Hunt for ‘missing’ works of Francis Bacon

THE DEATH of Francis Bacon, arguably Britain’s most distinguished 20th-century artist, is proving as controversial as his life. As art experts struggle to sort out and catalogue the cluttered contents of his London studio, lawyers are investigating the whereabouts of Bacon paintings claimed by his estate and willed in their entirety to John Edwards, Bacon’s loyal friend for the 16 years preceding the artist’s death in 1992.

The first effort has involved a team of archaeologists and conservators painstakingly excavating the jumble of the small, spartan South Kensington flat where Bacon lived and worked. The contents, along with the paint-streaked internal walls, have been shipped off to the artist’s native Dublin where they have been meticulously reassembled for exhibition in November at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - a donation from Mr Edwards. (Some of this material can be seen exclusively in our Culture section.)

But the legal spur to discovery is equally intriguing. It concerns the London gallery which had handled the artistic management of the painter for virtually his whole career — an association which the High Court terminated more than a year ago. Mr Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled that all the executors of Bacon’s multi-million-pound estate should be removed and replaced by Brian Clarke, the well- known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards.

Since then the effort to ensure that Mr Edwards, now 50 and living in south-east Asia, receives his inheritance has become a legal wrangle of immeasurable proportions, involving the gallery which represented Bacon for most of his working life: Marlborough Fine Art in London, and a Marlborough company in Lichtenstein. Marlborough also has galleries in New York, Spain, Zurich and Tokyo. One of the deposed executors was Valerie Beston, also a director of MFA.

Just as the jumbled contents of Bacon’s studio were colourfully spattered with daubs of paint, so the conflict and the background to it are liberally spangled with the names of celebrities, some of them deceased. Among them are Sir Paul McCartney, his late wife Linda and her brother, the New York arts lawyer John Eastman. (His clients have included Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell.) Mr Clarke is a friend of Sir Paul’s. Mr Eastman is Mr Clarke’s American lawyer. Mr Clarke has asked Mr Eastman to take up the case.

Within the canvas, too, are the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko who died in puzzling circumstances almost exactly 30 years ago; the 11th Duke of Beaufort, currently chairman of Marlborough; and some of the biggest names in the international art scene, including the former Marlborough boss — an unsavoury Viennese dealer who changed his name from Franz Kurt Levai to Francis Kenneth Lloyd and who died in 1998 with his reputation in shreds. The Queen herself is not left out of what is a confused and disturbing, picture.

Even the prestigious The Art Newspaper has difficulty interpreting it. Brian Clarke told that journal: "I knew Francis since the late 1970s — we were friends — but my long-term and great friendship has been with John Edwards. At John’s request I have been given his power of attorney for a considerable time and then I agreed to help out with the estate."

As the estate’s personal representative, appointed by the High Court, Mr Clarke has the necessary authority to administer and tie up the estate, and see that Mr Edwards — a chronic dyslexic who lived with Bacon but was not his lover — gets what is due to him. "I was assuming that it was a simple matter of resolving a number of outstanding issues and then the estate would be wound up," said Mr Clarke, "but before very much time had passed it was clear that it was a much more complicated affair than I had first realised." He found that the estate "is more extensive in terms of its holdings of paintings than has generally been assumed.

"Even though everybody thought that they had been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 1950s," continued Mr Clarke. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred times, but I missed them, and John Edwards missed them. It was such chaos in there and one was very frightened of moving too much for fear of disturbing things."

It was then that an approach was made to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin’s Parnell Square. With Mr Clarke’s approval, Mr Edwards donated the entire studio and contents to Bacon’s native Dublin. "[The Hugh Lane gallery] came to disassemble it archaeologically," Mr Clarke said. "But when they dismantled this extraordinary thing, we found these paintings. It also turned out that there were one or two works in other places - paintings that the Marlborough Gallery never saw that came out of that studio that we didn’t know existed; John Edwards didn’t know they were there. It is undeniable that the body of work that is in the estate constitutes the greatest collection of Bacons in the world, and it contains some unequivocal masterpieces."

By the time the Dublin studio is open to the public in November, more may have surfaced from the second effort at finding the complete oeuvre. That investigation will almost certainly examine the role of Frank Lloyd who ran Marlborough Fine Art and its international network of galleries since the end of the Second World War. The son of Austrian antique dealers, he fled the Nazis and went to Paris, and thence to England where he and a fellow Austrian refugee opened the Marlborough Gallery in London. By 1950, Lloyd had gained (as he put it himself) "some class, some atmosphere" by appointing as a director David Somerset, later to become Duke of Beaufort.

Royalty and gossip columnists attended Lloyd by the score. The Queen came to one of his gallery benefit nights. Venture capital poured into Marlborough from rich jet-setters, among them Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli, shipping magnates Ragnan Moltzau (Norway) and Onassis and Goulandris (Greece), the Brazilian publisher Assis Chateaubriand and the Rothschilds.

Lloyd told his salesmen: "If it sells, it’s art." He later declared: "I collect money, not art." He offered artists advances, staggered payouts and shielded them from the tiresome facts of business. He signed up such giants as Mark Rothko, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and, of course, Francis Bacon.

The Rothko affair was to inflict enormous damage on Marlborough’s reputation. A 1974 book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, about the American artist’s suicide four years earlier and the epic legal battle over his effects describes what occurred. According to a New York court petition by a daughter, Kate Rothko, her father’s executors gave Marlborough "virtually absolute control of the market" for Rothko’s paintings and "drastically limited the supply of money available" to the estate, "prevented" Rothko’s children, committed themselves to paying "unconscionably excessive" commissions, and "compounded the fraud" upon the estate. Further, the court petition said, the executors and Marlborough "wilfully and deliberately concealed from all other persons interested in the estate" the details of these agreements.

During the litigation, Rothko paintings were ferried out of the jurisdiction to Canada, despite a court injunction forbidding Marlborough from squirrelling them away. It took a private detective to track them down and force their return.

In 1975, with the Rothko case still unresolved, a Francis Bacon exhibit opened in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum. Lloyd and his wife were there to share Bacon’s limelight and approbation. A few months later, the judge handed down a decision in favour of Kate Rothko. He removed the three executors and cancelled the estate’s contracts with Marlborough, ordered the return of 658 unsold paintings and assessed damages and fines which included a $3.3m (pounds 2.1m) fine against Frank Lloyd and Marlborough for violating a court restraining order by shipping 57 paintings out of the country. This was later increased to $3.8m after a recount showed five more paintings had been in the illegal shipment.

The Rothko story, wrote its author Lee Seldes, was "one of legal legerdemain, camouflages and cover-ups, destruction of incriminating evidence ... the laundering of records, funds, and paintings. It ruined lives and reputations, wrecked long-term friendships."

The Bacon story remains — like his legacy — to be seen. According to John Eastman, the principal lawyer for the estate, "the defining question for the estate is: what is there beyond what we already have?"

Biteback

Francis Bacon must be laughing in his grave. The great artist, who died in 1992, has left a mischievous legacy. And not just the huge number of drawings and paraphernalia in his London studio, which are still being sorted through before being handed over, towards the end of the year, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the artist’s native Dublin.

There’s also a far more intriguing collection to go on show in the Irish capital from March 30: about 100 drawings and preparatory sketches that Bacon may or may not have done. I say “may or may not” as his London neighbour, Barry Joule, who was given them just before the artist’s death, has long been saying that they are the real McCoy. Yet most art scholars and certainly Bacon’s estate are not convinced.

The exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art was to be called Drawings by Bacon. But his estate spat blood. The compromise is The Barry Joule Archive: Works on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon, which is probably the most tedious title ever devised for an art show. The Bacon expert David Sylvester calls the drawings, many done on top of photos and newspapers, “crummy” and “almost certainly not Bacons”. Yet it was Sylvester who suggested to the estate that the exhibition go ahead, provided the phrase “attributed to Francis Bacon” was used.

In fact, Sylvester now welcomes the idea of displaying the work in Dublin. “At least we’ll have a chance to look at them and work out if they’re Bacons.” The exhibition might come to London’s Barbican art gallery later this year. But if they aren’t Bacons, who did them? One theory gaining ground is that they were done by a friend of Bacon’s. And that the great artist himself was in on the wheeze. A sort of memento-mori joke.

• Another Bacon gem has been discovered in New York by the BBC. An extraordinary TV chat, recorded but never aired, between the artist and William Burroughs. Fascinating, even if it is just two old queens bitching about the world and his wife. I just hope BBC2 decides to air this discovery.

Last week the channel announced a new series called The Conversation — a chance, as the BBC puts it, to eavesdrop on head-to-head discussions between two well-known figures in the arts. Anything would be better than the now dropped Face to Face series. Likely Conversation chats will be between Sir Richard Eyre and Arthur Miller, and Ben Elton with Lord Lloyd-Webber. Elton’s political hero? No, but they are collaborating on a musical about football. But the first of the series on April 23 will be between the lugubrious Mike Leigh and the, er, lugubrious Will Self. Maybe Prozac could sponsor it.

Gallery sued for millions over ‘undervalued’ Bacon paintings

                                                    By Mick Brown and Caroline Davies

THE estate of Francis Bacon, the most celebrated British painter of the 20th century, is suing his former gallery, claiming that it wrongfully exploited him over the course of a relationship that lasted more than 30 years.

In a claim issued yesterday that could involve millions of pounds, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd is alleged to have exercised total control over all Bacon’s artistic and private affairs. The gallery is accused of benefiting from the re-sale of many of Bacon’s works, having bought them from him at an undervaluation. Bacon died in 1992, aged 82. He left his £11 million estate to John Edwards, now 50, an illiterate east-Londoner who was his constant companion for the last 18 years of his life.

In 1989, he had become the world’s most expensive living artist when his triptych May-June 1973 sold at Sotheby’s New York for £3.53 million. The legal action follows a three-year inquiry by lawyers, accountants and investigators appointed on behalf of Bacon’s estate.

The case is certain to shake the international art world. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of Britain’s most prestigious galleries, and its worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA) based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed to Have exercised “undue influence” over the artist, who died from a heart attack in Spain. Neither Marlborough nor MIFA has produced a “full and true” account of their dealings with Bacon’s works, claims the estate.

It has identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, and which could be worth up to £30 million, which allegedly do not feature in any accounts supplied so far by Marlborough London or MIFA.

Other paintings, it alleges, were undervalued by Marlborough when they were bought from Bacon, then resold via MIFA for profits that ’substantially exceeded’ the prices which MIFA purportedly paid Marlborough.

The estate’s claim lists payments to Bacon which purport to demonstrate that in May 1984 Bacon was paid only 26 per cent of the $230,000 insurance value which one of his paintings — Statues and Figures In The Street 1983 — was given by MIFA three months earlier.

The case has strong parallets with that of the estate of the American abstract impressionist Mark Rothko, which inflicted enormous damage on Marlborough’s reputation in the Seventies. The claims, which were lodged yesterday with the High Court in London on behalf of Prof Brian Clarke, who was appointed the sole executor of Bacon’s estate by court order in December 1998, were served on Marlborough UK’s solicitors yesterday.

Central to the allegations is the claim that Bacon was a financial naive when, in 1958, he signed an agreement allegedly without independent legal advice giving Marlborough, “sole and exclusive” rights over his work. Marlborough’s agency, it is alleged, obtained until his death.

The estate claims tbat such prices as were paid to Bacon would not have been agreed if the agreement had been “reasonably negotiated” and wants it declared void.

Lawyers for Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and MIFA said the claims made by the Bacon estate were without foundation and they would be fighting the case.

The Bacon estate: Pages 4 & 5

Marlborough sued over Bacon estate

When Francis met Pablo

‘Lost’ masterpiece by Bacon to fetch £1.8m

A LOST masterpiece by Francis Bacon, the British artist, which for years was only known to collectors from a black and white photograph in a book, is expected to sell for up to £1.8 million in London next month.

Study for Portrait (Man Screaming), which was painted by Bacon in 1952, disappeared a decade later when a collector bought it for just £3,000. For almost 40 years, the only evidence of its existence has been the photograph in the definitive catalogue of Bacon’s work. The picture, which depicts a tormented man screaming into the face of the viewer, is to be sold at Christie’s in London on June 28.

The picture is expected to fetch between £1.4 million and £1.8 million. Brett Gorvy, director of Christie’s 20th century art department yesterday, said: “This is a tremendously exciting work last seen by the public some 40 years ago. It is one of the most powerful examples from an important series of portrait heads that Bacon painted in the early Fifties. ”

 My brushes with Bacon

Art critic David Sylvester was friends with Francis Bacon for 40 years.

During that time, he recorded many of their conversations.

Here, he introduces a selection of the artist’s previously unpublished

thoughts — about sex, about God, and about cricket...

DAVID SYLVESTER   |   LIFE & STYLE   |   THE OBSERVER MAGAZINE   |   SUNDAY MAY 21 2000

Bacon on Bacon

FB Yes. I love passing people. I love going to towns and places where I know nobody at all but very quickly talk to them. It’s so easy to talk to them.

FB I can’t imagine lying on the seashore, for instance, for hours, like people can do, with the dumb satisfaction that the sun is shining on them. That I couldn’t do at all.

DS And what about, say, moving to the country to work?

FB That would be impossible for me. 

DS Why’s that? 

FB Perhaps I was drunk and garrulous, had a lot to say. I think it can only be for that reason. I certainly am not conscious of those things. This is not false modesty; I am just not conscious of it. [1984]

DS Did you go to the theatre when you were younger? 

FB I drifted from bar to bar. 

DS And when did you start gambling seriously? 

FB Well, I have always been brought up with it, because when we were very young, we used to be sent to the local post office to put on bets. So, as I was brought up in that sort of atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that that influenced me. I don’t know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case. [1984]

DS It’s often said about you by hostile critics that your work reflects a feeling of disgust about human beings and of self-disgust. 

FB Well, I may have, I may very often be very discontented and loathe myself but I’m not trying to bring that out. In any way whatsoever. Nor have I a disgust with life. Life is all we have. I mean, here we are for a moment. [1984]

Bacon on religion

Bacon on work

FB The only thing that really keeps me going on is that I want to work — but work, I may say, for no reason. I just work; it still excites me to work. You see, unless you have religious feelings or something of that kind, how can you not think that life is totally futile — and becomes more so with age, because it hasn’t got the pleasures of youth? Probably the only thing, although I know it has no meaning, is that I like working. I like the possibilities of invention and the possibilities of something happening. Not because I think they’ve got any value, but because they excite me. [1979]

FB I know that teaching is one of the methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a period when there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your own attitude. The only thing that I can understand for art schools would be for them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are striving to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems with... But many people have to teach because they can’t make the money out of their work. In my own case, even when I could earn no money, I never taught. Except that once a friend went to the West Indies and he asked me to take his job for three months at the Royal College of Art, which I did. It’s true to say that I did it very badly. I didn’t often go there; there was nothing I could teach them whatsoever. 

DS And what effect did that have upon your own work? Did you feel it was just using energy which you needed for your own work, or...? 

FB Not especially, because it was only for three months. Otherwise I would never have done it. I’d rather go out and just do a job working. After all, I can cook, I can clean floors, I can earn my money that way. It would use physical energy, which would be so much more interesting than mental energy. Because I’ve got plenty of mental energy, because I never stop thinking, myself. After all, I think about painting. Not that I think thinking finally helps, and yet it does. [1975]

Bacon on books

DS What are you mostly reading nowadays? 

FB Well, you know, I read generally the same thing over and over again. I very often read translations of Aeschylus; I read Proust; I read anything that comes to my hand. Or any rubbish as well. 

DS What rubbish do you read? 

FB Well, most things are rubbish. So I can’t tell you exactly what rubbish. There are piles of rubbish and very little stuff that is any good. 

DS Do you read Shakespeare a lot? 

FB I read a certain amount, yes. I’ll tell you what I really read: things which bring up images for me. And I find that this happens very much with the translations of Aeschylus, and with Eliot. For some reason I read them, and when I read them another time, a different image comes up. I mean, I don’t say that these images are really to do with the poems of Eliot or even with the plays of Shakespeare, but they open up the valves of sensation for me and so images drop in like that from reading those things. It could happen just as easily from reading any of the trash. So it doesn’t really make much difference. Except that I’m less bored by those than I am by the trash. 

DS In the same way that you can be influenced by a news photograph or you can be influenced by Velázquez? 

FB Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [1984]

Bacon on Michelangelo    

FB Do you think Michelangelo was an erotic artist or not? 

DS Very. But almost embarrassingly. I find the Slaves almost embarrassing in the longing they conveyed for these boys. 

FB He was, after the Greeks, the great male voluptuary, wasn’t he? He made the male body really voluptuous. 

DS But with the Greeks, you feel that the artist has had these boys, and with Michelangelo, that he’d just longed for them. And that’s one reason why I find there’s a morbid quality in Michelangelo which doesn’t stop him from being the greatest artist of our civilisation. 

FB I think that Michelangelo, from what one knows about all of his history, had a deeply morbid side to him. But it’s more voluptuous than the Greeks. Because I think in those Slaves the longing is more poignant than anything you find in Greek art. [1973]

Bacon on cricket

FB Well, I have often seen cricket, and cricket is such an important game in this country, I am very conscious of it. When I did this image I suddenly said: 'Well, I don’t know why, but I think that it’s going to strengthen it very much and make it look very much more real if it has cricket pads on it.' I can’t tell you why. 

FB  Don’t the French have games in which they use pads? They’re deformed cricket pads, in any case. 

FB  It wasn’t quite the same. You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all these people, and they all had armbands on with the swastikas on them, and I wanted that in this image: it was stupid to put in the swastika, but there it is. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t think that people would interpret it all the different ways they have. But with the cricket pads, I didn’t put them in because I am particularly interested in cricket; I did so because it made the image more real. [1982]

“MY MOTHER promised me never to grow old,'” Francis Bacon used to say,” and now I now what she means.''

In many senses, Francis kept his promise to mother Winifred. He never grew old. He died in Madrid in 1992 aged 82 with his last lover, a Spanish banker. He painted and lived by sensation. He painted the screaming, open mouths of the Popes based on Velazquez’s portrait of Innocent X because he found their white teeth arousing. When Eastender George Dyer, the burglar, broke into Francis Bacon's house one night in 1964, he got more than he bargained for. “Take all your clothes off,'” Francis ordered. “And get into bed with me. Then you can have all you want.'” They were to remain lovers for almost a decade.

In an interview not long before his death, Bacon reflected finally that he “hated the thought of it all coming to an end”. Then he paused and shouted at the top of his old voice: “Shall we have some champagne!” When The Observer rang his house in Christmas 1991 to ask if Francis Bacon had passed away, the great undead artist answered the phone. “I’m sorry I’m not able to help on this occasion,” he told the paper’s eager obituarist.

Born at 63 Baggot Street, Dublin, in a private nursing home in 1909, Francis was a delicate child suffering from asthma and other recurrent ailments. None of this endeared him The Weakling to his tyrannical father, Captain Eddy, a moralising bully, known and feared for his extreme rages throughout the horsey establishment in Co Kildare.

A retired army officer who came to Ireland to train horses, and lived behind trenches and sandbags before Ireland’s independence from Britain, his self-righteous wrath knew no bounds. He had his young son horsewhipped regularly by the grooms (they later took turns sexually abusing Francis in the stables).

When he found his effeminate son trying on his mother Winifred’s underwear, the failed racehorse trainer disgustedly turned the 16-year-old out of the house. Francis left Ireland for London in 1925.

“I can’t say I was what’s called moral when I was young,” Bacon said, describing his early time in London. “Morality is a luxury that has come on me with age. I think I did whatever I could to get by. I’d always stolen money from my father whenever I could. And when I got to London I'd often take a room and not pay the rent.

“Although my parents had always told me that I was ugly, I found that some people were attracted to me and thought that I was pretty at that age. So I decided to do everything to get people to take a fancy to me and I didn’t very much care what happened after that.”

He had mixed feelings towards his father. “I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with, I realised that it was a sexual attraction towards my father.”

Bacon revealed little in public about his sexuality. One of the few obituary notices to have direct quotations from the artist on the subject was Lord Gowrie’s enlightening obit in The Guardian.

“He told me that he [Bacon] had come to the view that homosexuality was an affliction, that it had turned him, at one point in his life, into a crook. The crookishness, not the sex, was a source of shame and if he talked at all, it was his nature to tell everything. We both liked Proust and agreed that the beginning of Cities of the Plain said all that needed to be said about being homosexual.”

In Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain Proust describes a casual sexual meeting between M de Charlus (“whose ideal is manly precisely because [his] temperament is feminine’”,) and Jupien, a tailor. The “crook” reference in Lord Gowrie’s obituary was Bacon remembering the lengths carnal and otherwise — he went to pay his rent in London, Berlin and Paris, after his father had cast this fragile teenager alone into the world. “I remember once, when I was broke, I got myself picked up by a man in Dover Street,” Bacon recalled before he died.

“He was Greek but he'd been living in London for a long time, and he was obviously a rich man. Well, after we had been in his bedroom, he went out into the bathroom. And I started going through his pockets. He must have been watching me in the mirror, because suddenly he came out and said: ‘What are you doing, Francis?’ I said: ‘You know what I’m doing.’ Then he said: ‘You don’t have to do that. Just ask.’

“And he took me down to a bank and drew out one hundred pounds, which was a very large sum then, and gave it to me. It was a marvellous way to behave, and I've never forgotten it.” Indeed Bacon maintained, famously, that his life “has been divided between the gutter and the Ritz. I have lived on a diet of oysters and despair”.

His legendary love affairs were frequently stormy, sometimes violent, but never dull. One lover, an alcoholic ex-RAF pilot who played the piano in Dean’s Bar, Tangier, Peter Lacey died on the opening day of Bacon’s 1962 Tate Gallery show. He drank himself to death. Bacon attended the premiere and publicly at least acted as though nothing untoward had happened.

Ten years later, Lacey’s successor, George Dyer, also met an untimely death. He committed suicide on the day of Bacon’s larger and even more important retrospective which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1972, his body found crumpled over a toilet bowl.

Dyer’s death seem to reaffirm Bacon’s disillusionment with human existence. “You concentrate on something which was an obsession, and what you would put into your obsession with the physical act you put into your work. Because one of the most terrible things about so-called love, certainly for the artist, I think, is the destruction.'”

His asthma having preventing him from entering the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, Bacon joined the ambulance rescue squad instead. It is not beyond the realms of reason that the mangled horrors Bacon saw added a darker colour to the already black canvas of his soul.

Neither does it take a degree in Freudian psychoanalysis to conclude that the dark angst behind Bacon’s genius was fuelled by the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father’s grooms. It’s in his work for those with the eyes and the will to see it. The hidden turmoil, the rampant sexuality, the decay, the pain.

In an interview in 1991 with art critic Richard Cork shortly before his death, Bacon was revealing about his sexuality and the homophobic reception of his work in Britain: “Oh, they don’t like my work here at all. Maybe it’s the savagery they find in it, or maybe it’s the homosexuality which I suppose is in my work. I don’t go about shouting that I’m gay, but Aids has made it all much worse. People are very, very odd about it.'”

The homophobic boot was well and truly slammed home into Bacon’s face when Margaret Thatcher described him as “that dreadful man who paints horrible pictures”. (The Iron Lady wouldn’t have liked him anyway, but she would have liked Bacon, an enemy of cant, even less when he turned down a knighthood in 1977.) This was mild compared to the late Peter Fuller’s assessment of Bacon’s subjects as queer people vomited up from the underworld: “Lonely figures still throwing up in lavatory bowls beneath naked light bulbs, [who] occasionally ... hunch together on couches for some barbarous act of congress, or be sprawled disgorging their abdomens”.

Bacon believed that man’s existence was “a game without reason”. His was a fatalistic view: “We live, we die, and that is all.” He heaped ridicule on the idea of the Tate giving a whole gallery to his past painting. In a cutting reference to Henry Moore, he noted that he found “the profound vanity of these old men who try to immortalise themselves through foundations very boring”.

* Francis Bacon in Dublin, the first major exhibition of Bacon’s paintings held in Ireland since 1965, will be given its official opening at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin on Wednesday.

Life works

Critic ANTHONY CRONIN looks back on the art and attitudes to life and

death of his friend Francis Bacon before a keynote exhibition in Dublin

ANTHONY CRONIN  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2000

    The Irishness of other people is always a subject of great interest to the Irish. It is not always of equivalent interest to the people themselves.

    Francis Bacon displayed little interest in whatever degree of Irishness he may have had, and he was certainly not overly conscious of it. Indeed, so oblivious was he of such a strain in himself that he might even use a phrase such as "you Irish" when something one said or did amused him.

    When, after he died, I read an obituary in which Paul Johnson claimed his painting reflected "an Irish fear of death", I remembered such an occasion. He had unexpectedly arrived at my flat in Battersea one afternoon with the Indian poet Dom Moraes. Possibly because Dom had just been reporting on the Chinese invasion of Tibet and had said he had seen people die, the conversation turned to death in general.

    Bacon chose to regard what he saw as my reluctance to let go of some sort of belief in the afterlife as particularly Irish, and he was greatly amused by it. His own attitude, as expressed over the gin at the kitchen table that far-off afternoon, was succinct and simple: "When you’re dead, you’re dead."

    Which does not mean Johnson was not, in some sense, right, though it is worth remarking that Bacon is one of those painters who, rightly or wrongly, tempt critics into seeing their work as always being "about" something large and important, whether that be "the human condition", loneliness, sex, existentialism, death or despair.

    Most of his titles for paintings are quite exact and humble. I distinctly remember the paintings now famous as "the Popes" or "the Cardinals" being originally called simply "Six Studies after Velazquez". And this is what they are, variations on the theme of Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, a painting that would lend itself to just as much discourse about the human condition, or the weakness and terror of the rich and powerful, as Bacon’s works do - though it does not perhaps reveal the terror or expose the weakness of the supposedly great as much as Titian’s portrait of Pope Paul III with his nephews, or even Raphael’s unshaven Leo X with cardinals de’ Medici and de’ Rossi.

    But the modernist Bacon was, incidentally, the last to deny the greatness of certain old masters, though he always spoke of them in painterly terms. Neither was he one of those painters who affect to believe that their art cannot be talked about and that other people (and writers particularly) cannot understand it.

    He came into the French pub in Dean Street one forenoon, fresh from a morning’s work and, as usual, entirely free of hangover, and told me he had just that morning "discovered the secret" of painting. A cautious Irishman, ready at all stages for temporising smalltalk, I was astonished at the directness and sincerity with which this information was imparted, but at this distance of time I cannot, alas, say in so many words what the secret was, only that it had something to do with Frans Hals and his way of painting lace.

    Whether his painting was unconsciously or on some other level influenced by anything that may be called "an Irish fear of death", he, of course, made no secret of the fact that he was born in Ireland (at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, where there is a commemorative plaque) and that, apart from an interval in London during the first world war when his father worked for the War Office, he was brought up here, not leaving until he was about 16.

    Perhaps the most revealing story I remember him telling about his early childhood in Ireland concerned a maid or nanny — I had the impression of a sort of Irish mother’s help — who was left in charge of him for long periods when his parents were absent from the house. She had a soldier boyfriend who came visiting at these times and, of course, the couple wanted to be alone.

    But Francis was a jealous and endlessly demanding little boy who would constantly interrupt their lovemaking on one pretext or another. As a result, she took to locking him in a cupboard at the top of the stairs when her boyfriend arrived. Confined in the darkness of this cupboard, Francis would scream — perhaps for several hours at a time — but, as he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, in vain.

    He claimed he owed a great deal to that cupboard, and when I quoted WH Auden’s recipe for the upbringing of poets — "As much neurosis as the child can bear" — he was intrigued and delighted. It might be over-solemn and stretching interpretation a bit to derive particular works from these experiences, but his paintings are frequently about people confined, trapped one could say, in some strange box or limited space, some of them evidently screaming.

    Although there is a temptation to see these and other Bacon works as narrative, to invest them with a circumstance, a story and even a moral, what makes them unforgettable are the pictorial terms in which the predicaments of his people are conveyed. Our response is governed by the curved brushstrokes that create those curious concavities in the faces of his subjects and by the inexplicable effect of the almost dry brush dragging paint across an unsized canvas.

    In the years in which I had some acquaintance with him, the late 1950s and early 1960s, he gave the impression that he had come to terms with life and was determined to enjoy it. Despite his determination and ability to enjoy himself, however, there is no doubt that his work takes a bleak and, to use the fashionable phrase, "disturbing" view of the human condition.

    More than almost any other significant artist of the 20th century, he lived in his time, and his time was post-war. His work of those years is contemporary with Samuel Beckett’s, with the atom bomb and with the knowledge of the holocaust, a time when illusions were stripped away and reality was confronted as perhaps never before (or since?).

    Francis told the American photographer Peter Beard: "I haven’t any morals to preach. I just work as closely to my nerves as I can." A gambler and, in his youth, a man frequently dependent on rich homosexuals, he had lived on his wits and, doubtless, his nerves for long periods. He continued to do this as a painter, pushing each work as far as it would go, and destroying it if it did not succeed.

    In a way I find entirely admirable, he was a gambler through and through, always prepared to cut his losses. He had a gambler’s readiness for the worst, and, it is hardly necessary to say, a gambler’s zest for it too.

Bringing home the Bacon

   FRANCIS BACON: The Dublin-born artist, who died

in 1992, once said ‘all painting is an accident’

ANNA CAREY  |  ARTS PROFILE   |  THE ESSENTIALS  |  THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE  |  28 MAY, 2000

Dublin gallery finally brings home the Bacon

                     DUBLINER’S DIARY WITH GALEN ENGLISH

NEWS   |   BATLEY NEWS   |   THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 2000

City Lights

CITY LIGHTS  |  METRO  |  EVENING HERALD  |  THURSDAY, 1 JUNE, 2000

 Bringing home the Bacon

  ART: Bruce Arnold on two books to accompany the Francis Bacon exhibition

  which opened at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin this week

   BRUCE ARNOLD  |  BOOKS  |  THE IRISH INDEPENDENT  |  SATURDAY, 3 JUNE, 2000

I met Francis Bacon only once, in the mews where he worked, and where for a time my publishers had offices. He thought he knew me, and started a conversation immediately, his voice soft, almost silky. He was physically quite small, and in his manner androgynous.

As David Sylvester says, in his perceptive new book, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson: "The two sexes met in Francis Bacon, more than in any other human being I have encountered. At moments he was one of the most feminine of men, at others, the most masculine: he could switch suddenly and unpredictably. That duality did more than anything perhaps to make to make his presence so famously seductive and compelling, and to make him so peculiarly wise and realistic in his observation of life." It is also responsible for the sensuality in his art, for a great deal of its tension and violence.

More pertinently, from the point of view of his early life it shaped his relationship with is father, who despised him for his effeminacy. His father was a retired army captain, whose own father held the same rank, and whose grandfather was a general. This army background was coupled with some success in racehorse breeding, and Bacon found the company of the grooms more to his taste, including, as he grew up, his sexual taste, than he did the family environment.

A mixture of tension, fear, happiness, isolation, a considerable affection for his maternal grandmother, to whom he escaped from time to time from his parents — she lived in County Laois — created in him an ambivalence about his so-called 'Irishness'.

When I first had indirect dealings with him, in 1968, it was because I had included him in my book, A Concise History of Irish Art. My publisher sought permission for the use of an illustration, and was told in no uncertain terms by Bacon that he had no wish whatever to be associated with Ireland in a book on Irish art.

In a sense he was right. There was less advantage in the label then. But I take a certain wry pleasure in seeing the handsome the Francis Bacon in Dublin., a collection of essays and catalogue which is to accompany the exhibition which opened at the Hugh Lane Gallery this week. Bothe the show, and the acquisition of Bacon’s studio — which is to be reconstructed din the same gallery — represent a sensible and just homecoming, even if the artist himself, essentially a Londoner, might have had reservations.

David Sylveter’s book is fascinating. He knew the artist for 40 years. He interviewed him many times. He was duped by him. Bacon kept secret the whole resource in drawings behind the paintings, representing himself as working directly onto the canvas, when in fact he prepared from photographs and drawings. He also declared himself as  uninterested in the normal compositional structure of his work. In a telling  quotation, Bacon asserted: "I don’t think the layout of pictures is to me really that important. I mean, you can use the same layout for the whole of your life. It’s the way they are painted that matters."

This point is central to one’s understanding of the painter. Within the paint the glorious sense of life and movement is created, the tussle of existence — often the tussle of an individual form, or of two figures embracing or confronting in some way — float onto the canvas without seeming to be positioned. This is a strength with Bacon, giving a disembodied force and focus, where in other artists it might cause the work to fall apart. Bacon forces your visual attention towards the figure while at the same time challenging your intellectual assessment of why it all holds together.

Sylvester deals with much more, of course, than this hidden self who concealed, as Miro did,  the origins of work. But the book is not a 'Life': it describes and analyses the major works, from 1933 to the early 1990s., it contains a good deal of Bacon himself, through interviews, but biography is confined to a short addendum.

Bacon had a poor opinion of people’s understanding of painting, and no patience at all with the habitual endeavour to 'see' meaning instead of seeing the aesthetics of the paint itself. How wonderfully right he was.

In Francis Bacon in Dublin, Louis le Brocquy, who contributes one of the essays, sums this up in a different ay when he writes about the physicality of Bacon’s work, the intensely dramatic nature of his painting, like the painting of Goya, Delacroix, even Turner. Bacon transcends realism, but not appearance, and not the factual reality. This remains absolutely central, and is the reason Bacon eschewed abstraction in art. Grey Gowrie and Anthony Cronin contribute interesting essays on the artist in the same volume.

Francis Bacon in Dublin: How the wheel comes full circle! I look forward to the show next week in some trepidation. He is not a painter to be 'enjoyed' in the conventional sense. His canvases overwhelm. No book can present in any adequate way the aggressive nature of his vision, the scale of his work, the sheer power of the paint, the visceral sense of human life which is combined with a perverse but very real humanity. Nevertheless, both these books are produced to a high standard, the illustrations representing an excellent aide memoire to the real experience. Do not, however, miss the exhibition itself.

Bruce Arnold writes on politics and the arts for the Irish Independent

The New Galleries of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin were opened in March, with an inaugural showing of: Picasso: working on paper, curated by Anne Baldassari of the Musée Picasso, which brings together a collection of work which has not been exhibited together before; and The Barry Joule archive: works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon, the first showing anywhere of this collection of archival material given by Bacon to his friend Barry Joule shortly before the artist’s death. The galleries are located in the newly refurbished Deputy Master’s House. This building was originally designed to provide lodgings for the surgeons of the adjacent Royal Hospital Kilmainham, one of the finest 17th-century structures in Ireland.

So what do the two exhibitions have in common? Both are collections of works on paper, but this covers a multitude of possibilities from working notes to doodles, from preparatory sketches to completed images—and all of these are represented in the new galleries. Both artists explored the use of media photographs as a support for overdrawing and as part of photomontage imagery —though, as David Mellor’s essay in the Bacon catalogue points out, this was not an uncommon practice among artists by mid-century and was not, therefore, confined to these two artists.

The Picasso exhibition concentrates on the artist’s versatile use of newspaper as medium and material for expressing his ideas, a long-term interest reflected in the 70-year span of the exhibition (1893–1963). As a child, Picasso created his own home-made periodical, Azul y Blanco, and went on, in later years, to produce illustrations for publications such as Le Patriote and La Marsellaise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He used newsprint variously as a ground on which to draw and paint, as a source of subject matter, and also as a material for his papiers collés—the collages and cut-outs, such as Glass, bottle of wine, pack of tobacco, newspaper (1914), which were such an important element in the development of Cubism. Picasso made use of newsprint both for its appearance and for its content, and similarly used media imagery as a point of departure in various explorations, both serious and humorous, and for a range of themes, especially for his favourite subjects of still life and the human figure. Newsprint was of particular interest to Picasso because it encompassed both the commonplace trivia of everday life in its advertisements and minor features, as well as disseminating information and propaganda on historically crucial events. In common with his practice of using of “found” materials, discarded objects which he recycled to make permanent pieces of sculpture, he used disposable newspapers and ironically transformed them, through his intervention, into valued cultural objects to be preserved.

The Picasso selection is discerningly chosen by Baldassari from a vast quantity of such work held in public and private archives and collections. The artist squirrelled away virtually every scrap of material on which he made a mark, from subversive caricature additions to photographs in newspapers and fashion magazines, to completed works that involved the complex use of text and images from the mass media.

Unlike Picasso, who was in the habit of making extensive preparatory sketches to work through ideas, Bacon—or so he asserted—preferred to work directly with the canvas, prompted by familiar photographs or texts. Thus the process of his art was much more hermetic, and the evolution of ideas therefore denied easy scrutiny. The material in the Joule archive expands, and possibly challenges to some extent, this perception containing as it does an extensive hoard of around 700 items. While Bacon’s authorship is in question, the fact that this material was in his possession and was important enough to pass on to a friend for safekeeping, suggests it may be worth exploring in relation to his work. The Joule archive comprises the Working documents—a range of around 650 workedover media images that have been grouped under thematic headings—and the X Album, a photograph album once in the possession of his nanny, whose pages have been stripped of their original photographs and adorned with collages, drawings, and small paintings. The selection from the Joule archive is shown apparently with the intention of highlighting Bacon’s awareness of and involvement with popular culture and mass media. However, one does not have a sense of a cosmopolitan artist with an interest in public affairs, but rather of an individual who turned images of public and international events, news items, and of celebrity figures into opportunities for private and subversive forays into “all that is taboo, forbidden and sacred”.

Of the two bodies of material in the Joule archive, the X Album imagery comes across as the more purposeful, seeming to predict the forms evident in his finished paintings. However, its concerns are deeply personal and reflect internal fantasies involving the grotesque and the morbid. For example, some images are based on medical textbook illustrations of disease-induced facial malformations; Bacon was apparently fascinated by such imagery. The voyeuristic and introverted nature of the imagery is developed by the presence of framing devices and the inclusion of marginal figures with indeterminate forms and blurred features. Some such figures, for example that in X44Recto, are engaged in solitary sexual activities and are themselves subjected to the (simultaneously shaming and exciting) gaze of a witness. Similarly, Picasso explored the grotesque but, in the examples in this exhibition, as a tool for criticism. In Women at work, for example, his pencil additions to photographs that exalt forced work in Nazi Germany from a 1941 issue of the collaborationist newspaper Paris-Soir, transform the female workers into disfigured monsters—a comment on the distorted reality underlying Nazi propaganda. The divergence in the application of common features by these artists is indicated by their styles; Bacon’s enigmatic, shadowy forms contrast with the bold, decisive lines of much of the work by Picasso.

Interestingly, a Double portrait (X66Recto) of Picasso from the Joule archive is included in the show, and it is in keeping with Bacon’s recurrent theme of sight and voyeurism. In this portrait, Bacon has included a photograph of his subject, but gouged out the eye, reflecting his interest in eye deformities and blindness. Given his personal struggle to equal Picasso, several reasons for this image suggest themselves: was this an acknowledgement of Picasso’s inner vision, or did Bacon feel obliged to inhibit his “competitor’s” insight? Did he fear that Picasso could “see through” him, or was there some other, more complex and subtle reason?

If the two exhibitions were designed to induce visitors to conclusions about areas of connection or contest between the two artists, they are provided with little assistance. The catalogues each focus on the artists’ works separately, and the choices of works have been made independently without apparent reference to each other. Perhaps this is for the best as it avoids the danger of forcing arguments or leading opinions through selective editing of the material on show. However, given the very different nature of the material in each exhibition, they cannot be considered equivalents in the extent to which they represent each artist. While the Picasso exhibition is fairly complete in its representative range of works involving newspaper, the Bacon collection is much less conclusive. Until provenance is established, the Joule archive is unreliable though potentially invaluable in revealing aspects of Bacon’s processes and concerns. In the meantime, it serves to whet the appetite for the forthcoming major show of his paintings at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin which opens this month and prefigures the opening of his reconstructed studio, later in the year.

Yvonne Scott

Department of the History of Art, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Sacred monster, national treasure

The Guardian Profile: David Sylvester

• Francis Bacon in Dublin is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, until August 31

Looking Back At Francis Bacon is published by Thames & Hudson at £29.95

Artist Bacon ‘had a Swiss account

to dodge income tax’

By HUGH DAVIES   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   TUESDAY, 04 JULY, 2000

 Leading artist ‘was tax dodger’

RONAN McGREEVY  |  NEWS  |  THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  TUESDAY, 4 JULY, 2000

Francis Bacon, one of the foremost British artists of the 20th century, was a tax dodger, it has been alleged. Vanity Fair magazine is to publish details that Bacon, who died in 1992 aged 82, is alleged to have avoided paying tax in Britain by failing to declare payments made by his dealers Marlborough Fine Art to a Swiss bank account. 

The payments, made through the gallery’s worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art, based in Liechtenstein, were legal but Bacon’s failure to inform the Inland Revenue was not, according to the article to be published in this month’s edition of the US magazine. 

Bacon’s tax affairs have come to light because of a legal wrangle between his estate and the gallery. Bacon’s estate is alleging that the gallery exercised “undue influence” over the artist in a 30-year association. 

The estate identified 30 works of arts for which it claimed Bacon received no payment. The gallery claims that all the paintings have been accounted for because Bacon either sold them privately or gave them away. 

Bacon left his entire £11 million to his companion John Edwards, an East End publican. Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell says that Bacon's relationship with the Marlborough gallery was a constant compromise and that he preferred to be in their hands than those of an “incompetent honest man”. 

He added: “What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he got if he went with anyone else.”

Vanity Fair alleges that just before his death, Bacon put £4.2million from the sale of his paintings into a Swiss bank account, but asked for £1.6million of it back when he realised he would have to pay tax on his earnings.

FRANCIS BACON, TAX DODGER?

UK NEWS  |  ARTNET NEWS  |  THURSDAY, JULY, 6 2000

Francis Bacon failed to declare millions in earnings that he kept in a Swiss bank account, an article in this month's issue of Vanity Fair alleges.

The magazine reports that the British painter deposited at least £4.2 million in payments from the Liechtenstein branch of Marlborough Fine Art into the secret account, but then had the bank return £1.6 million when he realized he would have to show some income in the U.K.

The payments made by Marlborough were legal, but Bacon’s failure to declare them was not.

The shady doings have come to light due to the ongoing legal struggle in which the artist’s estate accuses the gallery of systematically defrauding the late painter and of being unable to account for the whereabouts of 33 works worth as much as £30 million. Marlborough claims that Bacon sold or gave away the missing works himself.

Swastika plus cricket pad equals art

David Sylvester takes a measured look at the legacy of

 a great artist in Looking Back at Francis Bacon

RICHARD SHONE  |  BOOKS  |  CULTURE  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY, JULY 9, 2000

GREAT DISSERVICE is done to the work of Francis Bacon in the current display at Tate Modern, a claustrophobic hang of paintings in a corridor-like room. At Tate Britain he pops up in a large gallery devoted to portraiture, in a selection notorious for its eccentricity. His opulent and relatively relaxed Seated Man, with shiny shoes à la John Singer Sargent, is matched to a wall text mentioning his ‘violent’ portraits. This is the popular view, that Bacon is invariably horrific. Admittedly, some paintings do suggest that he could be sent down for GBH. But his pervasive characteristic is one of perfumed catastrophe, past or impending, of menace rather than horror.

One of the strengths of David Sylvester’s new book is the way he cools Bacon down through formal analysis of the works. He is excellent on canvas-size, paint quality, the placing of the images, the geometry of the settings, the relation of the three parts of a triptych, that ecclesiastical format whose life Bacon extended into the twentieth century.

On the imagery itself, Sylvester is investigative rather than interpretative. In his discussion of Bacon’s images — the tasselled window blind, a swastika armband, the minatory umbrellas — Sylvester walks like a cat along a crowded mantelpiece, taking notice of everything but disturbing nothing. He opens up the subject — why a hypodermic syringe or why cricket pads on naked legs — gives us what he knows and leaves us in command of the facts of Bacon’s fetishistic regalia.

As the author of the celebrated Conversations with Francis Bacon and the selecter of many exhibitions, Sylvester is Bacon’s representative on this earth, a Boswell to his talk, a cicerone to his paintings. But he is no unquestioning hagiographer. Looking back on the painter’s career, he finds two periods of great achievement. There are the postwar years to about 1953, and the Seventies which saw the grand triptychs memorialising Bacon’s lover George Dyer. I think Sylvester undervalues the work of the Eighties, but does justice to a handful of landscapes and the 1985-86 self-portrait triptych that was a revelation in the Paris exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 1996.

New in this book are several early paintings that have only come to light since Bacon’s death, and which take their place among the volume’s generously illustrated pages with their double-sided pull-out colour plates. Some of Sylvester’s earlier writings have been revised and there are some previously unpublished fragments of taped conversations full of the old authentic flavour of Bacon’s decisive talk (‘I never saw one of Picasso’s [works] that ever looked erotic’). If the book isn’t the full exploration we might have hoped for, it provides a distilled introduction to a painter who, fatal as an influence, narrow in range and on occasion absurd, is one of the two or three modern British artists likely to last beyond these shores.  

On Francis Bacon

By RICHARD FEIGEN  |  MISCELLANY  |  CHICAGO READER  |  TUESDAY, JULY, 13 2000

The 1959 Francis Bacon exhibition was popular with Chicago artists like George Cohen, Leon Golub, Seymour Rosofsky, and Cosmo Campoli, though not particularly with the collectors. Bacon’s work had been exhibited only once before in the United States, in a small exhibition at Durlacher Brothers in New York in 1953.

I had never met Bacon, but on trips to London I accumulated 14 of his best works, dating from 1948 to 1956. I told Bacon’s dealer, Erica Brausen of the Hanover Gallery in London, about the exhibition. She phoned me and said that Bacon wanted to attend the opening. I thought that was a great idea.

A bit later, however, I was told that Bacon was eagerly anticipating his Chicago visit, that I was expected to line up some young boys for him, and that I should be a bit wary lest he use a little knife he carried around to slash any earlier painting he felt like disowning.

Whether any of this was true or not, I panicked. There were already three Bacons in Chicago, including one of his masterpieces, Figure With Meat, 1954, in the Art Institute, and I didn’t want any of them slashed. As for the young boys, I had not, nor have I still, reached that level of sophistication.

As the weeks passed before the opening, I was getting less and less sleep. In the end I managed, how diplomatically I was never sure, to have Brausen discourage Bacon from coming. The Bacon exhibition was a magnificent Grand Guignol of trapped, choking, screaming men and beasts.

The artists returned again and again to see it. But of the 14 paintings, and despite the fact that they were priced from $900 to $1,300, only one was sold, Study for Portrait VI, 1953, for $1,300.

In the face of death

                         JOHN A. WALKER

JOHN A. WALKER  |  ARTS  |  THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT  |  N0 5077  |  JULY 21 2000

Francis Bacon died in 1992, but the Bacon industry continues unabated His canonization even involves the preservation of a shrine — his London studio — relocated in Dublin Bacon, together with David Hockney, provides a steady source of income for Thames and Hudson. The two artists have much in common sexual orientation, figurative paintings many of which are autobiographical in subject media fame, market success and popularity. It is sad that editors employed by art publishers are unwilling to take more risks. There are other notable British artists of the 1950s still awaiting their first monograph.

David Sylvester has promoted Bacon for decades, and recorded eighteen interviews with him; he has also curated exhibitions of the painter’s work. In the 1950s, Sylvester even acted as Bacon’s agent, taking 20 per cent of sales. There are, for critics, obvious benefits to be derived from close friendships with artists but there are also disadvantages' they may overrate rate the work or be unduly swayed by the artists’ views Sylvester writes eloquently about Bacon’s paintings, and his intimate knowledge of  his subject generates acute descriptions of technique and iconography, as well as insights into influences and sources. (Much of Bacon’s work was the result of chance, memory, reading, and the use of existing images — photographs, film stills, and illustrations of old masters — rather than the direct recording of external appearances. He also borrowed from other artists such, as Soutine.) But an appropriate critical cal distance is missing.

An approach that acknowledges context would have been helpful In 1957, for example, Bacon painted a series based on the work of Van Gogh. Why at that particular moment? The reasons were surely: a Van Gogh show toured Britain in 1955-6, and Kirk Douglas played Vincent in the 1956 film, Lust for Life. Paradoxically, Bacon stressed the Expressionist rather than the realist aspect of Van Gogh, even though, in one of the fragments of interviews quoted by Sylvester he denied that he was an Expressionist himself. He was in fact such an individualist that to associate him with a particular art movement or style has always been difficult for art historians Sylvester once described Bacon as a “symbolic realist”; here, he employs the term “figurative sublime”. Looking Back at Francis Bacon is divided into four parts a review of Bacon’s oeuvre reflections on particular aspects of his art including a comparison with Giacometti; previously unpublished statements by Bacon taken from old interviews; a summary of the life.

The review of Bacon’s oeuvre is densely factual. In the section on reflections, Sylvester discusses questions of meaning and interpretation. During his lifetime, the artist preferred to remain an enigma, but psychological speculation has increased with the appearance of a number of posthumous biographies Sylvester believes that the famous “screaming popes” they could be thought to be shouting or gasping for breath (Bacon was asthmatic) — were inspired by his fear of, and sexual attraction to, his authoritarian father, but also that the threatening pope “father figure” incorporates a threatened mother or nanny figure. Sylvester also believes that, in Bacon’s paintings, open mouths can signify shouts of joy or orgasmic delight as well as cries of agony. The images are frequently ambiguous. Although a figurative painter, Bacon avoided naturalism and disliked liked pictures that were too illustrative or contained a message.

But Sylvester insists on the particularity of meanings in the works, and seems to dislike the generalizations that have been made by so many commentators — that is, those who treat Bacon’s art as statements about alienation, existentialist angst and our species’ blood-lust. He does not mention John Berger’s article, written in 1972, in which Berger compared Bacon to Walt Disney, describing the painter as “a conformist” for whom there was no hope of human improvement or social progress because “the worst has already happened”. Bacon often stressed the bestial — the worst — aspects of humanity; for him, Christ’s Crucifixion was an act of torture and execution rather than an event of resurrection and salvation. And in his illuminating comparison with Giacometti, Sylvester does acknowledge that the two artists shared “a certain mental atmosphere — the atmosphere of postwar Europe, full of menace, guilt, disquiet, doubt, a sense of nearness to death.”

 The artist’s political views reflected his cynicism and pragmatism Bacon was homosexual, but disliked the term “Gay” and took no part in the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s. According to Sylvester Bacon regarded homosexuality sexuality as “an affliction”. He was generous to friends, taxi drivers and waiters but unsympathetic to the idea that they might prefer decent wages to private acts of charity. Sylvester reports that Bacon had no respect for the idealism of the Left and for purely selfish reasons, voted Conservative.

 Bacon focused on the private realm on supposedly unchangeable (and irremediable) human nature. Much of his work was claustrophobic and violent: ectoplasmic flesh, distorted bodies trapped inside rooms, slaughterhouses and cages; Sylvester prefers to call the cages “space frames” — formal devices used by the painter to “concentrate the image down”. This may be true, but he seems curiously unwilling to address the more obvious connotations of confinement in the boxes railings and shuttering effects which Bacon so often employed to veil his portraits and figures.

Like the makers of horror films, Bacon used beauty and the pleasure of his medium to make viewers complicit in the pleasure of pain One of his biographers — Michael Peppiatt — maintains that much of Bacon’s art was “a projection of sado-masochistic practices”. The depiction of human cruelty — Bacon was obsessed with sensation and shock long before Damien Hirst — certainly raises questions of an ethical order, and some observers may feel that many of his representations of people are so bleak they have no redemptive value except as warnings Sylvester, in contrast, stresses the merit of a life devoted to art despite the godlessness of the universe, and contends: “The paintings are a huge affirmation that human vulnerability is countered by human vitality. They are shouts of defiance in the face of death.”

Francis Bacon’s Tangled Web

Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon, perhaps England’s most acclaimed painter since Turner, is at the center of a major scandal.

John Edwards, a former pub manager who is the painter’s heir, has sued Bacon’s longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art.

Examining charges that the gallery cheated both the artist and Edwards, its chicanery shielded by a token Liechtenstein branch,

Michael Shnayerson finds that all the parties in this scandal may have had hidden motives, including Bacon himself.

BY MICHAEL SHNAYERSON   |   VANITY FAIR   |   AUGUST 2000

Francis Bacon has come to stay in an old stone building in Dublin.

The widely declared “greatest British painter since Turner,” once condemned by Margaret Thatcher as “that awful artist who paints those horrible pictures,” died in April 1992. But his spirit is here, in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, to which his humble London studio has been brought, bit by carefully recorded bit. A team of eight archaeologists disassembled the site, noting the placement of every crumpled photograph and paint-smudged book in a three-dimensional grid. Now four curators are logging each of the studio’s roughly 10,000 items into a computer database. This is a first: no artist’s studio has ever been enshrined in quite this way before.

The visual links are fascinating, if inscrutable. A torn-out magazine photograph of monkeys with open mouths may have helped inspire Bacon’s “screaming pope” series. An old radiography text has drawings encompassed by frames and set off with arrows—both signature icons of many Bacon paintings. A large cutout picture of the head of one of Bacon’s lovers, George Dyer, appears to have served as a stencil for portraits of the “rough trade” thug. In November, Bacon’s studio will emerge from the boxes and folders, complete with walls and door, as a permanent installation, like one of those dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It will be re-created just the way it was: dirty and messy.

These, as it happens, are also apt words to describe the lawsuit filed by Bacon’s estate against the artist’s longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. 

The lawsuit’s charges suggest the sort of art-world scandal not seen since ... well, since the last time Marlborough was accused of such chicanery, by the estate of painter Mark Rothko, in 1971. Indeed, the superficial similarities between the two cases, and the fact that Marlborough stands accused of cheating Bacon during the same period it grossly underpaid Rothko’s estate and was fined by a New York Surrogate Court judge more than $9 million for doing so, suggest to many observers in the art world a likelihood of guilt on the gallery’s part—though such guilt would be no less shocking for that.

To some, the Bacon case seems, if anything, more egregious, because the painter appeared so trusting of the gallery during his more than three decades of representation by it, and because the younger male friend who inherited Bacon’s estate—estimated to be worth between $50 and $100 million—is a shy, uneducated Cockney whose work experience, before meeting the painter, consisted of helping his older brothers run a string of pubs in London’s East End. But the picture that has emerged in the press—of big bad Marlborough hornswoggling the hapless illiterate—may be almost as distorted as one of Bacon’s portraits, given the gallery’s own, surprisingly persuasive, version of events. Imagine, instead, a real-life version of the board game Clue, in which a crime may have been committed in the drawing room and every character in the house has a motive.

Including the deceased.

From outside, 7 Reece Mews appears just as it did when Bacon worked there. It’s hard to locate, which is one of its charms: you take a tiny street off London’s Old Brompton Road, then look for the arrow that points to a cobblestoned court of brick-walled former stables. Though plain, the mews is a lovely sanctuary in South Kensington. Inside No. 7, obviously, nothing remains as it was. Now that the archaeological excavation is done, a work crew is sheetrocking the walls, finishing the transformation of Bacon’s studio into a sleek apartment where Bacon’s heir, 50-year-old John Edwards, will stay when he comes to London from his large country farmhouse in Suffolk, or from his home in Thailand.

By the time Bacon moved to this address in 1961, his critical reputation was established, though he remained, at age 51, a painter of modest means. That was fine by him: all his life he had a disregard for money that verged, literally, on the criminal. As a young man he moved from one small apartment to another, often without paying the rent due. As his paintings started selling, he loved having a wad of bills in his pocket to blow on gambling in private dens, or champagne at the Colony Room, a seedy Soho bar where he held court almost every day (the gleefully profane manager there, Muriel Belcher, had been shrewd enough, when she first saw how charismatic he was, to pay him £10 a week just to show up), or oysters at Wheeler’s fish restaurant, where he invariably picked up the check for a group that often included painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. After he bid his artist friends good night, he liked to spend money on young men who indulged his desire to be beaten, whipped, and sodomized—a lifelong acting out, it was sometimes said, of the physical abuse he’d received from his quick-tempered fool of a father, a military man who bred horses in Ireland.

Otherwise, Bacon spent little money on himself, and the studio reflected that. A steep wooden staircase with a rope banister led up to a bare kitchen and tiny bed-sitting-room with lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The adjacent studio was as chaotic as the apartment was stark. Its door was a palette of paint smears—as close, Bacon liked to joke, as he ever got to abstract art. Within lay piles of what appeared to be garbage: torn newspaper and magazine pictures, creased photographs of the friends he liked to paint, and hundreds of unwashed, discarded paintbrushes in buttered-beans and orange-juice cans. On his easel would be the next of his startling yet strangely beautiful portraits, the features of his subject stretched to the grotesque and rendered all the more striking by the streaks and gobs of excess paint that Bacon flung onto the canvas with inspired daring.

Three years before his move to Reece Mews, Bacon had left his first dealer, a mannishly dressed lesbian named Erica Brausen, to sign with London’s hottest gallery for contemporary artists, Marlborough Fine Art. It was a move made less to burnish his career than to settle a £5,000 gambling debt that Bacon felt Brausen would be unable to pay off for him. In return for his signing a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him the money against current and future paintings, with the price of each to be determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($ 1,176); these were two sizes that Bacon favored. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year, and would be represented exclusively by Marlborough, which would also handle all his finances—acting, in effect, as his manager. 

Four decades later, Bacon’s estate would start asking pointed questions about that arrangement. Why, its complaint asks, was an artist so cavalier about money allowed to sign a binding contract without independent legal representation? Why was the pay scale for an artist of Bacon’s stature based on measurement, and why did it not include a provision for paying Bacon a higher percentage of the retail price of his paintings if their market value increased over that 10-year period? Why, though Marlborough was required by the agreement to give Bacon an accounting of the paintings sold, did it appear never to do so? And why, the estate began to wonder, were Bacon’s paintings not sold in London, but through Marlborough’s notorious Liechtenstein branch, Marlborough AG?

At the outset, Bacon had no cause to complain. New York dealer Richard Feigen had staged a show of Bacon paintings in Chicago. “I was getting $1,300 for the most expensive paintings,” Feigen recalls ruefully. “The others were priced between $900 and $ 1,200.” No one was necessarily buying them. The Marlborough deal gave Bacon his market price for 8 or 10 paintings a year—guaranteed. It also put him in the hands of Frank Lloyd, the most brilliant English art marketer of the postwar period.

Lloyd, born Franz Kurt Levai near Vienna in 1911, had started Marlborough after World War II with a fellow Austrian refugee, Harry Fischer, naming it for the Duke of Marlborough to lend it an air of grandeur. The “old uncles,” as Bacon would come to call them, chose to deal in top-tier modern art, much of it acquired discreetly from highborn British families brought low by the war. For entrée, they relied on a junior partner, David Somerset, the future 11th Duke of Beaufort.

By the time he signed Bacon, Lloyd had fashioned Marlborough into a powerhouse that had virtually cornered the market on undervalued European painters of the early 20th century—such as Klimt and Schiele—while cosseting and promoting contemporary artists as no other gallery did. As efficient as an investment bank, Marlborough gave artists advances, staggered payments, and handled all their finances for them. Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, and Lucian Freud—all were excited and proud to be Marlborough artists. Many gave their art to the gallery on consignment, receiving nothing until a painting was sold. But Bacon wanted ready cash, so the gallery bought his paintings outright.

Lloyd’s shrewdest stratagem was to establish the branch in Liechtenstein. It was little more than a mail drop, but Lloyd and Fischer bought and sold much of the art they handled through Marlborough AG; that way, both they and their clients could exploit loopholes in English tax laws. “The legal avoidance of taxes was an integral part of the growth of Marlborough,” explains one longtime London dealer. “Lloyd’s real purpose in operating the gallery,” says another, “was to move currency around. It was much more efficient, he found, to move currency around by paintings than any other way—and they made money on the paintings, too!”

Why did other galleries not follow Marlborough’s lead? The first dealer laughs. “Laziness . . . and social responsibility. I think one should pay taxes.” By the mid-1970s, Bacon’s paintings were sold exclusively through Marlborough AG.

The paintings would be picked up in groups every few months by a Marlborough factotum named Valerie Beston, who soon came to play as large a role in Bacon’s life as he played in hers. Not only did “Miss B,” as Bacon fondly called her, log the new paintings into a record book and arrange for their sale by Marlborough AG, she also handled his mail, paid his bills, even dealt with his laundry. “Valerie was very, very attached to him—a kind of love,” says Michael Peppiatt, whose 1996 biography of Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, is, to date, the definitive one. “It was a major thing in her life, it was her raison d’être. It was like a shrine to Bacon in her office—photos and mementos.” For legal matters, Miss B steered Bacon to Marlborough’s solicitors. According to the estate, the solicitors, in turn, recommended the accountant Bacon used to prepare his tax returns.

At some point, Bacon established a Swiss bank account—almost certainly with help from Marlborough AG, though how much remains unclear. Into this account the gallery began to make partial payments for paintings it bought from the artist. For the Liechtenstein branch, this was a legal maneuver. For Bacon, as an English resident, establishing the account broke no law, either. But failing to declare Marlborough’s payments to the English Inland Revenue as taxable income did.

Midway through his 10-year agreement, Bacon chose to exercise an escape clause. Yet he stayed on as a Marlborough artist without a contract for the rest of his life. To those who side with the gallery in the Bacon case, this is the point that undercuts the estate’s legal action. Bacon, they argue, was pleased with how he was treated by Marlborough; if he hadn’t been, he would have left. Anyway, they say, he should have been pleased. In addition to paying him up front for his work, Marlborough was organizing major shows for him and meting out paintings in a carefully controlled way at steadily rising prices to establish him as a major artist.

“He did mention to me,” says one old friend, “when that contract was up, ‘I just can’t be bothered to go anywhere else. I can’t be bothered. I’ll stay with them.’” 

“Francis once said to me, ‘I’d rather be in the hands of a competent crook than in the hands of an incompetent honest man,’” recalls art critic Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard. “What he said, and this shows the shrewdness of Francis, is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half of half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. And so however little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he’d have got if he went with anyone else.”

“He implied they’d been so good for him and put him where he was that he was grateful for that, and didn’t want to change,” says art historian Sam Hunter, recalling a conversation with Bacon about Marlborough. “And he was very loyal by character.”

There is, however, another interpretation for why Bacon never left Marlborough. Perhaps he feared that no other gallery would funnel money into a Swiss account as Marlborough did, enabling him to shelter a sizable chunk of his income from English taxes. Perhaps, too, the account put the painter in a vulnerable position. “He was perhaps less happy than he seemed,” suggests one old friend of Bacon’s who occupies a high enough position in the art world to be a sort of Deep Throat for the Bacon saga. Is that to say Bacon did feel trapped? “Yes, that’s the nub of it,” says this source, “but I can’t say any more.”

Lending credence to this theory are mentions, in a 1978 book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, by Lee Seldes, of Swiss accounts established by Marlborough for another of its artists at roughly the same time. Like Bacon, Rothko had a Swiss account for partial payments from the gallery, in his case to avoid U.S. taxes. Seldes suggests he may have been haunted by the gallery’s knowledge of his illegal act. “Those who know about such things in the art world say that Marlborough often offered collectors as well as artists kickbacks deposited in numbered Swiss bank accounts,” Seldes writes. “If so, these arrangements might have made severing one’s ties with Marlborough . . . quite difficult.”

The Rothko case is mentioned only in passing in the Bacon complaint, but it hardly needs to be stressed, so striking are the parallels it depicts. To some in the art world, the only mystery is why Marlborough hasn’t already settled out of court with the Bacon estate: perhaps, goes the reasoning, Frank Lloyd pulled the same tricks with Bacon that he did with Rothko’s estate.

Those tricks, as prosecutors proved in 1975, included influencing the estate’s executors with blatant perks, to nudge them into selling some 100 of Rothko’s paintings to the gallery for a low lump sum of $1.8 million, then reselling them for windfall profits. When a U.S. judge called a halt to the sales, Marlborough ignored him, making numerous sales covertly. When the judge returned a $9.2 million penalty against it, the gallery tried to smuggle a trove of Rothko paintings out of U.S. jurisdiction, first shipping them from New York to a Canadian warehouse, then trying a dead-of-night maneuver to fly them to Liechtenstein. But prosecutors, alerted by an anonymous tip, foiled the plan.

Lloyd, charming and evasive throughout the Rothko trial, became a fugitive from U.S. justice. Humiliated into resigning his chairmanship in London, he lived his last years in the Bahamas with a new young wife and family, until his death in 1998 at the age of 86. Starting in 1983, day-to-day management of the gallery fell to the two children from his first marriage, Gilbert and Barbara, and a nephew, Pierre Levai. The Duke of Beaufort remained, apparently unruffled by Lloyd’s various crimes. Most Marlborough artists, including Bacon, remained, too, and the gallery, scandalized but solvent, soldiered on.

Whatever his feelings about the Rothko trial, Bacon was almost certainly less interested in it at the time than he was in a handsome 23-year-old pub manager from the East End, who confronted him rather belligerently one day in 1974 in the Colony Room. More than once, the young man explained, his older brother, who managed a pub called the Swan, had been tipped off that Bacon was coming, and stocked champagne for the occasion. But Bacon hadn’t showed, and now the brother was stuck with the stuff, because no one in the East End drank it. “I said to him, ‘Why don’t you turn up when you are supposed to turn up for this fucking champagne?’” John Edwards related later to a British journalist. “He found that very amusing, and he took a shine to me. He invited me to have lunch at Wheeler’s, but it’s a fish restaurant and I don’t like fish, so he bought me some caviar.”

Edwards became Bacon’s closest pal, though apparently not a lover-rather, a surrogate son. Unlike George Dyer, the petty criminal who was with Bacon for eight years and committed suicide in 1971, and a previous lover of Bacon’s named Peter Lacy, who played piano in bars, Edwards was neither self-destructive nor a drunk. He had shrewd judgment, which Bacon came to rely on, especially in weeding out some of the hangers-on in the painter’s entourage. Bacon’s friends had no choice but to accept Edwards, though some did so reluctantly. “He’s a nice guy,” says one close family friend of Bacon’s. “Up to a point.”

With Marlborough’s guidance, Bacon became world-famous over the next decade and, in 1989, the most expensive living artist when one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby’s for over $6 million. Yet he kept Reece Mews as his home and studio. People would see him at the South Kensington subway station—but only after 9:30 A.M., when Bacon could travel at the reduced senior-citizen rate. With friends, however, he was an easy touch, often pulling a mass of crumpled bills from his pocket and handing them over. Peppiatt recalls a late night when Bacon invited him to go gambling. “But I have no money,” protested Peppiatt, who was a student at the time. Bacon pulled cash from various cans around the studio and spotted him £50. At the private gambling den, Bacon quickly lost his own stake, while Peppiatt, to his own astonishment, won. When Bacon asked for a loan, Peppiatt, naturally, obliged. Bacon proceeded to lose that money, too. The next day, over lunch, Bacon insisted on repaying the money he’d “borrowed.”

As he grew closer to Bacon, Edwards adopted a more extravagant lifestyle, installing himself with friends and family in a Suffolk cottage called the Croft, which Bacon owned. According to Andrew Sinclair, whose book Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times appeared in 1993, the Edwards clan then acquired a nearby Georgian mansion with converted stables, and Dale’s Farm, a house with outbuildings. For transportation, they had a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, one with the license plate BOY 1.

 “One banker, who went to dinner with the Edwards brothers, found himself seated with eight men and two women at the table,” Sinclair reported in The Sunday Times soon after Bacon’s death. “Four of the men boasted of their prison sentences for burglary and demanding money with menaces; but the food and the wine were excellent. The rooms of the house were superbly decorated, but the banker was told that the old furniture and the pictures were changed every three months. The constant factor was the numerous paintings by Francis Bacon, which were even hung in the lavatories.”

Bacon, who often mused on the finality of death and remained an atheist all his life, appeared calm, almost cheerful, as he asked his family doctor and longtime friend Paul Brass to be one of the three executors of his will. “Don’t worry,” Bacon told him. “It’s such a simple will, it’ll all be over in a few weeks. Everything will go to John.”  

Seemingly unconcerned about possible conflicts of interest, Bacon appointed as his other two executors Gilbert de Botton, a wealthy financier who had once been a director of the Marlborough gallery and who still served as Bacon’s financial adviser, and his own adored Valerie Beston. Death came quickly, of a heart attack in April 1992 while he was on a trip to Madrid to try to rekindle a romance with a much younger lover. On his easel back in Reece Mews, Bacon left an unfinished self-portrait.

Though probate took some years to establish, Edwards was given money by the executors, whenever he needed it, from his initial inheritance of cash, real estate, and a handful of paintings, valued in sum at $18 million. But the gallery held on to a dozen or so Bacon paintings—the bulk of the estate—taken by Valerie Beston from the painter’s studio soon after his death. “They kept telling him the market was flat; it was a bad time to sell,” says one source. And when Edwards asked Marlborough for a complete list of Bacon’s paintings sold over the years, and for how much, he thought the gallery’s answers seemed insufficient.

Unfortunately, the estate’s executors could be of no help. Gilbert de Botton resigned upon Bacon’s death, citing other obligations. Edwards believed that Valerie Beston could hardly be counted on for impartial counsel about Marlborough. And Dr. Paul Brass, though well-meaning, could get nothing more out of Marlborough than Edwards had: Beston told him that she was very busy, but was supplying Edwards with all the information he needed. Beston thought that everything was proceeding properly, and that her relations with Edwards were, as she reportedly put it, “very good.” But Edwards’s frustration was growing, especially since Marlborough, as a stipulation of Bacon’s will, was empowered to handle the paintings owned by the estate. “John was overwhelmed by having to carry on the Francis Bacon mantle, and wasn’t happy with how Marlborough was doing it, because they were running the show completely,” a person close to the situation recalls. Early on, this person says, Edwards had been contacted by an artist friend named Brian Clarke, volunteering to help with the estate. Now Edwards took him up on the offer, giving him power of attorney and asking him to scout around. “That,” says another close observer, “is when the niggles began.”

When Marlborough at last opened its warehouse, about a dozen full-size paintings, not all of them finished, lay within. Among them was a stunning crucifixion triptych done a year before Bacon died, in magenta and mauve. The Inland Revenue hired an expert from Christie’s to appraise the works, and after much back-and-forth a settlement was worked out: the government would take the triptych in lieu of transfer taxes for the whole estate. But Edwards, wary of the process and fond of the triptych, said no.

Not long after, at an old framer’s shop that Bacon had favored years ago, about 20 rolled-up canvases were found. These were mostly finished paintings, including two “screaming popes” from Bacon’s golden days in the 1950s, but some had been declared “abandoned” by the artist in his catalogue raisonné. Nevertheless, they were said to be signed on the front and back—an indication that Bacon approved them at the time. Now the estate was worth considerably more, perhaps five times more. A new settlement was agreed upon by the Inland Revenue and Bacon’s executors, but again, Edwards refused to accept it.

Then, four years into the process of settling the estate, the bombshell was revealed that Bacon had had a Swiss account, containing millions of dollars. Moreover, Valerie Beston had been a co-signatory on it, but apparently had failed to mention it to Edwards or anyone else involved with the estate in all this time.

Why? One Bacon friend observes that Beston had started as a secretary, as well as a nanny for Frank Lloyd’s children, and worked her way up to be a director of the gallery with an elegant home on Harley Street in London filled with art. Later, to the press, Brian Clarke exculpated Dr. Paul Brass from any wrongdoing, but pointedly failed to mention Beston. Yet a close associate of Beston’s recalls the day when Miss B showed her a check for £1,000 from Bacon, intended as a gift. Beston had never cashed it. “I didn’t want my relationship with Francis to be tainted by that,” she told the associate. 

 “She wanted to protect Bacon,” says another source close to the situation. “She lived to protect him.” Also, says another source, “she was old, and . . . had definitely gotten confused.” So conceivably Beston had somehow forgotten about the account. In any event, says the participant, “after the Swiss account turned up, Valerie Beston was exposed. So she had to leave.”

The estate moved to have Beston removed as an executor, and in December 1998 an English judge complied. Dr. Brass was also removed, much to his relief: the new money had meant new taxes to be paid to the Inland Revenue, but Edwards, now a resident of Thailand, had been able to acquire the whole Swiss account without having to pay any English taxes on it; theoretically, Brass was warned, he, as an executor, might have been obligated to pay them. Beston moved to France to tend a dying sister. Soon after, her lawyers reported that she was no longer mentally competent to answer queries about the account or anything else. (She is, in fact, not named in the estate’s complaint.) Since no executors remained, Edwards was allowed to name Brian Clarke to the post.

Also at the hearing, Marlborough was severed from the estate. As a result, Clarke and Edwards were able to choose new dealers to handle the Bacon paintings now owned by the estate: Gerard Faggionato in London, and Tony Shafrazi in New York.

Those appointments sent up red flags on both sides of the Atlantic. Faggionato was relatively unknown; Shafrazi was all too well known, as the dealer who made his name by spray-painting the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and who later represented Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, among other hot 80s artists. Neither Faggionato nor Shafrazi was remotely in Marlborough’s league, but both were old pals of Clarke and Edwards’s. Both, as it happens, have exhibited the stained-glass art of Brian Clarke.

By now the estate had a high-powered art-world lawyer in John Eastman, 60, of New York. Eastman, who is the brother of Linda McCartney, had represented many artists—one of his largest clients is the estate of Willem de Kooning—and on at least one occasion he had gone up against Marlborough, successfully representing the estate of the sculptor Naum Gabo in the early 80s. When Clarke described how Bacon’s paintings had been handled by Marlborough AG, Eastman perked up, remembering the role that the Liechtenstein branch had played in the Rothko case.

At Clarke’s urging, Eastman undertook to determine if Marlborough was hiding anything from the estate, and if Bacon had been underpaid systematically over the years. But every time he requested information from Marlborough, he felt the gallery failed to make a full disclosure. By last spring he was fed up, one observer says, and so was the estate.

The estate’s complaint, lodged in England, seems to make an impressive case. Much of it portrays Bacon as a naïf about money, easily duped by the gallery. At the start, the suit alleges, Marlborough let him sign the 10-year contract without independent representation. It paid him a pittance on the measurement scale when he should have earned much more. By way of example, the estate lists more than 40 paintings and studies Bacon created in 1965 and 1966, for which he was paid a total of £41,678 ($116,698) when their “fair market value,” based on sales at the time, was £101,226 ($283,432). Instead of granting Bacon full market value for his work, the complaint declares, the gallery paid him less than 50 percent of that, and appears never to have told Bacon what his paintings fetched when sold through Marlborough AG.

Moreover, says the estate, the gallery was acting not just as Bacon’s dealer but as his manager. As such, it had a “punctilio of honor,” as the legal phrase has it, to get Bacon the highest possible price for his paintings, and to give him the highest possible share of those sales. Yet in many cases, the estate says, Bacon received as little as 26 percent of the sale price of a painting. As one estate lawyer observes, the Rothko case established a definition of prima facie fraud on the gallery’s part for paying an artist 25 percent of a painting’s retail price.

The most shocking documents in the suit concern six paintings bought from Bacon by Marlborough AG in the last years of his life. Soon after Bacon’s death, his accountant received a receipt from Valerie Beston showing that Marlborough had deposited £1.6 million ($2,832,000) for the paintings into Bacon’s U.K. bank account in January 1992. But the complaint produced another document from Marlborough AG purporting to show that the Liechtenstein branch had paid Bacon £4.2 million ($7,434,000) for those same paintings. Worse yet, the estate claims, the £1.6 million was taken from Bacon’s own Swiss account. Not only was Bacon cheated out of half of what he was owed, the complaint suggests, he was paid with his own money!

When Eastman examined the list of Bacon paintings sold over the years, eventually surrendered by the gallery, 27 known paintings failed to appear on it. Some of those are visible in photographs taken of Bacon in his studio, yet Marlborough had no record of them. In an average year, John Edwards recalled, Valerie Beston picked up between 10 and 25 paintings. Marlborough’s list, however, showed only two or three paintings in some of those years. Was it possible that Bacon, lost in his creative world, had never been paid for those paintings at all?

Lawyers for the estate demanded the formal record book that Valerie Beston had kept of Bacon purchases, but Marlborough U.K. failed to produce it—then allegedly sent it out of jurisdiction to Marlborough AG. They asked for photographs, books, and documents removed by Beston from Bacon’s studio immediately after his death, but were given nothing. Instead, they learned that seven boxes of documents pertaining to Bacon’s estate had been spirited off to Marlborough AG. The attorneys went to the agency which had taken photographs of all of Bacon’s paintings, and ordered a full set of copies, only to learn that the copies and negatives were, according to the lawsuit, “collected in person shortly thereafter by Gilbert Lloyd.”

As the charges were filed, they were reported both in the London papers and on the front page of The New York Times, without any point-by-point response from Marlborough, whose English lawyers forbade Gilbert Lloyd or anyone else to make any comment other than that the charges would be “robustly” contested.

Since then, Marlborough’s side of the story has come clearer, pieced together from a number of sources.

It’s surprisingly credible.

In the first place, says a Marlborough source, Bacon was represented by two different law firms at the time he signed his 10-year agreement with Marlborough. One was Marlborough’s own solicitor, but the other was hired to help him thwart a possible lawsuit from the Hanover Gallery, which he’d left so abruptly. Marlborough became his dealer but not, says one close observer, his manager: “All Marlborough did was allow Valerie Beston to become Bacon’s secretary because Bacon was so disorganized.”

In any case, the amount paid per painting was fair based on the painter’s market value at that time, say sources, as was the method of paying by measurement. (Picasso, observes one art critic, was paid by a comparable measurement scale by his Paris dealer for years.) When Bacon terminated his agreement with Marlborough after five years, he set his own escalating prices, understanding that the gallery would try to double them or better, to cover its overhead and earn a profit. By 1990, according to a Marlborough source, he was charging the gallery as much as $1.8 million per artwork.

f Marlborough had handled Bacon’s work on a consignment basis, it would have sent him regular financial statements—and paid him a higher percentage when a painting was sold than it did by buying his paintings outright. But Bacon, says someone close to the case, “knew very well what his paintings fetched on the open market.” The estate’s claim that Bacon received as little as 26 percent of his paintings’ retail price is based, says a Marlborough source, on the sale of a 1983 painting entitled Statue & Figures in a Street. This was a deal, though, in which Bacon also received a painting in exchange, says a gallery insider. Usually, says the same source, he received much more—enough so that over time, says a close observer quoting Gilbert Lloyd, the gallery netted only about one-third of its sales prices for Bacon paintings after all its expenses for promoting him.

At first, says the source, the sums paid to Bacon seemed paltry, because the estate knew only about Bacon’s U.K. account. Then the estate learned that Bacon’s work had been sold through Liechtenstein. Marlborough AG invited the estate’s lawyers to come inspect its books, but the lawyers canceled two appointments to do so at the last minute. When a full accounting was subsequently sent to the estate’s lawyers in New York, it was initially returned unopened—because the lawyers realized it would show payments made to Bacon’s Swiss account, which would obligate them to notify the Inland Revenue. “The gallery actually said, ‘You might not want this information,’” says one estate lawyer. Finally, they sent the accounting to the estate’s English lawyers, who did open it—revealing the Swiss account.

In any event, say sources, Bacon was hardly naïve about what Marlborough was making from his artwork, or how his finances were being handled. “There are all kinds of public statements, whether in interviews in the press or television, where Bacon complained about his taxes and talked with a great deal of sophistication,” says one observer. “This guy was no bucolic bumpkin.”

Art critic Brian Sewell agrees. “Francis was no fool. And this idea that he was naïve and being taken for a ride is absolutely idiotic.” Adds another old friend of Bacon’s, “You must never forget about Francis that he earned his money early on by being a croupier at illegal roulette parties. He was very good; and he had to be able to count.”

The shocking charge about the invoice of 1992 becomes an embarrassment to the estate if the gallery’s side of this particular story is true. “Bacon got himself a bit mixed up,” one source says. “He had all of the money—the full £4.2 million— sent to his Swiss account. Then he realized he needed to show some income in the U.K. for those paintings. So he asked for a portion of it to be sent back.” To do that without implicating himself, he had his Swiss banker send £1.6 million back to Marlborough, which then forwarded the £1.6 million to Bacon’s U.K. account.

As for the missing paintings, says a Marlborough source, they have all been identified. In most cases, Bacon gave them away himself—or sold them, which he was allowed to do after his initial agreement was terminated. (“It’s well known,” says biographer Michael Peppiatt, “that Bacon gave paintings to various friends.”) Marlborough, which thus had no record of them, and claims it had no obligation to bother about them, tracked them down anyway. A list provided to the estate—and to Vanity Fair—appears to show all those missing paintings, along with the full prices paid for them, detailing payments made both to Bacon’s U.K. and Swiss accounts. (A lawyer for the estate pronounces the information “not satisfactory.”)

The estate also believes that Marlborough paid Bacon little or nothing for some 3,700 lithographs made of his work over the years. Yet if a list shown to Vanity Fair is accurate, Bacon was indeed paid, on a consistent and proper basis, for the lithographs.

Intimations of a cover-up, on this or any other aspect of the gallery’s dealings with Bacon, says a Marlborough source, are simply groundless. Any documents and photos Beston may have taken from the studio were in the boxes that a lawyer sent to Liechtenstein by mistake, this source explains. Half turned out to contain information pertaining to Bacon, and were handed over to the estate. As for the telltale record book, only a copy of it was sent to Liechtenstein, this source says; the original resides in London. But a copy of it has been made available to the claimants. And Gilbert Lloyd’s personal trip to snatch back photos of Bacon’s paintings, says a source close to the gallery, never happened. (A spokesman for Marlborough confirms this.) Lloyd did have a lawyer advise the photographer who took the pictures that the pictures belonged to Marlborough, and warned him that he’d be dragged into a messy lawsuit if he cooperated with the estate.

Sources close to Marlborough acknowledge that the Rothko case hangs heavily over the Bacon lawsuit, even 25 years later, and puts the gallery on the defensive. But “the gallery has learned its lesson,” one insider says, “I can tell you that.” And so it may have, to judge by two of America’s best-known artists. “I’ve been very happy with them,” Red Grooms says of Marlborough, which he had the nerve to join in 1974, in the heat of the Rothko trial. “The accounting’s very good, very straight, they’re very good at collecting money—which isn’t easy to do, actually—and I get paid. And that’s been consistent.” Larry Rivers, a Marlborough artist for 30 years, concurs. “They’ve always been honest with me,” he says. “Like any two people who stay together a long time we’ve had our disagreements, but it was never about anything where I felt I was being shortchanged. They were always perfect with me.”

All of which leads one to wonder: in a game where every character has his motives, what are Clarke’s and Edwards’s?

“They’re a bunch of cowboys,” says Brian Sewell. “The man who inherited the estate knows nothing about pictures, knows nothing about the market. The executor of the estate, Brian Clarke, is an absolutely lowly artist who has a private war with Marlborough because he thinks he’s marvelous and Marlborough wouldn’t take him on.” Their motives, say two other close observers, are simple. “Money, money, money.”

Clarke in particular does seem to draw his share of disparaging judgments. One prominent American dealer calls him a “ferret.” “Had you ever heard of Brian Clarke or his art,” says one dealer, “before he got the Bacon estate?”

One of Clarke’s supporters, English art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, suggests that at core Clarke, like Edwards, is driven by class resentment. “Brian is a tough North Country boy,” says Smith, “and he’s not going to let the Duke [of Beaufort] off the hook.”

Clarke is, in fact, the child of a miner and a cotton-mill worker. “My childhood memories,” he told one British journalist, “are of deprivation, of hardship, damp, mice and cockroaches.” But he scoffs at Smith’s comment. “There’s a certain ill grace in suggesting that a [properly structured] lawsuit is class-motivated,” he says. “It’s too silly for words.”

In the mid-70s, Clarke dove into the London art scene through a chance meeting with Robert Fraser, the glamorous bad-boy dealer who stood at the center of it all. Fraser was famous by then as the handsome, Eton-educated founder of London’s most exciting gallery, the Robert Fraser Gallery, though his fondness for drugs and his utter recklessness with money doomed the venture from the start. In Groovy Bob, a recently published oral biography of Fraser by Harriet Vyner, Clarke recalls favoring clergyman’s clothing at the time. The day he met Fraser, he recalled, “I had on a clerical collar and a leather jacket and tight jeans, and Robert tried to pick me up in the toilets.”

The two became close enough for observers to feel that Clarke was Fraser’s boyfriend, but Clarke denies this. “I would be proud to say I was, but it wouldn’t be true.” In Groovy Bob, he says the relationship was more complex than that. “That night Robert and I left with two boys from the club,” Clarke recounts about an evening at a sleazy Soho club called the Toucan, “and that established a pattern of behavior that was to characterize a particular part of our friendship for the next decade.”

Through Fraser, Clarke met all the characters in the Bacon-estate saga: Edwards, Shafrazi, and Faggionato. Also Paul McCartney, who hired Clarke to design the sets for his 1993 “New World Tour,” and Linda McCartney, who would introduce him to her brother, John Eastman.

In the process, Clarke became what he calls an “architectural” artist, working in stained glass, and began to win large commissions to design abstract creations for corporate clients which ranged from a country club in Japan to an energy company in Kassel, Germany. Before long he became rather wealthy, living in a spacious private house in Kensington called Peel Cottage.

Clarke says he’s taken on his executor duties without fee. “I don’t need any help from the estate,” he says, “and I don’t particularly want it.” But an executor is entitled to charge for expenses, and Clarke is said to travel frequently with Edwards, sparing no expense: for a gallery show of Bacon’s work in Paris, according to a dealer, the two reportedly stayed at the Ritz, with Edwards in a particularly impressive suite. “I know a person who was in it who had never seen a suite this large at the Ritz,” says one person in the Edwards-Clarke circle. “I do travel by first class,” says Clarke. “I’ve done so since 1980. And yes, I’ve stayed in hotel suites for 20 years, too—and expect to continue to do so.”

Nor is an executor forbidden by law to receive gifts—of art, say—for his good work. One visitor to Clarke’s home observed a large Bacon painting on the wall. “That belongs to John [Edwards],” Clarke explained. Still, if Edwards sees fit—and perhaps if the legal action is successful—Clarke could be rewarded with art on which, by law, he would owe no taxes unless he sold it or died within seven years of receiving it. Meanwhile, as one close observer notes, the owner of such a gift could borrow money against it.

Clarke waves off the very suggestion, and says that in fact the case has become a huge obstacle and headache. For starters, he says, “I have an over-20-year relationship with both Shafrazi and Faggionato. I’ve never found them to be anything other than impeccable. And because both were known to Edwards through Fraser, I suggested he speak to them.”

This case, Clarke says emphatically, is not about money. “John Edwards is wealthy enough not to have to worry about financial matters for the rest of his life. So am I. This is about the truth. And it’s about Francis Bacon’s legacy.”

So far, Clarke says, the gallery has “given accounts created retrospectively. They have not answered our questions, they’ve stonewalled us, they’ve moved documentation out of the jurisdiction of English courts. We had to get the courts to order it back.

 “When a will is discharged,” Clarke adds, “there are always delays of one sort or another. But in a simple will, a delay of five years is not acceptable. Especially when after that five-year period there was not the slightest hint it would be resolved. We’ve worked very diligently to avoid bringing this case to court. All we wanted was for Marlborough to tell us the truth. If they want the truth as well, they have nothing to fear.”

One way to assess Clarke and Edwards is by how they’ve handled Bacon’s art to date. Several shows of the estate’s holdings—the paintings at Reece Mews when Bacon died, and those found since his death—have been held in Paris, London, and New York. The consensus seems to be that many of the recent works are unfinished, and that most of the rest appear in an early catalogue raisonné as “abandoned” paintings—listed that way by Bacon so that if they surfaced they would not be sold or judged as part of his oeuvre. One London dealer recalls taking on several “abandoned” Bacons in the 1960s, and incurring the painter’s wrath. “I was on the wrong foot with Bacon after that.” An art-world source who attended a Shafrazi show found the paintings “pretty indifferent . . . I think Bacon had every idea that these paintings should have been edited out.”

To one rival dealer, the recent shows suggest an intriguing motive for the estate’s insistence on acquiring a complete list from Marlborough of all of Bacon’s paintings. Clarke has acknowledged wanting to create an updated catalogue raisonné. When that’s done, the matter of which Bacon paintings are or are not “abandoned” can be revisited. The legal, logical arbiter of that will be the estate. If “abandoned” paintings are redefined as part of Bacon’s body of work, their value will rise. Clarke concedes that that would probably make them easier to sell, “but the intellectual value is so exciting that the last thing we want to do is part with any of these pictures.”

Another realm of Bacon’s work in which the estate has made decisions is that of the drawings—genuine or not—which have surfaced since his death, challenging the painter’s oft-stated claim that he went straight to the canvas.

The first lot surfaced courtesy of a South Kensington neighbor of Bacon’s named Barry Joule, who became a friend and helper to the painter after meeting him by chance in 1978. Often, Joule says, Bacon asked him to destroy portraits that failed to meet his standards; Joule would comply by cutting out the faces with a Stanley knife. It was Joule, too, who introduced Bacon to a young Spanish banker in 1988 who became the painter’s last lover. When the banker broke up with Bacon in 1990, the painter was devastated, says Joule, and poured his sorrow into all his last paintings. The hope of reviving that romance was what propelled Bacon to take his ill-fated trip to Madrid in April 1992, even after a collapse and hospitalization, three months before, for a faulty heart valve.

Joule says that when he drove Bacon to the airport that last time, the painter asked him to deal with a cardboard box and a folder that together contained hundreds of drawings, as well as magazine and newspaper images drawn or painted over, and an early self-portrait on canvas. Joule claims his instruction was somewhat cryptic—“You know what to do with it”—but Joule interpreted it to mean he should safeguard the work.

In his art-filled London apartment, the 45-year-old self-described Canadian ex-hippie, his long blond hair cut Sir Galahad style, recalls the furor that greeted his unveiling of the drawings in 1996. “Here was a man who said all his life he never drew—and the people who’d written about him, and particularly [Bacon critic and interviewer] David Sylvester, had followed that line, hook, line, and sinker.” They were embarrassed, Joule feels, because they hadn’t pushed him hard enough in their questions about whether he drew.

The estate responded first with silence, then with lawyers’ letters demanding the trove be returned. In a number of coffee-shop meetings, Joule managed to persuade Clarke that he was, at least, a real friend of Bacon’s. And his avowal that he would give nearly all the drawings to a museum helped assuage Clarke’s suspicions. But a meeting at the Tate Gallery to judge whether the drawings were real ended in keen frustration. Sylvester, who had declared in a lecture upon first hearing of the drawings that they were legitimate, now said that he could not “see Bacon’s hand in them.” Another critic theorized that while much of the material must have come from Bacon’s studio, someone else might have “overpainted” the magazine pictures. Despite enthusiasm for them from more than one of his curators, Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, was persuaded to reject the collection.

Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt, who sat in on the meeting, agrees with Sylvester about the Joule drawings. “They didn’t smell right,” he says. “From everything I knew about Bacon over 30 years, he didn’t need to practice like that, repetitively, before doing a picture. The whole point of the picture was that as far as possible it should be spontaneous. And the idea that he should have kept that huge amount of work, which he didn’t want people to see, then preserved it and given it to Joule—it’s unlikely.”

Yet within months of that meeting, the Tate announced its acquisition of a collection of other Bacon drawings from two old friends of the painter, Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock. The collection is essentially a notebook containing 42 works on paper, yet the Tate bought it for £360,000 ($637,200). Ironically, the collection came through Marlborough, supported by Sylvester and, tacitly at least, by the estate, which appears to need Sylvester as much as he needs it.

More curious still is the estate’s decision to give Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin. In September 1997, John Eastman asked Serota if he would be interested in acquiring the studio as a gift to the Tate if it could be reconstructed as a permanent installation. Serota expressed some interest, but warned that he couldn’t predict how the Tate’s trustees would feel about dedicating a permanent space to it; the museum was having trouble enough finding space for its Bacon paintings. Eastman suggested that Serota view the studio by getting keys from Valerie Beston. But when Serota called her, on more than one occasion, Beston said the keys were with Edwards; she chose not to mention that the estate had begun to disassociate itself from Marlborough, or that she and Edwards were no longer working together.

Rather than approach Serota another time, Clarke and Edwards gave the studio to the Hugh Lane, reasoning that Bacon had been born in Ireland and spent his early years there. To Serota, who heard of the gift only when a newspaper reporter called to ask for his reaction to it, the estate’s behavior was baffling and unfortunate. The Tate clearly lost out on a plum, but to many in the Bacon circle the estate lost, too, because the Tate would have seemed the right place for the studio of a painter who had done nearly all his best-known work in London.

Now that most of the items are logged in on the Hugh Lane gallery’s computerized catalogue, a Bacon fan can amuse himself by typing in the names of Bacon cronies to see how many references to each appear in the studio’s contents. Photographer Peter Beard, a close friend since the mid-1960s, has 254 references. (Bacon, says Michael Peppiatt, gave him a triptych of Beard, just one of the many examples of paintings given by the artist to friends and not sold through Marlborough.) John Edwards has 143, and Lucian Freud 94. But, for Brian Clarke, there are only four references. Along with the photographs and papers, the collection includes 58 slashed canvases—each with a gaping hole where the face once was—and one unfinished self-portrait, the painting found on Bacon’s easel after his death.

A short ride away is the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which looks like a castle with elaborate formal gardens, where an outbuilding is currently given over to the Barry Joule collection, warily subtitled “Works on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon.” Many of the items are news photographs—boxers, Nazis, cricket players—painted over with hurried brushstrokes. But enough of them do jibe so closely with the studio drawings as to seem of a piece with them. If the estate declares them so, the Tate will look foolish for buying its smaller collection of drawings instead of taking the Joule material for free; so will the panjandrums of the Bacon circle for judging them unpersuasive. But if it calls them fake, it needs some proof, and so far, it appears to have none.

Handing Bacon’s estate is, as it turns out, fraught with tough decisions—none harder than whether or not to push ahead with the lawsuit against Marlborough. The gallery’s strong response will surely give the estate’s lawyers pause. So must a recent verdict in another case against the gallery, brought by the estate of German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, who died in 1948. In the Schwitters case, Marlborough’s Liechtenstein branch was accused of withholding information about its stewardship of roughly 700 works by Schwitters from the legal guardian for the painter’s stroke-debilitated son. The son, like Rothko and Bacon, had a Swiss bank account. But when the guardian tried to access it, Marlborough moved it to Liechtenstein. The guardian, in turn, terminated Marlborough’s contract with the estate and sued for the return of the artworks. Eventually, Marlborough did surrender the art—but countersued for breach of contract. A lower court in Norway found in the estate’s favor, declaring Marlborough’s conduct “reprehensible.” But a higher court reversed the ruling last March, chastising the gallery for not coughing up information earlier to the estate, but finding that the gallery’s actions did not breach its contract, and awarding it $1.2 million plus court costs.

So Marlborough is powerful, and in the Bacon case it may also be right. If it is, however, that hardly makes it a paragon of virtue. As in the Schwitters case, the gallery is accused of almost extraordinary hubris, failing to communicate with Bacon’s rightful heir, much less giving him a full accounting in a timely fashion. If so, the gallery has brought the suit upon itself. (Marlborough’s lawyers say that the gallery cooperated with the estate’s executors from when the first requests for information were made in 1997, and that charges of hubris are completely unfounded.)

Then, too, even if Bacon was eagerly avoiding English taxes, Marlborough has played the tax game on a grand scale for far too long. “It’s a much bigger question than the Bacon affair,” says one longtime London dealer. “It’s about people using foreign currency to buy art.” And using the art, in turn, to launder their money. “If you take $10,000 into the U.S., you have to declare it,” the dealer explains, “but if you consign a $2 million painting through Liechtenstein, you don’t have to declare it.” The gallery wins, not just by selling its paintings, but by moving art from country to country for tax advantages. “Look at the annual gallery reports,” the dealer says. “You will never see Marlborough appearing in the highest profit or turnover columns,” despite the gallery’s prominence in the London art world. “There’s a pattern,” says the dealer, “of disguising information.” (“Absolutely false,” says one Marlborough lawyer. “It’s just that in London people don’t want to pay the 17.5 percent [value-added tax]. So anyone who wants a Bacon will go find it in New York or Switzerland.”)

Which side, in the case of The Estate of Francis Bacon v. Marlborough Fine Art, is more egregious? One titled English collector seems to sum up the growing consensus. “I don’t think for a moment the Marlborough [directors] are saints—they’re rough and tough—but there are very few artists’ families who don’t feel put out,” he snorts. And in this case, John Edwards has little reason to be. “He’s a wanker,” says the old lord. “He’s bloody lucky to get what he got.”

JOHN McEWEN  |  BACON IN DUBLIN  |  ART  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SUNDAY 6 AUGUST, 2000

It is lucky that Francis Bacon’s South Kensington studio, where he worked for the last 30 years of his life, did not end up in the Tate, because it would have looked like just another example of installation art. Instead it has been shipped piecemeal for preservation as a shrine to be opened next year in a refurbished annexe to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the city of his birth. A survey of his career selected by the supreme authority David Sylvester, Bacon in Dublin Bacon in Dublin at the Hugh Lane Gallery (until August 31), acts as an important prelude to this event.

Bacon lived in Ireland almost exclusively until he was 17, his father having moved there to train horses; so it is the country of his formative years. A friend, Doreen Molony, recalled how he was fascinated with butchers’ shops and how "to this day" (1977) she saw "evidence in his paintings of hanging carcasses". And there was a maid who used to lock him in a cupboard when her boyfriend came to visit, a trauma to which he said he was deeply indebted—the source perhaps of his obsession with contortion and restriction.

Moreover, although not Irish, he behaved a if he were. There was nothing he enjoyed more than a good "craic over a jar", and his whole attitude to life was based on gambling: "I was brought up in that sort of atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that influenced me. I don’t know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case."

His passion for roulette and painting mirrored this attitude, each governed for him by chance and instinct. Certainly the Irish are delighted to adopt him as one of their own. Posters advertise the show with the alternating slogans: "It will create awe." "It will create a sensation." And for the cabbies it is "Good for Franny" and a case of "brining home the Bacon".

This is Sylvester’s fifth major Bacon exhibition since the artist’s death, each deliberately revealing a different aspect of the work. In the course of curating the Dublin show, he came increasingly to agree with what the painter Rodrigo Moynihan used to say in the early 1950s—that Bacon’s pictures had a curious affinity with 18th-century English portraiture by the likes of Reynolds and Gainsborough—another legacy of the painter’s Irish childhood perhaps, since these are the sort of pictures he would have seen in the Georgian country houses in which he grew up. It is a view at odds with the popular conception of Bacon as a painter of horror and squalor; and his own disappointed conviction that people did not like, or really appreciate, his pictures.

In the elegant Georgian setting of the Hugh Lane it is the portraits that have pride of place—grand and painterly as they are in the manner of the 18th-century full-length; and seemingly made-to-measure for the walls of the ground-floor enfilade, stripped of the permanent collection in his honour.

In this context it should be recognised that Bacon had an 18th-century as well as an Irish side to his character: the gambling, the dandy’s disdain for convention, the rational attitude to religion: "when you’re dead, you’re dead". He would surely have got on like a house on fire with Sheridan or Charles James Fox or Gainsborough, although he did not suffer from clients as he never painted commissions—in that sense he is very much not an 18th-century portraitist.

At the Hayward Sylvester confined the selection to figure paintings, releasing them from the narrow confines the artist preferred and placing them in wide-open spaces—a monumental test they triumphantly withstood, confirming his greatness as a colourist and the ultimate achievement of the triptychs.

But for Dublin, where two side galleries afford the chance to show smaller works, he survey the full range, in subject as well as date—from the small Crucifixion 1933, the most important early painting, to the large, barely outlined figurative self-portrait which was on the artist’s easel when he died. It was typical of Bacon’s dismissal of half measures that he painted small or large but hardly ever  in the intermediary size preferred by dealers and collectors.

The most sensational aspect of the show is the inclusion of seven paintings from the artist’s estate, six of which have never been exhibited before. Most are unfinished works dating from 1949 to 1952.

Bacon was such a meticulous painter, whatever the scale, that to see an unfinished work is lightly shocking—especially when glazed and in a gilded frame. But artfully integrated in the first room their complementary size and sombre palette ensure a suitably impressive opening.

Some are sketchier than others but Bacon never destroyed them, as he always did anything he considered sub-standard, and Study after Velasquez was "unfinished", and accordingly never shown during his lifetime, only because it was intended as part of a triptych. It is from the famous "screaming pope" series and, in Sylvester’s opinion, possibly the most powerful. Bacon, to his regret, thought it had been destroyed, whereas it is now revealed to have been merely "lost" in storage.

Bacon’s evolution as an artist might be described as from the general to the specific: from grey to colour, from "untitled" subjects to often named portraits, frequently self-portraits for want, as he said, of a sitter. It is also a story of growing mastery and grandeur by a sublime tragedian. As obsessed with technique as Gainsborough, Bacon’s methods became less crude as his reliance on solemn geometry and the impact of colour grew, and his delight in the game of chance and nuance deepened.

Two cabinets at the entrance connect the show with the studio by containing some of the source material stored on the database. One discovery is a photograph of the French statesman Poincare, copied for the face of Study for a Pope III; and there is ample evidence of the inspiration derived from illustrations in medical books—X-rays and the circles for enlarged details; faces ravaged by disease.

On a lighter note, in every sense, there is a photograph of his much-loved nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. It proves that the choice of the pseudonym Lightfoot when he worked briefly as a butler was not quit as inspired an example of his wit as one had thought. Never mind—it is still a perfect name for a butler.

Allied with the catalogue and Sylvester’s newly published Looking back at Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson) with its revised over-view, previously unpublished scraps of taped conversation and corrective biographical note, this latest show marks the apogee of a unique and momentous association.