lucre for one into beauty for many. 

Where is our Bacon?

LETTERS  |  BATLEY NEWS  |  FRIDAY 30 MAY 2008 

                                               Figure Study II  1945-46  Francis Bacon

Sotheby’s Sale of Contemporary Art in Paris Sets

World Auction Record for Georges Mathieu

Roman’s empire:

Roman Abramovich has been revealed by The Art Newspaper to be the mystery buyer who bought Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1976) for €54m at Sotheby’s New York last week, as well as splashing out €21m on Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), at Christie’s. Both works made auction history, the Bacon achieving the highest price for a postwar work of art and Freud becoming the most expensive living artist at auction, taking the title from Jeff Koons.

It is believed the Russian tycoon purchased both works to display at his London home. But his newfound interest seems to be inspired chiefly by his girlfriend, Daria “Dasha” Zhukova, who is opening a gallery in Moscow. The Centre for Contemporary Culture Moscow will open in September at a bus depot designed by Konstantin Melnikov, with a retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Amy Winehouse is reported to have been offered €1.25m to perform at the launch.

THE BUSINESSES

Abramovich, 41, is estimated by Forbes magazine to have a net worth of €15bn. Having sold his stake in the Russian oil company Sibneft to the state-owned energy giant Gazprom for €8.2bn in 2005, he is now the main owner of private invest-ment company Millhouse Capital, which has diverse interests, including a 41.4pc stake of Russia’s largest steelmaker, Evraz Group, and a 40pc stake in the UK mining company Highland Gold, which owns gold deposits in Chukotka, the state where Abramovich has been governor since 2000 (despite tendering a letter of resignation to Vladimir Putin, which was rejected). The company also invests in real estate, pharmaceuticals and consumer products. Reports that Abramovich recently invested in Neo Vita, Russia’s first clinic for the super-rich in Moscow, have been denied.

A Bacon Study of Dyer Hits the Market

BY ZOE STRIMPEL  |  THE SUN NEW YORK  |  THURSDAY, 22 MAY 2008

The contemporary art season in London is grinding into gear. With more than a month to go until Sotheby's and Christie’s hold their evening sales, the press releases are beginning to make their rounds. And — shock — Francis Bacon will be making some very high-profile appearances indeed.

The latest about the constant (and worthy) darling of the market is that Sotheby’s will be selling his 1967 Study for Head of George Dyer. Like other portraits of his loved ones, this is an unsettlingly intimate, if inscrutable depiction in which Dyer’s face is slashed with anatomically rebellious jags of paint. It’s a nice London piece, as it comes from the period Bacon spent in ’60s Soho. It’s estimated to go for more than $16 million. And — no doubt — will.
 

Inflation’s wild ride puzzling work of art

Jack Markowitz, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Thursday, May 22, 2008

Even now a new bubble is surely a-building in the weird inflation of weird modern art.

Someone the other day, identity undisclosed, paid $86,261,000 for a painting, which would be a lot even for the big brands, a Rembrandt, a Picasso or Van Gogh. Or if it was at least a pretty painting, flowers or a western sunset.

But no, this was an ugly painting and by a chap named Francis Bacon, an Irish-born artist who is a hot stock now in only-fools-look-for-meaning-in-art circles. Last year a previous daub of his sold for $52.7 million, a record for him, and now he’s up 60 percent. A bubble for sure. Or another proof of the decline in the dollar.

Triptych, 1976 is the title of the work auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York. It wasn’t the folks in the room (who could see it) but two telephone bidders who really drove the price up, according to the Reuters report.

The three-panel work depicts in two of its panels a thin-faced man whose expression is obscurely stern. He does not appear to be sitting in a bathroom but he might be, because in the painting’s central panel he disappears and just a toilet is left there. With a tree growing out of it. Odd, but it gives you something to think about other than "what a dumb painting."

True, a newspaper reproduction may not do the work justice. Its actual colours may be very vivid and the man may be smiling enigmatically like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which a museum in Paris luckily acquired before the current mania of up-bidding.

The Bacon sale not only set a new high for the small-talent artist but for any work of post-World War II contemporary art. The previous record was last year’s $72.8 million for Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), which is a picture of nothing really, but in all those colours. Another Rothko smear, Orange, Red, Yellow, was expected to draw $35 million but went - strangely? - unsold.

Unidentified, too, although he may be someone near you laughing all the way to the bank, was the seller of the Bacon painting. He had owned it for over 30 years. And got rid of it for $86.2 million! No soap suds on that guy.

Sotheby’s London to Offer Exceptionally Rare

Study for Head of George Dyer by Francis Bacon

   ESTABLISHED IN 1996  |  NEWS   |   ART DAILY  |   THURSDAY, MAY 22, 2008

LONDON.- Sotheby’s announced that it will offer Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967 by Francis Bacon (1909-92) in its Evening Sale of Contemporary Art on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008. Francis Bacon is widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and this work is not only an exceptionally rare, intimate depiction of Dyer — the love of Bacon’s life — but is also an outstanding example of Bacon at the height of his powers. It is a rare lifetime depiction of Dyer and is also representative of Bacon’s life in London during the 1960s, a period which the artist spent in the gritty milieu of swinging Soho. The work is outstanding in its execution, presenting brushwork and an exuberance of colour that is equalled by only a handful of other works by the artist, and it is totally fresh to the market, having been acquired by the current owner directly from the Marlborough Gallery only two months after Bacon painted it in 1967. With a pre-sale estimate in excess of £8 million, it is offered ahead of Tate Britain’s major retrospective entitled Francis Bacon, which opens in September 2008 and continues into early 2009 – Bacon’s centenary year.

Oliver Barker, Senior Specialist, Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s London said: “Study for Head of George Dyer represents the zenith of achievement in portraiture for Bacon, an artist who is world-renowned for accomplishing an incredible likeness to his subject via a seemingly chaotic use of brushstrokes on the canvas. Painted in 1967, at the height of Bacon’s love affair with Dyer, this emotionally rousing work is the iconic crystallisation of the most significant relationship of Bacon’s life. We expect it to create great excitement at auction, coming at a moment when the market for works by Bacon is at an all-time high. The offering follows Sotheby’s extremely successful sale of Self Portrait, 1969 – painted in the same small-scale format – which achieved $33 million in November 2007.”

Study for Head of George Dyer is a rare type of eulogy to Dyer, not least because Bacon destroyed any canvas that he deemed unsatisfactory. Indeed, despite 129 photographs of Dyer being found in Bacon’s studio after the artist’s death, this painting is one of only two known designated portraits in this single 14 by 12 inch format. From the early 1960s Bacon only worked on two sizes of canvas, either a 78 by 58 inch or a 14 by 12 inch format. Whereas his monumental Triptych 1976, sold at Sotheby’s New York on May 14th for a world record $86.2 million*, enlists epic narrative to confront universal themes with the large format, by contrast Study for Head of George Dyer uses the more intimate format for one of the most profoundly personal and intense portraits of the 20th Century. It also serves as a counterpoint to the so-called ‘Black Triptychs’ of the early 1970s that commemorate Dyer and which are widely considered to be the pinnacle of Bacon’s whole oeuvre. Oliver Barker adds: “In the brilliance of its conception and the significance of its subject, Study for Head of George Dyer should be included in the history of art alongside Picasso’s Weeping Woman of 1937 in the Tate as an example of what portraiture can achieve.”

Contrary to the myth that they met when Dyer broke into Bacon’s mews house – popularised by accounts such as the 1998 film Love is the Devil starring Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as Dyer – according to Bacon, they actually met in Autumn 1963 in a Soho drinking den when Dyer introduced himself to the artist’s party. Hailing from the East End of London, Dyer had received little formal education, possessed a criminal record and had served several short prison terms for theft and petty crime. Nevertheless, well-built and immaculately dressed, he soon succeeded Peter Lacy, who had died the previous year, as Bacon’s companion and lover. As the 1960s advanced, Bacon and Dyer’s affair became increasingly stormy. The artist repeatedly bought Dyer out of trouble and by providing a ‘kept’ existence, inadvertently fuelled the East Ender’s paranoia of lacking purpose, which in turn drove his worsening drink problem and the onset of depression. In the Autumn of 1971 the pair travelled to Paris for the major retrospective for Bacon’s work that had been organised at the Grand Palais. It was to be a monumental occasion celebrating the artist’s already stellar career. However, barely 36 hours before the opening, George Dyer was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills, exacerbated by alcohol abuse, in the hotel suite the pair shared. Dyer’s suicide left Bacon grief-stricken.

Thus, both before and after death, George Dyer provided a defining inspiration for Bacon’s work, proving the catalyst for a string of masterworks. Similar to the way that Pablo Picasso created a profile of his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter and obsessively repeated it in works throughout the 1930s, Bacon created a distinctive and instantly recognisable template for the outline of George Dyer’s head which became a highly visible recurrence in his 1960s and ‘70s output.

In executing Study for Head of George Dyer, Bacon cut out a photograph of his subject, taken by photographer John Deakin who he had met in the late 1940s. Bacon and Deakin were both habitués of Soho’s Colony Room, where the photographer took endless shots of his fellow regulars, many of which became the basis of the artist’s penetrating portraits of their mutual drinking companions. Bacon never painted from live models and this famous cut-out, circa 1964, is frequently cited as iconic evidence of Bacon’s use of photography to aid his work. It was not used as a direct template, but provides insight into Bacon’s working method. Talking of his subjects, Bacon said: “If I know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room. I think that, if I have the presence of the images there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am able to through the photographic image. This may just be my own neurotic sense but I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me.” (the artist cited in: David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1993, p.48).

Painted in oil, the resulting portrait announces in an exuberance of emerald green, arcs and dashing flecks of pinks, reds, yellows and white, the unmistakable features of Bacon’s lover who was so significant in the artist’s life and of whom Bacon continued to make paintings after Dyer’s death. The work has been requested by Tate for their forthcoming major Francis Bacon retrospective. The exhibition will also travel to the Prado, Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Study for Head of George Dyer was recently exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for the exhibition Francis Bacon: Portrait and Heads for which it was on the cover of the catalogue, as well as at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in A Guest of Honour: Francis Bacon und sein Umkreis. Prior to its sale in July, the portrait will be on view at Sotheby’s New Bond Street Galleries in London.

                                                     George Dyer taken by John Deakin circa 1964

A New Art Lover Shells Out $120

BY JILL LAWLESS  | THE MOSCOW TIMES  | THURSDAY, MAY 22, 2008 

22 May 2008 — Two days, two modern art masterpieces, two record-breaking auction prices — and one buyer: billionaire Roman Abramovich.

A respected art publication says London-based Abramovich was the anonymous buyer of Francis Bacon’s Triptych and Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which sold at separate New York auctions last week for a total of $120 million.

Abramovich represents a new breed of superrich collector from emerging economies such as China, the Middle East — and, especially, Russia — that is buoying the art market through tough economic times.

The Art Newspaper cited sources close to the market as confirming that Abramovich, whose wealth is estimated by the Sunday Times’ Rich List at £11.7 billion ($22.9 billion), had bought both paintings.

Sotheby’s, which sold the Bacon work; and Christie’s, which auctioned the Freud, refused to provide details about the buyers. A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment.

Art Newspaper editor Cristina Ruiz said Abramovich, a former oil magnate who owns London’s Chelsea football club, had not been known as a major art-market player.

"We’d never heard of him purchasing anything, and certainly not at this level," she said. "What’s interesting is he’s come in at the very top of the market, not just in terms of price but in terms of the quality of what he’s purchased. It’s extremely impressive."

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping — a 1.5-meter-by-2.2-meter painting of Rubenesque model Sue Tilly asleep on a sofa — sold at Christie’s in New York on May 13 for $33.6 million. Bacon’s huge three-panel work Triptych 1976 fetched more than $86 million at Sotheby’s the next day.

The sales made Bacon’s painting the most expensive postwar work of art ever sold at auction, and Freud’s the most expensive work by a living artist. The record prices defied fears that the international art market was on the slide because of global economic turmoil and the credit crunch.

Ruiz said Abramovich’s new interest in art might have been guided by his girlfriend, former model Daria Zhukova, who has announced plans to open an art gallery in Moscow.

Like many oligarchs, he may also need new ways to spend his money. He already owns multiple properties, including mansions in England, France and the United States; at least three yachts; a private jet; a $2 million Ferrari race car; and, reportedly, two submarines.

For the superrich, art is the next frontier. In the past few years, Russian collectors have been buying up works from their homeland, sharply driving up prices for Russian art. Sales of Russian art at Christie’s rose from $27 million in 2004 to $144 million last year, and private galleries as well as auction houses in London and New York are increasingly previewing artworks in Russia in their quest for buyers.

Some buyers appear motivated by a desire to repatriate Russia’s artistic heritage. In 2004, billionaire Viktor Vekselberg bought a collection of tsarist Faberge eggs that Sotheby’s had intended to put up for auction, and brought them back to Russia.

Last September, Sotheby’s called off a sale of works owned by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich after billionaire Alisher Usmanov bought the whole $40 million collection.

Lately, they have begin to snap up non-Russian modern works. In 2006, an anonymous Russian bidder bought Picasso’s Dora Maar au chat for $95 million, and high-profile works by Mark Rothko and Peter Doig also have recently sold to Russians.

"Every society has its foibles," said Charles Dupplin, an expert at specialist art insurer Hiscox. "Russians don’t seem to spend a lot of money on racehorses, but they do like modern and contemporary art."

Such ultrarich collectors have helped the art market defy predictions of meltdown by driving top-quality works to record prices. Dupplin said the Russian buyers have mostly made their fortunes in commodities and are largely unaffected by the credit crunch.

"They are not bankers or hedge fund managers," he said. "They have vast quantities of money, and they are keen on spending it."

But analysts warn that rising prices for everything from food to fuel and an expected wave of financial-sector layoffs have led to a softening of demand at the next level down — works in the $500,000 to $1.5 million range. A growing number of these are going unsold, touching off fears that only the superrich can take part in the market.

"From the auction houses’ point of view, it’s quite encouraging that they are getting a lot of new collectors from Russia and the Middle East," said Ruiz, of Art Newspaper. "That globalization will help sustain the market. At the same time, when one person is responsible for two of the major lots that sold last week, that may be a cause of concern in the future."

 Francis Bacon’s portrait of lover ‘to fetch £8m’

BY STEPHEN ADAMS | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY, 21 MAY, 2008

A portrait that painter Francis Bacon made of his lover George Dyer is expected to fetch at least £8 million at auction in July, Sotheby’s announced on Wednesday.

It is the latest in a season of big-ticket sales of contemporary art that have seen record prices achieved for work by British artists.

A three-panelled work, or triptych, that Bacon painted in 1976 was bought in New York last week for £43 million ($86.3 million) by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Earlier this week rival auction house Christie’s announced it would be offering for sale a previously unseen triptych self-portrait by Bacon, which is expected to reach the £10 million mark when it goes under the hammer next month. The latest Bacon to be offered for auction, Study for Head of George Dyer, was painted in 1967, at the height of their affair.

Bacon never worked from live models and this portrait was painted from a photo taken by the photographer John Deakin, who like the artist was a regular in a Soho members’ bar called the Colony Room.

Oliver Barker, a specialist in contemporary art, at Sotheby’s London, said: “Study for Head of George Dyer represents the zenith of achievement in portraiture for Bacon, an artist who is world-renowned for accomplishing an incredible likeness to his subject via a seemingly chaotic use of brushstrokes on the canvas.

“Painted in 1967, at the height of Bacon’s love affair with Dyer, this emotionally rousing work is the iconic crystallisation of the most significant relationship of Bacon’s life.

“We expect it to create great excitement at auction, coming at a moment when the market for works by Bacon is at an all-time high.”

The painting will be auctioned in London on July 1.

Freud and Bacon are in the frame for a £25m sale

BY RICHARD ALLEYNE   |   NEWS   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   TUESDAY, MAY 20, 2008

A LUCIAN Freud work featuring a nude on a tattered sofa and a previously unseen Francis Bacon self-portrait are together expected to fetch more than £25 million at a Christie’s auction in London next month.

Records tumble: Page 28

Super-rich send prices soaring

AMAR SINGH | MEDIA CORRESPONDENT | THE EVENING STANDARD | 19 MAY 2008

A Lucian Freud masterpiece featuring a nude on a tattered sofa and a previously unseen Francis Bacon triptych are together expected to make more than £25 million at auction. They have been described as two of the most valuable and important post-war works to come up for sale.

Both will go under the hammer at Christie’s in London on 30 June, with Freud’s Naked Portrait With Reflection estimated to sell for between £10 million and £15 million and Bacon’s Three Studies For A Self-Portrait for around £10million.

The sale follows the success of recent art auctions in New York. Christies post-war and contemporary sale made £221 million with Freud’s Benefit Supervisor Sleeping fetched £17.3 million — a world record price for a work by a living artist sold at an auction. At Sotheby’s in New York last week Bacon’s Triptych 1976 sold for a record £43 million.

Both are reported to have been bought by Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, who may be among bidders at the London auction. The pieces are being exhibited in London and Hong Kong ahead of the sale.

Pilar Ordovas, head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, said: "The growing demand for works by Freud and Bacon has seen them recognised as two of the most talented-influential and valuable artists of the late 20th century."

Painted in 1980, the Freud was acquired for £2.8million by an anonymous bidder at an auction in 1998. In the top right hand corner of the picture a pair of legs are apparent - the artist reflected in a mirror. Bacon’s triptych was painted in Paris in 1975, as he was trying to recover from the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971. The painting’s owner acquired it in Paris in 1976 and it has never been seen before in public.  

Is Roman the mystery buyer of Freud and Bacon works?

 THE FIRST POST  |  MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008

Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch and owner of Chelsea Football Club, appears to have found a new pastime — collecting contemporary art. According to the Art Newspaper, it was Abramovich who paid the record-breaking prices, totalling £60m, for works by British artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at auctions in New York last week.

Although the Russian tycoon was not seen at either auction — like most wealthy collectors he would have bid by telephone — art world insiders are convinced he was the mystery buyer of Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which went for £17m, and Bacon’s Triptych (1976), which achieved £43m.

Cristina Ruiz, editor of the Art Newspaper, said: "Abramovich is now said to be the buyer of both these paintings and I’m very impressed by his choices. He has gone in at the highest level, but these are good purchases and I think they will retain their price."

She added: "Abramovich appears to be completely new to the market. It’s very interesting because the power in the art world is shifting from European and American collectors who are selling to Russian and Middle Eastern collectors."

Abramovich’s new-found interest appears to have been sparked by his girlfriend, Daria 'Dasha' Zhukova, 26 (pictured above with Abramovich), who, as The First Post reported last week, is opening a gallery in the heart of Moscow this summer, assisted by British socialite Molly Dent-Brocklehurst.

Roman Abramovich brings home the $86.3m

Bacon and the $33.6m Freud