Francis Bacon's Tangled Web 

Vanity Fair   August 2000

 

Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon, perhaps Europe'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 hidden motives, including Bacon himself

 

Francis Bacon has come to stay in an old stone building in Dublin. The widely declared "greatest 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 recoded bit. A team of eight archaeologists disassembled the site, noting the placement of every crumbled photograph and paint-smudged book in a three-dimensional grid. Now four curators are are logging each of the studio's roughly10,000 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 popes" 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 2rough 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 he 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 the 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 guild 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.

 

 

                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                  A self-portrait by Bacon, 1970.    

 

 

By the time Bacon moved to his 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, seedy Soho bar where he held court almost everyday (the gleefully profane manager there, Muriel Belcher, had been shred 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 Lucien 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 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 appeaered to be garbage: torn newspaper and magazine picture, 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  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 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 favoured. 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 nost 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 the 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 advance, staggered payments, and handled all their finances for them. Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoscka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, and Lucien 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 opening 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 through Marlborough AG.

The paintings would be picked up in groups very few months by a Marlborough factotum named Valeries 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. 2Valerie was very, very attracted 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 the help of 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.

 

 

                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      SELF-DEFACING 

                                                                                                                                                                       A 1962 Irving Penn photograph of Francis Bacon with a Rembrandt self-portrait.

 

 

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 being constantly 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, 2but I can' say anymore."

Lending credence to this theory are mentions, in a 1978 book, The Legacy of Matk 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 would 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 Barabra, 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 judgement, 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."

 

 

                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         GOOD WILL HUNTING 

                                                                              Bacon with his heir, John Edwards, in the early 1970s. "He's a nice guy. Up to a point," says a Bacon-family friend about Edwards.

 

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 a 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 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 the 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, Edwrads 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,2 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 Clark, volunteering to help with the estate. Now Edwards took up on the offer, giving him power of attorney and asking him to scout around. "That," says another close observer, 2is 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 reappraise 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 farmer's shop that Bacon had favoured 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 of 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 wrong doing, 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 ... definitely got 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 compiled. 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 obliged 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 Bacon's paintings now owned by the estate: Gerard Faggionato in London and Tony Shafrazi in New York.

Those appointments sent 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 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.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  OLD MASTER                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                The Duke of Beaufort, who helped Marlborough's founders gain access to highborn families, is the London chairman.

 

The estate's complaint, lodged in England, seems to make an impressive case. Much of it portrays Bacon as naif 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 honour," as the legal phrase has it, to get Bacon the highest possible 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 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.

If 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 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 sale prices for Bacon paintings after all its expenses fro 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 to inspect its books, but the lawyers cancelled 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 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 short-changed. They were always perfect with me."

All of which leads one to wonder: in a game where every character has his motives, what were 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 judgements. 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 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 a 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 favouring 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 behaviour that was to characterise 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 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 clud in Japan to an energy company in Kassel, Germany. Before long he became rather wealthy, living n 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 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 documents out of the juridiction 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 wat 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 - 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-dealer source who attended a Shafrazi show found the paintings "pretty indifferent... I think Bacon had every idea that these paintings should be 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's 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 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 neighbour 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 that" - 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, is long blond hair cut Sir Galahad style, recalls the furor that greeted his unveiling of the drawings in 1996.  "Here is 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 layer's letters demanding the trove be returned. In a number of coffeeshop meetings, Joule managed tp 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 to 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's 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 behaviour 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 tying 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 Lucien Freud 94. But, for Brian Clarke, there are only four references. Along with 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 in 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 them are news photographs - boxers, Nazi, cricket players - painted over with hurried brushstrokes. But enough of them do jibe so closely with the studio drawings as tto 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.

Handling 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 Dadist Kurt Schwitters, who died in 1948. In the Schwitters case, Marlborough 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 return of the artworks. Eventually, Marlborough did surrender the art - but counter-sued for breach of contract. A lower court in Norway found in the estate's favour, 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 $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. "Looking 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, 2of 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 to buy 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 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."

Copyright © Vanity Fair 2000 

 

 

 

Bacon's estate 

Henry Lydiate  Artlaw 1999

Artquest, University of the Arts London, 65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA

 

A strange saga has begun to unfold in London, where the High Court recently removed two of the three executors of Francis Bacon's estate, leaving the artist Brian Clarke as sole executor with the onerous responsibility of ensuring that all of Bacon's assets go to his sole named beneficiary, John Edwards. The two former executors were Paul Brass, Bacon's doctor, and Valerie Boston, a director of Bacon's gallery. According to Clarke, the doctor had done his very best to fulfil his duties as executor, but was not sufficiently versed in the art world to be able to deal effectively with the complexities involved in such a vast and valuable estate. The Marlborough Galleiy director had been put in a compromising position as an executor, since there was a potential conflict of interest between Bacon's estate and his gallery. Clarke has placed the legal work with US lawyer John Eastman, father of his friend the late Linda McCartney, and the commercial side of the work with the Tony Shafrazi Galleiy, New York, which has handled Clarke's work for some years.

Although Bacon took the sensible precaution of making a will, it would have been beneficial if he had engaged in some serious estate planning, to deal with essential matters such as selection of appropriate executors; cataloguing all his works and papers; storing and insuring all his assets; appraisal and valuation, and inheritance taxes. (An excellent guide was published in the US last year: A visual artist's guide to estate planning, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Act Foundation and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 1998,0966518802.)

© Henry Lydiate 1999

 

 

 

 

Bacon Estate alleges artist was blackmailed by Marlborough

 

 

By Martin Bailey, The Arts Newspaper, Tuesday, December 18, 2001

 

The Francis Bacon Estate’s legal claim against Marlborough Fine Art has taken a new twist, with allegations of blackmail. Bacon is said to have decided to leave Marlborough to move to the Pace gallery (now Pace Wildenstein), but changed his mind after being warned that he might then have problems with the UK tax authorities and in getting access to money paid through Liechtenstein into his Swiss bank accounts.

On 20 November the High Court in London ruled that the blackmail claim could be incorporated into the Estate’s case, which will come to trial in February. Mr Justice Patten pointed out that his duty was to filter out “hopeless claims”, but the new allegation “does not fall into that category.” The judge stressed that this “does not mean that it will succeed or that I have formed any view at all as to its truth."

Although the extent of the Estate’s claim has not been calculated, it could well amount to more than £100 million. When Bacon died in 1992, he left his assets to John Edwards, a former East London barman who now lives in Thailand. The sole executor is Professor Brian Clarke, who believes that Bacon was not paid properly by his long-time dealer for many of his pictures. Professor Clarke is therefore taking legal action against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Liechtenstein-registered Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment (see The Art Newspaper, no. 115, June 2001, p. 6).

Dinner at Claridge’s

The alleged blackmail by Marlborough dates back to March 1978, when Bacon tried to switch galleries in order to boost his earnings. Respected art historian Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon, told Arnold Glimcher, the chairman of Pace in New York, that the artist was “unhappy” with Marlborough, his established dealer. Mr Glimcher then flew over to London, meeting Bacon and Mr Peppiatt for dinner at Claridge’s on 2 March. Bacon wanted £50,000 per large single panel painting, and Mr Glimcher made an offer (there is now some confusion now over whether the 50,000 offer was in sterling or dollars). A further meeting was held at Claridge’s the following day.

Between 4 and 8 March, Bacon approached Marlborough owner Frank Lloyd and told him of his decision to move to Pace. The Estate alleges that Mr Lloyd “placed undue pressure on Bacon to remain with Marlborough”, by threatening that if the artist left his gallery then (a) “Bacon would have problems obtaining access to the funds belonging to him which Marlborough had paid into Bacon’s bank accounts in Switzerland” and (b) “Bacon would be exposed to the English tax authorities.”

Mr Glimcher provided a statement on 1 November 2001, giving details of the conversations at Claridge’s: “Bacon and I seemed to have an immediate rapport. By the end of the second meeting, we had reached an agreement on which we shook hands.” But on 8 March 1978 Mr Glimcher was devastated to receive a letter from Bacon saying that he had decided to remain with Marlborough. In retrospect, Mr Glimcher believes that his source of information about what had occurred was probably Mr Peppiatt.

Mr Peppiatt and his wife Jill Lloyd had a meeting with the Estate in June 2000 to discuss the possibility of compiling a catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work. Mr Justice Patten recorded: “I am told that this is likely to be a lucrative and prestigious project and these discussions are relied upon by Mr Lyndon-Stanford [Marlborough’s QC] as giving his clients additional concern that Mr Peppiatt’s independence as a witness may thereby have been compromised.” Marlborough has since stressed to The Art Newspaper that it has never objected to Mr Peppiatt’s authoring the catalogue, describing him as “by far the best qualified person to do so.”

Rothko link

Marlborough’s lawyers have pointed out that Mr Glimcher “is in competition with Marlborough in New York and acted for the Rothko estate in connection with its dispute with Marlborough in the 1970s”. This was a legal row which has some parallels with the current case between the Bacon Estate and Marlborough. The gallery therefore does not regard Mr Glimcher as “in any sense an independent witness.”

It was also argued by Marlborough that had the blackmail claim been made at an earlier stage in the proceedings, it would have been possible to have discussed the matter with two of Bacon’s close associates, art historian David Sylvester (who died on 19 June 2001) and financier Gilbert de Botton (who died on 27 August 2000). Mr Lloyd, the key witness, died in 1998.

Marlborough concludes that it “does not know why Bacon changed his mind [over the move to Pace, but would invite the court to infer that it was in his best interests to continue to work with Marlborough.” Last month a gallery spokesman told The Art Newspaper that “in relation to the allegation of blackmail, Marlborough rejects it entirely.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Court Cuts Gallery's Ties To Francis Bacon Estate

By WARREN HOGE

 

The New York Times  March 23, 1999

 

 

 

Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that handled the artistic management of the British painter Francis Bacon for virtually his entire career, has had all association with his estate ended by England's High Court.

In a decision that has gone unreported until now, Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled in late December that an executor of the multimillion-dollar estate who was a director of the gallery should be removed and replaced by a new independent representative.

 

The new trustee is Brian Clarke, 45, a well-known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards, 49, the painter's closest friend, to whom Bacon willed his entire estate. Bacon, widely accepted as the greatest British painter of his generation, died of a heart attack at the age of 82 in 1992.

 

Mr. Clarke had been responsible for shifting the representation of Bacon's works from Marlborough to Faggionato Fine Arts in London and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, an arrangement that drew sudden attention last October when the Shafrazi Gallery mounted a show of 17 previously unseen Bacon paintings and photographs of his famously cluttered London studio. Marlborough's loss of the prestigious Bacon account and the reasons behind it became a subject of curiosity and speculation among contemporary art experts in London and New York.

 

Mr. Clarke would say only that lawyers looking into the administration of the estate had found "certain anomalies" in actions by Marlborough that compelled them to take their court action.

They had become alert to possible problems when, on making their first inquiries to Marlborough London, Bacon's gallery since 1958, they were told that the Bacon paintings were being handled not in London but by Marlborough Liechtenstein.

 

The explanation set off alarms since the Liechtenstein office had been central to a scandal in New York in the 1970's over the estate of the American painter Mark Rothko that led to the ousting of executors; heavy fines against Marlborough; the conviction of its head, Frank Lloyd, for tampering with evidence and the end of its membership in the Art Dealers Association of America.

Liechtenstein is also known as a place that affords corporations high levels of secrecy and protection against demands for disclosure.

 

The Rothko case exposed sinister inner workings in the supposedly genteel art world and cost Marlborough its pre-eminence in contemporary art. Among other abuses, Marlborough was found to have sold paintings to favoured clients at less than market value and to have collected inflated commissions.

 

Lawyers for the Bacon estate are busy in four European countries and the United States tracking assets that the estate believes should go to Mr. Edwards. "They are currently putting together a case that may at some point in the near future come to court," Mr. Clarke said.

 

His whole purpose, Mr. Clarke said, was to "get John everything that Francis left him."

 

The principal lawyer for the estate, John L. Eastman of New York, said in a telephone interview from St. Barts that "the defining question for the estate is what is there beyond what we already have." The argument presented to Justice Neuberger for the removal of Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough London, was that entrusting fiduciary responsibility to an official associated with the gallery whose actions were being examined by the estate presented a conflict of interest.

 

Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Eastman would specify what activities of Ms. Beston's or the gallery's they had questioned.

 

Geoffrey Parton, a director of Marlborough London, said the gallery would not discuss any aspect of the Bacon estate. Mr. Parton said "no comment" six times during a brief telephone conversation on Monday, including to questions about whether Ms. Beston had been a Bacon trustee or was a director of the gallery. Court documents confirm that she was both.

 

There were originally two other trustees of the Bacon estate, Gilbert de Botton, a financier well known in art collecting circles who was a former director of Marlborough Zurich, and Dr. Paul Brass, Bacon's personal physician. Mr. de Botton never took up his commission, and Dr. Brass was replaced in the same Dec. 18 action that removed Ms. Beston. Dr. Brass, Mr. Clarke said, had acted "impeccably" but was simply overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the task.

 

Mr. Clarke and Mr. Eastman both resisted putting any value on the overall Bacon holdings. Individual paintings have fetched up to $6 million, prompting outsiders to estimate the worth of the whole estate at more than $100 million.

 

The estate has paid its taxes and does not need to raise any money with sales of major works. "We may sell a number of pictures as time goes on, but we have no plans for any kind of big sale," Mr. Clarke said. "Not even a small sale, for that matter," he added.

 

Bacon's friends have found that the painter was even more prolific than they had known.

 

"Even though everybody thought that they'd been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 50's," Mr. Clarke said. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred, a hundred and fifty times, and I had missed them. John Edwards had missed them."

 

The studio where Bacon worked for the last 30 years of his life was a giddy jumble of half-finished canvases, books, rags, drawings, notes, twisted paint tubes, encrusted brushes and broken furniture with bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling and smears of paint on the doors and walls. It occupied two rooms of a South Kensington mews house and is being disassembled, measured, catalogued and documented for reconstruction in Dublin, where Bacon was born and spent the first 16 years of his life.

 

It will be reassembled in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art for public show beginning in 2001. The dismantling has been done in archeological fashion, with highly detailed and enumerated placement charts so that the creative chaos that Bacon wrought in London can be precisely recreated in Dublin.

 

More Bacon works emerged when Barry Joule, 44, a Canadian writer who was one of the painter's neighbours, came forth with 500 oil sketches, drawings, and worked-on photographs from 1945 to 1965 that Mr. Bacon had given him.

 

There have been reports in the British press of disputes and threatened legal action between the estate and Mr. Joule, but Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Joule shared the estate's interest in abiding by the painter's wishes that Mr. Edwards receive everything.

 

He said that talks with him were "perfectly amicable." Mr. Joule agreed with that characterization, saying, "Things are being worked out in a friendly fashion."

 

Last year the Tate Gallery purchased 42 similar works on paper from the 1950's and 60's in gouache, oil paint, ink, ballpoint pen and pencil from Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock, friends of the artist, and the estate of Sir Stephen Spender. The works, compelling early visions of the twisted figures, blurred faces, screaming popes and butchered carcasses that were to become Bacon's signature repertory of postwar angst, are on display at the Tate until May 2.

 

Mr. Edwards, a reclusive and simple man currently living in Southeast Asia, was Bacon's closest friend for the last 16 years of his life. Born within the sounds of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in East London and therefore a genuine Cockney, Mr. Edwards never learned to read or write and maintained a relationship with Bacon that friends described as filial.

 

Mr. Clarke said he became involved four years ago when Mr. Edwards approached him perplexed about delays and problems in dealing with the estate. "He asked if I would help him to try to understand why the estate was not being wound up, and he asked me to become his power of attorney. I thought it would be a very short thing, but after a while I discovered that there were, let's say, certain anomalies, problems without the resolution of which the estate could not be wound up."

 

Mr. Clarke took on the assignment without the knowledge of the executors, and when he found the task more daunting than he had anticipated, he turned to Mr. Eastman, a lawyer with broad experience in the worlds of art and entertainment. Mr. Eastman's sister, Linda, the wife of Sir Paul McCartney, had been a friend and collaborator of Mr. Clarke's, and the photographs of Bacon's studio that were displayed in New York last fall were the last pictures she shot before her death last April.

 

While he declined to get into the details of his preoccupation over Marlborough's management of Bacon, Mr. Clarke explained why he thought the painter's estate required special attention.

"Francis Bacon was famously disinterested and uninterested in money," he said. "He lived the life of an essentially simple man in a tiny bed-sit that was heated when very cold by leaving the gas door open. He had a tiny kitchen that contained an open bath, and a room with a bed and a chest of drawers.

 

"He was the last great existentialist. If you are an art gallery representing such a man whose chief legatee can neither read nor write and hasn't even had his own lawyer until recent years, your fiduciary obligations are all the greater because such a man could be described as 'easy pickings.' "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gallery Accused of Cheating Prominent Artist

By CAROL VOGEL

 

The New York Times  March  22, 2000

 

 

The international art gallery that was at the center of one of the art world's most spectacular scandals - the plundering of the estate of Mark Rothko - was accused in court papers in London yesterday of cheating a second prominent artist, the British figurative painter Francis Bacon, and systematically defrauding him and his heir.

In papers submitted to the High Court, an English court that can be overturned by the Law Lords, lawyers for the estate of the artist who died in 1992 after a turbulent life, charged that the gallery, Marlborough International Fine Art, consistently undervalued many of Bacon's paintings, which it bought outright from him and quickly resold for substantially higher prices, and could not account for the whereabouts of many other paintings.

The lawyers estimated the losses at tens of millions of dollars but said a total could not be established because Marlborough quickly moved documents out of Britain and seized photographs of the disputed paintings when it became clear that a court case was at hand.

Georgianna Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Marlborough London gallery, said that Bacon's relationship with Marlborough was not a passive one and that the artist was aware of the gallery's activities and transactions on his behalf. She also said the gallery has provided access to all the records the estate's lawyers have asked for. ''But any other documentation relevant to the claim will be disclosed during the course of the court action,'' Ms. Gibbs said. She said the documents that were moved out of Britain were papers that were returned to the gallery's Liechtenstein branch. Robert Hunter, a lawyer for Marlborough International, said he could not comment directly on the allegations because of the litigation.

The papers paint a complex picture of how the suit alleges the gallery took control of the most minute aspects of Bacon's financial and personal life - to the point of paying his laundry bills and handing him spending money - and then used this grip to deprive him of the true value of his work. According to the lawsuit, the Marlborough connection continued after his death, when a director of Marlborough's London gallery was named an executor of his estate and ran it to the detriment of Bacon's sole heir, John Edwards, an illiterate and reclusive cockney who now lives in Thailand and with whom, friends say, he had a filial relationship.

Bacon's paintings of distorted, anguished figures fetched as much as $6 million at auction and made him one of Britain's most celebrated postwar artists. His own life was as openly tortured as his art. ''You can't be more horrific than life itself,'' the artist was fond of saying.

He cultivated a bad boy reputation, speaking freely about his abuse of alcohol, his homosexuality, his penchant for gambling and his kinship with gangsters. Born in Ireland, he lived most of his life in a rundown mews house in South Kensington, London, with bare light bulbs, a tub in the kitchen, and paintings and photographs strewn everywhere.

Unlike some artists who change galleries periodically throughout their careers, Bacon put all his faith in Marlborough, which represented him from 1958 until his death of a heart attack eight years ago at 82. For much of this time Marlborough reigned over the contemporary art scene as one of the leading international galleries with branches in New York, London, Geneva, Madrid and Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

But the Rothko scandal shook it from its pedestal. In 1983, Frank Lloyd, Marlborough's founder, was convicted of evidence tampering and sentenced to community service in connection with the 11-year case in which Marlborough and the executors of the Rothko estate were found to have engaged in a conflict of interest in selling and consigning Rothko's work. Mr. Lloyd, who died two years ago, the gallery and two executors were fined $9.2 million.

Many of the charges made by the lawyers for Bacon's estate involved activities that they said took place during the same time period as many of the Rothko transactions. Indeed, Mr. Lloyd, as well as his son Gilbert, a director of Marlborough, were named in the suit filed yesterday. Two other directors of Marlborough were also cited, the Duke of Beaufort and Gilbert de Botton.

Bacon's will, which he wrote a year before his death, was a three-page document drawn up by Theodore Goddard, a London law firm which represented Marlborough. In it he left his estate to Mr. Edwards. Bacon appointed three executors: Valerie F. Beston, a director of Marlborough Fine Art, London; Paul Brass, his doctor, and Mr. de Botton, chairman of Global Asset Management. Mr. de Botton declined to take up his role as an executor.

The papers contend that Marlborough bought paintings outright from Bacon for well below fair market value and sold them for several times as much within months. A 1958 agreement filed with the court shows that Marlborough estimated the value of Bacon's paintings based on size - $462 for a painting 24 by 20 inches and $1,176 for one 78 by 65 inches. John Eastman, the lawyer for the estate, said an artist of Bacon's stature would get far more: about 70 percent of the price the gallery anticipated getting from a buyer.

According to documents, the gallery valued one painting, ''Statue and Figures in the Street,'' from 1983, at $250,000 in January 1984. Four months later it paid Bacon $66,371, about 26 percent of that amount, the documents show.

In one case, the papers said, two sets of books were kept on the sale of six paintings at the time of the artist's death in 1992, for $2.5 million. One set kept in the gallery's Liechtenstein office indicated that the money Marlborough used to pay the estate for the paintings came from Bacon's own Swiss bank account.

Ms. Gibbs said she could not comment on any of the valuations and referred all such questions to Mr. Hunter.

In many other cases, Mr. Eastman said, the gallery has not provided records of its purchases.

Marlborough furnished Mr. Eastman with records covering some transactions over a 20-year period, but he said many of these were incomplete or lacked documentation.

Ms. Gibbs said that Mr. Eastman had been given access to all the records but that it is difficult to determine exactly what is in the estate. ''Marlborough has accounted for everything they were aware of,'' she said.

''Who knows if it's all been found and there won't be more,'' she said.

Underlying the charges is the close relationship between Bacon and Marlborough. Ms. Beston was his link to the gallery before becoming executor, which Mr. Edward's lawyers say was a conflict of interest. Ms. Beston, who stepped down as executor with Mr. Brass, was not sued. Attempts to reach Ms. Beston were unsuccessful.

Records show that Ms. Beston had the power to sign checks on Bacon's primary checking account and to give him money when he needed it. Brian Clarke, an artist who is now executor of the estate, said that it was Ms. Beston's job to keep Bacon away from distractions and that she kept a brown envelope in the gallery for spending money for him, which he would often use to gamble.

Ms. Gibbs said Ms. Beston's relationship with Bacon was a close one. ''It was Bacon who appointed Ms. Beston as one of his executors,'' she said.

In a statement submitted to the court, his accountant, Hugh Thornton Brown, said Bacon signed his tax returns before the figures had been filled in. Mr. Brown became Bacon's accountant at the suggestion of Theodore Goddard, which also represented Marlborough. He said Mr. Brown, who prepared Bacon's taxes for 19 years, never met the artist, relying on Ms. Beston's information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artist Bacon 'had a Swiss account to dodge income tax'

By Hugh Davies

The Daily Telegraph  04/07/2000

 

 

FRANCIS BACON, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th century artist, allegedly kept a Swiss bank account to shelter large chunks of his income from tax. 

The claim surfaced when details of payments made to Bacon by his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, were sent to the English lawyers of his estate, according to an article to be published in the magazine Vanity Fair. The estate is in the throes of a legal battle with the gallery, claiming that it wrongfully exploited him over more than 30 years. 

 

Bacon died in 1992, aged 82, leaving his £11 million estate to his closest friend, John Edwards, 50, an illiterate east Londoner and his constant companion for the last 18 years of his life. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of Britain's most prestigious galleries with its worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed to have exercised "undue influence" over the artist, who died from a heart attack in Spain. 

 

It identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, worth as much as £30 million, that allegedly do not feature in the gallery's accounts. Michael Shnayerson, the author, said that the gallery's "partial payments" to the Geneva bank were legal for its Liechtenstein branch. It was also above board for Bacon to establish the account. But failing to declare the payments to the Inland Revenue as taxable income broke the law. 

 

The magazine suggests that a reason why Bacon never left Marlborough was that he feared no other gallery would agree to the arrangement. An old friend of the painter high in the art world is quoted as saying: "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed." Did he feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it." The art critic Brian Sewell said that Bacon once told him that he would rather be in the hands of Marlborough than in those of "an incompetent honest man. 

 

"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'd got if he went with anyone else." Mr Sewell dismissed the idea that Bacon was naive and being taken for a ride: "Francis was no fool." 

 

The Vanity Fair article, to be published in Friday's edition, quoted sources which appear to be close to the gallery, as saying that Bacon was hardly naive about what Marlborough was making from his work, or how his finances were handled. According to the magazine, in 1992 Bacon "got himself mixed up" and had all of his money from paintings - "the full £4.2 million" - sent to Switzerland, then, realising he needed to show some income in the UK, he asked for a portion to be sent back.

 

He allegedly had his Swiss banker return £1.6 million to Marlborough. The sum was then forwarded to his British account. A Marlborough source claimed that as for the missing paintings, they had all been identified. In most cases Bacon gave them away or sold them himself. Liz Beatty, a representative of the estate, said last night that she would have no immediate comment on the claims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon   

 

By Steve Boggan,  The Independent  26 April 2001 

 

A £100m court battle over works by the painter Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of the most bitter art wrangles in decades.

Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.

The gallery, which denies the allegations, is seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial will begin in earnest early next year.

Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."

Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82 from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.

But the estate alleges that instead of taking a "fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work, valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for only one series ­ a flat fee of $40,000.

The estate has questioned the role of one of Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly from the arrangement.

Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.

"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry ­ in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best interests'."

The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended "like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last 18 years of his life.

The trustees complain they have been unable to examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so. Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the gallery in 1958.

"The trustees have not been able to get a full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate. "Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of the paintings thought to have been painted by him.

"But what is also annoying is that we can't get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate mail.

"If nothing else, we hope to have these released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest 20th-century painter."

During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter. In 1989, his triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.

He is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest painters ­ if not the pre-eminent British painter ­ of the last century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.

His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among others.

His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were among his friends.

His stature, therefore, has made the alleged failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between 1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts. You could be looking at £5m for each of them.

"The figure of £100m was raised during an interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out there, we don't know how much could be at stake."

A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said: "We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the claims."

It is understood the gallery will argue that Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance of his bank account.

One of his friends said: "He needed money for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than that, it meant nothing to him."

During the case, it will be pointed out that Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?

Part of the reason might have been because of Ms Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely to give evidence.

The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m for some works.

The questions the court must answer are: Were those prices enough, and did Bacon care?

 

 

 

 

 Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on

  

  By Maev Kennedy, The Guardian,  May 16, 2001

 

Years of legal argument over the tangled affairs of Francis Bacon lie ahead after a judge refused to block a legal action by the artist's estate against his former agents.

The life of the man acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, which was ended by a heart attack in 1992, was notoriously chaotic, and his afterlife is proving to be just as bumpy.

The stakes are enormous. The assets in dispute could be worth up to £100m. In his life time Bacon was one of a handful of British painters whose works broke the £1m price tag.

Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar. Last week in New York a world record was set at Sotheby's, where just under £6m was paid for a triptych.

His estate is suing the galleries that promoted his work for 34 years, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art, which is based in Liechtenstein, alleging "undue influence" over the painter.

As a result of yesterday's judgment, after three weeks of legal argument by Marlborough trying to have the case thrown out, the main action will go ahead. It is expected to take months, and will probably not begin before January.

Marlborough said it would "vigorously" defend the case. It described its relations with Bacon as "frank, close and mutually beneficial".

The high court was told that a representative of Marlborough acted almost as a minder, removing paintings from Bacon's studio - which was sometimes knee deep in rubbish, newspaper articles, old photographs and scraps of magazines - "as soon as the paint was dry".

When he died at 82, he was worth an estimated £10m, and left his fortune to his much younger friend, John Edwards, a former east London barman who now lives in Thailand.

The main legal action was instigated by the estate's executor, Brian Clarke. It is demanding a full statement of the galleries' dealing with the artist, claiming that they retained up to 70% of the sale value of his paintings when a third would have been fair, and that Marlborough has not demonstrated that it paid for all the paintings received.

Marlborough strenuously denies the allegations. Yesterday Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied there was "at least an arguable case". The trial would have to examine in detail Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough. While one of the greatest 20th century artists "both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate".

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon art payments case can go to trial, judge rules

By Steve Boggan, The Independent  May 16, 2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unseen paintings may provide evidence in Bacon court case

 

By Steve Boggan, The Independent  May 30, 2001

 

 

PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN paintings by Francis Bacon may be among a photographic archive that a court has ordered his former gallery to reveal to his estate.

 

A discovery application from Professor Brian Clarke, Bacon's executor, has been granted by the High Court, a move he believes may provide evidence that the artist was habitually underpaid and that a substantial number of his paintings are unaccounted for.

 

Professor Clarke, a friend of Bacon's and a highly successful artist in his own right, is suing Marlborough Fine Art and an associated company in Liechtenstein, alleging they exercised "undue influence" over the painter. The estate claims Marlborough would take as much as 70 per cent of the value of the paintings it sold for Bacon instead of a "fairer" 30 per cent and that it failed to pay him for lithographs.

The gallery rejects the claims, which could total pounds 100m, arguing that Bacon was content with what it paid him and knew it would make a profit when it sold the paintings on, a sentiment underlined by the fact that he continued to deal through it for 34 years.

A spokeswoman for the gallery said it had nothing to hide and had always been prepared to disclose the archive; it was simply the manner of inspection that it wanted to establish before allowing access.

 

Nevertheless, lawyers for the estate complained that Marlborough had refused them access to full records of its dealings with the artist. The latest order in the High Court means the gallery must give them further details of its dealings with Bacon between 1958 and his death in 1992.

It must disclose every Bacon painting and lithograph that it or its directors currently own or control and must hand over Bacon's correspondence and an archive of documents kept by Valerie Beston, a former Marlborough director who took care of the artist's affairs.

But it is the archive of photographs by Prudence Cummings, a fine art photographer, and a record book of Bacon's works kept by Miss Beston that have excited most interest in Professor Clarke.

"From an art historical point of view, the prospects of seeing detailed records of Bacon's life and perhaps previously unseen paintings are tremendous," he said. There might be, he said, completely legitimate reasons why Marlborough had recorded paintings he, as executor, knew nothing about.

"There were times when we believe Bacon may have changed his mind about a work and destroyed it after it had been photographed. If that is the case, Marlborough could have the only record of an unknown painting by one of the 20th century's greatest artists. That would be of immeasurable value to scholars of his work."

Mr Clarke, visiting professor at the Bartlett Institute of Architecture, University College London, met Bacon at the Colony Rooms in Soho in 1974 through a friend, John Edwards. For the last 18 years of his life, Mr Edwards enjoyed a close filial relationship with Bacon and became the sole beneficiary of his estate.

But four years after Bacon died, Mr Edwards had still not been given details of his legacy, so Professor Clarke drafted in John Eastman, the lawyer of his friend Paul McCartney, and an accountant, Peter Hunt.

As a result of examining what records they could, Mr Edwards asked Professor Clarke to become executor and they launched a legal action in December 1998.

"This is not a role I sought or wished to be laid at my door," said Professor Clarke. "Circumstances brought it to me and I have a moral and legal obligation to John Edwards, as my friend, and Francis Bacon, as my late friend, to see it through."

Although he believes Bacon was unfairly treated, Professor Clarke said the prime motivation in bringing the action against Marlborough was not financial.

"Perhaps the most important aim of the estate is to ensure that the entire output of Francis Bacon is available for appreciation and study," he said. "I would like to see the production of a full catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon's work to be put in the public domain. I would be perfectly happy to work with the Marlborough gallery to produce a catalogue."

Professor Clarke is also anxious to point out that John Edwards shares these aims and is not involved in the litigation purely for monetary gain.

Any Bacon paintings recovered would be of enormous value; only two weeks ago, a tryptych fetched pounds 6m at auction.

The full High Court hearing has been set for mid-February next year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wooed Bacon with Claridge's champagne but London gallery cheated me, says dealer

 

By Steve Boggan, The Independent  28 November 2001

 

 

To most hungry artists, the offer would have been too good to refuse. Even to a wealthy Francis Bacon, sipping champagne at Claridge's, it seems to have been the answer to his prayers: a minimum of £50,000 per painting and a move to the books of the New York gallery that handled Picasso.

 

The offer was made in March 1978 by Arnold Glimcher, the influential Pace Gallery owner, at a time when Bacon, arguably the greatest British-based painter of the last century, is thought to have wanted to break from Marlborough Fine Art in London, the gallery that had pushed his work for the previous 10 years.

 

But Bacon did not go. Instead, he stayed with Marlborough until his death in 1992, a decision that baffled those close to him. Why he did not leave has remained a mystery. However, according to dramatic claims in what could become the most sensational legal spat the British art world has seen, the reason was simple. He was a victim of blackmail.

 

That is the allegation to be made in a High Court battle in February which, if proved, could make Bacon's estate up to £100m richer. On one side is Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of Bacon and the executor of his will. The professor claims Marlborough's then director, Frank Lloyd, asserted undue influence over Bacon, cheating him of millions of pounds and failing to account for up to 33 of his paintings.

 

On the other is Marlborough, the distinguished art house that claims it made Bacon famous and wealthy and dealt with his every whim with scrupulous fairness. Neither side has given ground in preliminary hearings since Bacon's estate launched a civil action against the gallery last year. But what no one expected was that a row over money and paintings would turn up allegations of blackmail.

 

The Independent reported three weeks ago that threats against Bacon had been alleged, but the full details of the allegations have only become clear since the judge, Mr Justice Patten, ruled that a statement by Mr Glimcher could form part of Professor Clarke's argument.

 

In it, Mr Glimcher alleges that Bacon was blackmailed by Mr Lloyd into staying with gallery.

 

According to High Court documents, Mr Glimcher said he had two meetings with the artist in London. "Bacon and I seemed to have an immediate rapport," he said. "By the end of the second meeting [also at Claridge's], we had reached an agreement on which we shook hands."

 

Bacon, Mr Glimcher said, was delighted with his promise of £50,000 a painting. But, suddenly, the artist pulled out.

 

Later, Mr Glimcher claims he was told by Michael Peppiatt, the respected art historian and author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, about the allegations of blackmail.

 

Mr Glimcher said: "When Francis Bacon informed Frank Lloyd he was leaving Marlborough for Pace, Frank Lloyd told Francis Bacon that if he left Marlborough, Bacon would have problems accessing funds that Marlborough [had] paid to Bacon in Switzerland. I recall something that Bacon's sister was in a sanatorium of some kind. I was also told that there were threats by Frank Lloyd of income tax exposure."

 

Bacon, who had bank accounts at Dreyfus Soehne and Rothschilds in Zurich, was deeply in debt to the Inland Revenue. According to Professor Clarke, exposure would have left Bacon financially unable to care for his sister, Ianthe Knott, who was suffering from a degenerative disease in Zimbabwe, so he decided to stay with Marlborough.

 

In his statement, Mr Glimcher, who has been advised by his lawyers not to comment on the case, says he believes it was Mr Peppiatt who told him about the blackmail threat. Lawyers for Marlborough do not want Mr Peppiatt questioned until the full hearing in February. In another statement, however, Professor Clarke says that during a meeting in 1999, Mr Peppiatt said to him: "I suppose you will be wanting to know about the famous 'blackmail' conversation with Glimcher."

 

Mr Peppiatt has also been advised not to comment. It is understood he has expressed a willingness to co-operate fully with the court, but lawyers for Marlborough are unhappy that Bacon's estate has asked him to help compile a prestigious catalogue of the artist's work.

 

Marlborough's legal team is also concerned about the independence of Mr Glimcher. During a preliminary hearing several weeks ago, Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, for Marlborough, pointed out that Mr Glimcher was a competitor of the Marlborough in New York. And he asked Mr Justice Patten to bear in mind that Mr Glimcher had acted for the estate of Mark Rothko when that artist had had a similar dispute with Marlborough in the 1970s.

 

Marlborough rejects the allegations. It said: "It remains Marlborough UK's case that a provisional arrangement was made between the Pace Gallery and Bacon (as evidenced by [a] letter of 4 March 1978).

 

"Bacon responded to that letter on 8 March 1978 stating that he had not made up his mind about whether to move to Pace Gallery and wrote again on 17 March 1978 stating that for the present time he had decided not to change his gallery in New York. Marlborough UK does not know why Bacon changed his mind, but would invite the court to infer that Bacon decided that it was in his best interests to continue to work with Marlborough."

 

That is something Bacon's estate disputes. It claims that dozens of his paintings may be unaccounted for and that he was paid only $40,000 (£28,000) for one series of lithographs when, in fact, many more than that were produced.

 

If the court case is successful, the recipient of any award would by Bacon's sole beneficiary, John Edwards, with whom he developed a filial relationship after the pair met in London in 1974. Professor Clarke says the primary purpose of the litigation is not to enrich Mr Edwards, but to establish a record of Bacon's work and to provide funds for research.

 

The judge is keeping an open mind as to the veracity of the allegations. "The court is only concerned at this time to filter out hopeless claims ... the blackmail claim does not fall into that category," Mr Justice Patten said in his judgment. "But that does not mean that it will succeed or that I have formed any view at all as to its truth."

Mr Lloyd cannot defend himself against the allegations. He died in 1998.

 

 

 

 

 Battle called off between Bacon estate and gallery

 

 By Steve Boggan, The Independent  02 February 2002

 

The New York Times  February 2, 2002

 

On the eve of what could have been one of the art world's nastiest trials, the estate of Francis Bacon and the artist's dealer mutually agreed to withdraw a two-year-old case in England over whether the dealer had fraudulently earned tens of millions of dollars by consistently undervaluing many of Mr. Bacon's paintings.

Under their agreement, the estate and the dealer, Marlborough U.K. and Marlborough International, will each bear its own legal costs and be spared the risk of losing a bruising case and having to pay both sides' legal fees, which could have come to more than $15 million.

Also adding to the estate's decision not to go to trial was the fact that John Edwards, the sole heir, was recently found to have lung cancer.

''It was going to be a long, tough case,'' said John Eastman, one of the estate's lawyers. He said the estate's executor chose to conclude the case with the uncertain outcome among the uppermost things in his mind.

Mr. Bacon, who died in 1992, left his estate to Mr. Edwards, a reclusive character with whom he had a filial relationship. Over the years Mr. Bacon's paintings of distorted, anguished figures brought as much as $6 million at auction and made him one of Britain's most celebrated postwar artists.

The suit contended that Marlborough controlled the most minute aspects of Mr. Bacon's financial and personal life - to the point of paying his laundry bills and handing him spending money - and so could buy paintings from him at greatly reduced rates and quickly resell them for substantially higher prices.

Stanley Bergman, a lawyer for Marlborough, called the charges baseless, saying the estate ''realized it was without merit.''

Mr. Eastman said that the executor, Brian Clarke, is completing plans to set up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation for the study of Francis Bacon and his work

 

 

 

 

INSIDE TRACK LAW & BUSINESS:

Handle publicity with great care

 

By Robert Hunter, FT.com site
The Financial Times, Jun 10, 2002

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon's Estate

 

Artlaw  2001

Artquest, University of the Arts London, 65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA

 

It was widely reported last month that the court action brought by the Francis Bacon Estate against the Marlborough gallery will be listed for trial in the UK's High Court at the beginning of 2002, and is likely to last several months.

Brian Clarke is the sole executor of the Estate and he launched proceedings against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein), seeking judgment that would clarify the nature of the contractual relationship between the artist and gallery over 40 years, and to decide how much money is owed to the Estate.

In the UK's High Court last May, Marlborough applied for Clarke's action to be struck out, on the grounds that the Estate's claim was spurious. The judge rejected the application and determined that there would be a trial. The heart of the matter appears to be the nature of Bacon's relationship with his gallery, which is not supported by any clear documentary evidence of a contract between them. As the judge in this preliminary action stated, 'the artist was a bohemian, lacking in business and financial experience and without the benefit of any independent advice'.

Bacon's 'arrangements' with Marlborough reflected the artist's insouciant nature over five decades; from around 1956, when the gallery paid him for paintings depending on their size, through an episode in the early 60s when he sought to move to a new gallery (but did not do so), to his death when Marlborough remained his only dealers, always taking works from his studio/apartment as soon as they were completed.

The Estate claims that Bacon was not dealt with properly, especially in terms of payment, and that the gallery owed the artist a high duty or care, attention and transparency in their commercial dealings with him and for him; for example, by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and re-selling it almost immediately for seven times as much, the gallery was not necessarily acting in the artist's best interests. Issues involved include whether works were 'bought-in' by the gallery, which were then re-sold for a profit they determined; or whether such works were sold by the gallery on behalf of the artist as his agent (in which case a percentage of the sale price should have been paid as a commission by the artist). There are other claims that many paintings do not appear in the accounts provided by the gallery, and that the income owed by the gallery to the artist/his Estate could amount to millions of pounds.

Marlborough is strenuously resisting the court action, and may be encouraged by its successful resistance of a legal action brought against them earlier this year by the Kurt Schwitters Estate. Norway's High Court finally determined the Estate's allegation that the gallery had bought works from the Estate below their true market value, had under-insured them and had failed to make proper payments. Judgment was given in favour of the gallery, which was awarded substantial damages and costs. In this case, once again, the heart of it was the nature of the relationship between the artist and gallery, and the lack of clear documentary evidence to clarify the matter.

In 1976 Marlborough (New York) lost a case, similar to the Schwitters case and possibly even closer to the issues in the Bacon case, when the Mark Rothko Estate was given substantial awards against the gallery for breach of trust and fiduciary duties. Again, the absence of clear documentation evidencing the nature of the commercial relationship and the gallery's obligations was a key issue. (In the next issue, legal wrangles surrounding Salvador Dali’s Estate will be explored.)

© Henry Lydiate 2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art after Death: The Bacon Estate

Artquest - The Art Law Archive  2000

Henry Lydiate, Art Lawyer

 

On February 6, 2002, the High Court in London dismissed the claims brought by Brian Clarke against the Marlborough Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Francis Bacon, who had decided not to pursue the matter. The Judge, Mr Justice Patten, was told that the parties had managed to resolve their differences, and would not require the court to conduct an estimated three month trial of the issues, which had been set to start on February 18, 2002.

Bacon died in 1992 and his will named Clarke as one of two executors of his Estate, responsible for managing his affairs and ensuring that Bacon's friend John Edwards received the artist's assets remaining; after all expenses and taxes had been paid.

The first legal issue arose when the High Court ordered the removal of Clarke's co-executor, who was a Director of the Marlborough Gallery. There was an apparent conflict of interest between the duty of the executors (to maximise the value of Bacon's estate) on the one hand, and the duty of Marlborough's Director (to act in the best interests of the Gallery), on the other hand. It would have been unfair to both the Gallery and the Estate for the Director to continue to act in both capacities. This decision left Clarke as sole executor, and he had no such conflicting interests, being a friend of Bacon in his later years and wishing merely to do his best for the Estate.

As the nature and extent of Bacon's dealings with the Marlborough Gallery over five decades (from around 1956) began to emerge, Clarke's concerns over the artist/gallery relationship began to develop. Eventually, Clarke's concerns drove him to launch proceedings against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein); he sought clarification of the nature and extent of the contractual relationship between the artist and gallery over 40 years. The Gallery resisted Clarke's claims that it had dealt with Bacon inappropriately.

One of the major issues in the case was whether or not Bacon was subjected to undue influence by the Gallery, and this and other issues were complicated by the paucity of clear documentary evidence of the terms of the contract between them. The particulars of claim served by the Estate asserted that 'the artist was bohemian lacking in business and financial experience without the benefit of any independent advice'; which claim the Gallery disputed.

The Estate also asserted that the Gallery owed the artist a high duty of care, attention and transparency in its commercial dealings with him, and had failed in these respects; for example; by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and re-selling it for seven times as much; the absence of clarity as to whether works were 'bought in' by the Gallery and then re-sold for a profit it determined, or were sold by the Gallery on behalf of the artist as his agent; and that many paintings were unaccounted for. Marlborough strenuously resisted all such claims, and contended amongst other things that Bacon's works were purchased 'in arm's length' transactions.

Late last year the case took a dramatic turn when the High Court allowed Clarke to include in his claim a specific allegation: that, when Bacon was considering changing his dealer (from Marlborough to the Pace Gallery, New York), Marlborough unduly influenced the artist to continue with it by suggesting that he might then experience difficulties both in accessing money in his Swiss bank accounts and in his future dealings with the UK's Inland Revenue (see AM 253).

This latest assertion appears to have flowed from a recent dialogue between Clarke and the well-known art historian Michael Peppiatt (a friend of Bacon), in which they had discussed Peppiatt's recollections of his liaising with Arnold Glimcher, the Chairman of the Pace Gallery, New York around 1978. Peppiatt had evidently acted as honest broker, relaying to Bacon that Glimcher was interested in representing him and attending a meeting which was then arranged between the artist and Glimcher at which sale prices and Bacon's shares thereof were discussed. Nothing came of this exchange and Bacon remained with Marlborough.

Days before what became the final High Court hearing on February 6, Peppiatt formally clarified to Marlborough's solicitors that in his discussions with Clarke he had not encouraged Clarke to believe that there was any substance in the suggestion that Bacon had been blackmailed by Marlborough. And it was this event which triggered the settlement of the dispute and the formal dismissal of the Estate's claims; the terms of the settlement are not public knowledge.

At the heart of this sorry saga lies the absence of clear documentation recording the nature and extent of the respective contractual duties and obligations of artist and gallery. For the past 25 years or so (and throughout roughly half the length of Bacon's contractual relationship with Marlborough) this column and other informed commentators have increasingly and continually stressed the need for such clear documentation between artist and gallery; covering, amongst other things:

• parties' names and contact data
• dealer's engagement (exclusively or otherwise) to promote and represent the artist by one or any combination of:
i) selling work
ii) arranging commissions
iii) arranging showings
iv) arranging lectures, talks and media appearances
v) publications
• which works are included: all; only paintings; only works on paper; sculpture alone, and so on; existing and/or future work
• copyright: who owns it, manages and licenses reproductions and on what terms
• moral rights: who can allow works or reproductions of them to be altered or amended in some way
• geography: the limit of the dealership's territorial representation (worldwide; only EU; EU and North America and so on)
• length of representation: whether for a fixed term (normally no more than two years) or periodically renewable with written notice on either side
• sales: pricing strategy: timing of release into primary marketplace; gallery's commission; VA1 arrangements
• consigned works: details of finished or future works to be deposited with (consigned to) the gallery for sale/not for sale
• bought-in works: how many and which ones will or may be bought in by the gallery; prices including discount to the gallery.

Crucially, such deals also need to clarify: when and how the artist will be paid, and for statements of account to be given by the gallery; details of all transactions including names of purchasers, prices, commission, and so on, and whether cash advances or stipends are to be set off against future income: the artist's rights to have access to the gallery's accounts and records, for the purpose of independent auditing (if ever required by the artist).

Finally, agreement as to what should happen to the works, benefits and obligations covered by the deal in the event of the artist's death or the dealer's bankruptcy or ceasing to trade. Sadly, the creation and regular updating of such documentation or similar records continue to be avoided by many artists and their dealers/galleries - often in the belief that they are unnecessarily bureaucratic and time-consuming matters. In truth, they are necessary 'good housekeeping' chores; every good home should have them.

© Henry Lydiate 2002

Clarke v. Marlborough (15/5/2001)

 

 

 

 

  Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s

   Baker/Rowland Exhibition Galleries

   Milwaukee Art Museum  January 27 - April 15, 2007

 

     

 

Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s is the first exhibition to look in detail at this extraordinarily fertile decade in Bacon's life and affords the viewer unprecedented insight into the artist's imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques. Although the most fruitful years in Bacon's career, they were also the most tumultuous and tortured in the artist's unsettled existence; Bacon was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with bewildering frequency. 

By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess to forcefully express his vision, but he was still not fully in command of his disturbing images, which appear to rise from a dark well of the unconscious. Yet the rawness and sense of urgency exhibited in these pictures transcend any pictorial problems that Bacon eventually did come to resolve with experience and technical ability. 

From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later, Bacon created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during this time. Also making an appearance were dogs, owls, and elephants; sphinxes, children, and naked women; heads of William Blake, self-portraits, and portraits of friends. For this painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of a dark, claustrophobic interior, there were even glimpses of the African and French landscape.

 

A Major Exhibition of Paintings by Francis Bacon at the Milwaukee Art Museum

 

Milwaukee, WI, October 2006— During the 1950s, painter Francis Bacon began to formulate the iconography of his dark and troubled world in paint. The exhibition, Francis Bacon in the 1950s , opening at the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007, features nearly fifty paintings from the period in which Bacon was at the height of his creative powers. In this intensely fertile time, many of Bacon’s themes-screaming popes, howling dogs, and haunting figures trapped in tortured isolation-began to materialize as the man himself was becoming one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon in the 1950s takes a profoundly personal look at this fascinating period in Bacon’s career and is the first exhibition to examine Bacon’s formative works. 

 

 

Curated by Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon’s, the exhibition provides a first-person perspective on the artist’s emerging style in the first decades of his career through paintings, drawings, and a selection of archival materials that illustrate the artist’s life and work.

 

At the core of the exhibition are thirteen paintings collected by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury, who were among the artist’s earliest patrons and, eventually, close friends. The works include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public.

 

This unique opportunity to view exceptional works by Bacon is credited to a new partner of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the global financial services firm UBS.

 

“We are proud to partner with the Milwaukee Art Museum, to be the presenting sponsor of Francis Bacon in the 1950s “, said Kim Jenson, Regional Manager - Upper Midwest, UBS Financial Services Inc. “Our Firm has a long standing commitment to the arts and we are pleased to help bring this outstanding exhibition to our clients, employees and the broader community of Milwaukee and the surrounding areas.”

 

Throughout his life, Bacon controlled every aspect of his art, from the selection and presentation of his work to the interpretation. He commanded that all exhibitions of his art be classic retrospectives, focusing on his most recent works. As a result, his later work was more visible. In contrast, Francis Bacon in the 1950s brings together paintings from a single decade in that earlier, less visible period.

 

“The usual feeling you get in a Bacon show is of tortured, strangled human beings alone in a room,” explained Peppiatt. “These paintings have a much more narrative quality, a much more approachable Bacon, of sorts. Someone who hadn’t decided who he was going to be, someone still in search of himself.”

 

By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess as a painter and expressed his often dark vision with force, but he was not fully in command of his disturbing images. Eager to explore themes and take risks in his early career, Bacon created images that contain a rawness and sense of urgency that would be lost in his later works.

 

To guest curator Michael Peppiatt, the fifties seemed to hold a lot of the clues to who Bacon was: “That was when he located his biggest themes. He felt that he had to focus on the most important things of all to man…his existence. ”

 

Bacon is one of the most unique and powerful artistic visionaries of post-war European art. The 1950s were the most fruitful years in Bacon’s career, but they were also the most tumultuous and tortured of the artist’s existence. During this time, the artist was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with incredible frequency. The artist established a pattern of all-night revelry, culminating in a feverish fit of creativity-painting into the early morning hours. Much like Bacon’s approach to life, his approach to the canvas was radical, aggressive, and seething with raw human emotion.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

The Artist 

 

Bacon’s staunchly Catholic father banished him from their Irish home when he was sixteen after learning of his homosexual activities. Bacon departed for Berlin, where he participated in the bohemian nightlife. Leaving Berlin in 1927, Bacon traveled to Paris where he saw an exhibition of drawings by Picasso that inspired him to become an artist.

 

The Surrealism of Picasso was not the only influence on the artist; poetry and film had a significant role in forming Bacon’s artistic vision. Bacon described his process: “I am like a grinding machine, I look at everything, and everything goes in and gets ground up very fine.” For example, Sergei Eisentein’s famous film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), had a major impact on the artist. The blood-splattered face of the screaming nurse in this film was an enduring image for the artist, and one that featured in many of his paintings, most significantly, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952.

 

Although he never attended art school, Bacon began to draw and paint in watercolor upon his return to London in 1929. There he established himself as a furniture and interior designer. While Bacon did not seriously pursue painting, he did exhibit a few early paintings alongside his design work. It was not until the end of the war when he began to formulate his evocative style of misshapen figures that reflect his disturbed worldview.

 

The artist’s work was met with financial success during the 1950s, and the artist himself became an instant hit in art circles, showing work at major galleries and moving comfortably between his aristocratic patrons and the seedy side of society. Throughout this period, Bacon visited exotic places where he engaged in relationships that would shape his life and influence his work. Bacon’s relationships with his lovers were vibrant and interesting, like the artist himself; however, some had violent and tumultuous overtones. Bacon’s personal relationships often bled onto the canvas, and are evident in the violence, intimacy, and passion portrayed in his work. According to the artist: “My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life.”

 

In the early 1960s Bacon settled into a studio space in South Kensington, where he resided until his death in 1992. Bacon described the studio: “I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me.” Heaps of photos, bits of illustrations, books, catalogues, magazines, and newspapers provided nearly all of his visual sources. Bacon added: “Images also help me find and realize ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.”

 

The artist utilized the entire space: paint was mixed on the door, and scraps of clothing were used to apply paint. When the artist died, seventy works on paper were found along with one hundred slashed canvases.

 

Catalogue and Tour 

 

A fully illustrated, 174-page catalogue is available.

 

The exhibition will be on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK, October-December 2006. From Norwich, the exhibition will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007; then on to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, May 5-July 30, 2007.

 

This exhibition was initiated by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, with funding from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Charitable Trust. It was curated by Michael Peppiatt, who is also the author of the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition has been made possible by UBS, the global financial services firm.

 

About the Sponsor

 

UBS is one of the world’s leading financial firms, serving a discerning global client base. As an organization, it combines financial strength with an international culture that embraces change. As an integrated firm, UBS creates added value for clients by drawing on the combined resources and expertise of all its businesses. UBS is the world’s largest wealth manager, a top tier investment banking and securities firm, and one of the largest global asset managers. In Switzerland, UBS is the market leader in retail and commercial banking. UBS is present in all major financial centers worldwide. It has offices in 50 countries, with about 39% of its employees working in the Americas, 36% in Switzerland, 16% in the rest of Europe and 9% in Asia Pacific. UBS’s financial businesses employ around 75,000 people around the world. Its shares are listed on the SWX Swiss Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE).

 

 

 

 

Exploring the Paintings of Francis Bacon: A Series

 

 

Throughout his career as an artist, Francis Bacon produced a body of work that has been described by some as unpardonable, grotesque and an outrage. On the contrary, it has also been said of the artist that, “Not since Oscar Wilde has London been graced with a pair of eyes and a tongue like Francis Bacon’s.” Such discrepancies in critical opinion are not uncommon in the realm of art history, as aesthetic themes – especially with respect to modern art – are at best varied and worst, paradoxical. The rift in critical stance is particularly interesting in the case of Bacon’s work as the viewer’s reactions to his paintings seem to be consistently decisive, whether they are of a positive or negative nature. Lukewarm sentiments and middle ground are rare entities where Bacon is concerned. Taking into account the bulk of his subject matter, this seems to be a fairly logical outcome. For the casual viewer, a Bacon portrait or triptych is likely to appear first and foremost as an incredible exhibition of violence, involving plural figures within the work or a singular figure and an invisible force, perhaps more disturbing because of its ambiguity.

That being said, the criticism in circulation is generally rather accessible. The majority of critics have chosen to focus primarily on formal elements; studies approaching the work from biographical or psycho-analytical angles appear to be less prevalent. When read in conjunction with Bacon’s own commentary on his work, these various critical methodologies can to some extent, shed light on several aspects that appear throughout Bacon’s work. In a paper titled, “Remaking Bacon,” Andrés Mario Zervigón illustrates a basic framework for the study of Bacon’s work. For the purpose of this paper, Zervigón presents three approaches to the subject. He outlines these schools of thought by highlighting three critical works, namely: Francis Bacon written by John Russell, exemplifying a concentration on formal analysis as a method for understanding the artist’s work; Francis Bacon: His Violent Life and Times by Andrew Sinclair, focusing on a biographical approach; and Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self written by Ernst van Alphen, considering the paintings primarily in respect to the reaction of the viewer, thereby concentrating on an interpretation rooted in psycho-analysis.

Using Zervigón’s research as an armature, as Bacon himself might have said, this study will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the artist’s work in the context of these three methodologies – formal analysis, biography and psycho-analysis – as well as the artist’s statements as quoted by David Sylvester and Michael Peppiatt during their many talks with him. The work of Francis Bacon presented critics and patrons alike with an enormous amount of challenging material. Much of this relates to how the artist conceptualized violence and truth in the artwork he produced. Concerning the study of his work, an understanding of how the artist configures his work can be considered a step towards the understanding of why he configures it at all.

 

 

 

 

Exploring Francis Bacon: Violence of Reality Part I

 

 

Violence is one of the most fundamental and frequently misunderstood elements in Bacon’s painting. While the content may initially seem violent in the traditional sense, it actually operates on a much more complex level within the work. In Bacon’s own words, “The violence of painting has little to do with the violence of war, rather, it is an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, author of Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, is often cited as a source for the psycho-analysis of Bacon’s work. Deleuze’s study of Bacon can also be insightful in terms of a formal analysis. In a text contributed to Artforum International, he offers a clarification of Bacon’s statement, explaining that the violence present in the work is that of sensation and not of a representation.

Though Deleuze expresses Bacon’s concept in a simpler fashion, it nonetheless retains its problematic nature. Bacon’s vision extends to the actual conception of sensation within the paintings themselves. Bacon sternly rejected abstraction and therefore must have employed some degree of representation in order to give form to a particular sensation or feeling; however, the presence of human-like forms within the pieces strikes a sensitive nerve in the mind of the viewer, as the brain immediately makes a connection between the being of the figure and its own awareness of being. This effect is challenging, as to actually see the figures as Bacon did, the viewer must reject the tendency to know the painting’s violence exclusively through his or her own experiences. Once the viewer has rejected this tendency, a fresh approach to the work is plausible.

Formally, Deleuze suggests that Bacon’s painting was a continuation of what Van Gogh and Gauguin were working on during the Impressionist movement. He maintains that both artists worked to resolve “the problem of painting after Cézanne,” that being dealing with the background as the framework of a piece and also the evolution of the form. In his discussion of Bacon’s work, Deleuze makes the case that while most modern painters chose to focus exclusively on the first issue, resulting in what he calls, “those great, brilliant monochrome fields that take life not in variations of hue, but in very subtle shifts of intensity or saturation determined by zones of proximity,” Bacon resolved the problem of the color field as well as the coloration of flesh. Deleuze’s reasoning can be helpful in the viewer’s understanding of Bacon’s work as it puts forth a method of knowing the work through its formal elements.

Bacon painted Deleuze’s zones of proximity as large colour fields, at times broken up or defined by lines. These strokes have often been described by critics as serving to confine the figures within a reduced spatial environment and furthering the notion of isolation within the work. Bacon strove to create a background that would allow the figures or forms to speak for themselves. Commenting on his exercise to create forms that are simpler and at the same time more complex – perhaps by which he means rich in content – Bacon said, “And for this to work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that is probably why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself.” In an article titled, “Francis Bacon’s Modernism,” Andrew Brighton describes these resulting figures as, “isolated painterly incidents within flat planes.” In isolating his figures, Bacon enabled them to emerge as the primary focus of his work. They are chaotic in their isolation, as if confinement increases their electric charge, making them more energetic.

 

 

 

 

Asthma in the Life of a Modern British Painter, Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

 

 

Abstract:

The case of the recently deceased British painter Francis Bacon may be added to the series of articles (1-4) that illustrate how asthma can relate to artistic creativity, while adding its burden to the many turmoils and adversities of a negative “quality of life” (5). Francis Bacon, considered “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century” (6), was born in 1909 in Ireland, of English parents. His father was an army officer with a passion for horses and hunting and a disdain for illness and physical weakness. When his son developed asthma at a very young age, the captain not only resented it, but intentionally challenged the little boy with activities that aggravated his breathing problem. A move to London when Francis was 5 years old kept him for a while away from the animals to which he was evidently allergic. His biographer (5) provided interesting details about asthma.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Photobooth: Facing the Homosexual in Post-war Britain

 

Author: Richard Hornsey

Journal: Visual Culture in Britain
ISSN: 1471-4787
Volume 8 Issue 2, Winter 2007, pp 83-103

 

Abstract:

In 1975, David Sylvester's book Interviews with Francis Bacon promised an unprecedented insight into the life and work of one of Britain's most significant painters and it went on to shape critical interpretations of his work in subsequent decades. Amongst the few visual representations of the artist, the book included a set of portraits of Bacon taken by himself in automatic booths. 

This article is about those photobooth images and explores how, whilst reinforcing the interviews' tone of candid revelation, they provided a displaced articulation of the artist's homosexuality. It begins by considering the photobooth portrait as an ambiguous object caught between official apparatuses of public bureaucracy and private rituals of remembrance and intimacy. I argue that the photobooth image oscillates between two modes of self-representation: one that makes reference to the camera obscura and invests in older ontological ideas of unique individuality, and a more playful mode of inauthentic image-making, as embraced by post-war youth culture, which exploits the photobooth's dynamics of commodification and repetition. 

The second half of the article considers this in relation to contemporary attempts to formulate a 'legitimate' notion of homosexual selfhood. Turning, in particular, to the trial and defence of Peter Wildeblood, I explore how new claims for homosexual citizenship required a complex renegotiation around the terms of queer visibility. Contrasting two contemporary portraits of Wildeblood reveals that the playful subversion of authentic sovereignty that the photobooth made available to urban youth was exactly that which frustrated attempts to envisage the face of the homosexual citizen. In summary, I argue, the presentation of Bacon's photobooth portraits exploited this structure. They intimate his queerness through his inability to meet the terms of the camera's eye, whilst also suggesting how similar displacements ran through early critical reactions to his work.

Keywords: David Sylvester, Francis Bacon, homosexuality, photobooth portrait, Peter Wildeblood

Published by: Manchester University Press

Copyright © 2007 Manchester University Press

 

 

 

 

 

The Cunning of Francis Bacon

 

By Julian Bell

The New York Review of Books  Volume 54, Number, May 10, 2007

 

 

Notes

^[1] Quoted in Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, p. 218, from Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full and in Profile, (Rizzoli, 1983), p. 45.

^[2] Schmied tells a relevant story: "On one occasion Bacon had a picture brought back to the studio after seeing the transparency made by the gallery's photographer. There was a blue in the reproduction that he particularly liked, but it was lacking from the original and he wanted to add it in as an afterthought." See Schmied, Francis Bacon, p. 80.

 

 

 

 

 Francis Bacon Detritus.

 

  Ivory Press 2006. Director: Elena Ochoa Foster

 

   

                                                  Francis Bacon's Detritus 2006

 

Detritus contains the most important items that Francis Bacon left in his studio. They represent the instruments of  his creation. Since 2001 we have been researching and selecting these items. Detritus was launched in Autumn 2006 at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 5, 40213, Dusseldorf Germany. Detritus is displayed with the exhibition Francis Bacon - the Violence of the Real from the 15th of September until the 7th of January 2007.

Francis Bacon Detritus 2006. In a Limited Edition of 25. Height 37 cms, Width 65 cms, Depth 11.5 cms. 

Each edition contains seventy-six facsimile items originally found in the studio of Francis Bacon and now held in The Dublin City Art Gallery, The Hugh Lane, in Ireland. The material consists of photographs, pages from magazines, drawings, letters and notes by Francis Bacon. Each item has been individually produced by hand, using special techniques, creating in effect a 'new original'. The material is contained within a facsimile of an old leather suitcase from Bacon's studio, which was discovered in the stable in Reece Mews. Each edition has a signed Certificate of Authenticity from the Estate of Francis Bacon. Detritus is a production of Ivory Press in collaboration with The Estate of Francis Bacon.

 

     

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

An offbeat homage to an unlikely pair

 

By David Galloway

The International Herald Tribune  Monday October 9, 2006

 

DÜSSELDORF Under the motto The Year of Art, this Rhineland capital has launched a Quadriennale that more than lives up to its hype. A dozen major exhibitions in museums and other public spaces are complemented by more than 20 shows in leading private galleries and an uncountable number of fringe events. The consistently high quality of this fine arts smorgasbord establishes Düsseldorf as Germany's only serious cultural rival to Berlin.

For the Francis Bacon show, entitled The Violence of the Real, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has assembled 64 works dating from 1945, when Bacon exhibited the first of his celebrated triptychs, to 1991, the year before his death at 82. Among the exponents on view are 10 triptychs and numerous preliminary works, photographs and memorabilia. Bacon's writhing, tormented bodies suggest striking parallels, as well as contrasts, to the sensuous, earthy, well-fleshed figures that would created the 17th-century vogue of "Caravaggisimo."

Unlike Caravaggio, Bacon has been the subject of several important exhibitions in Germany, so that viewers can expect few surprises here. Yet there are revealing moments and sudden insights to be gained: from the icon-like, small-format heads that underscore the painter's fascination with classical painting or the Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979), on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum, revealing the bulging, asymmetrical head that Louise Bourgeois once described as resembling nothing so much as "an overripe melon someone has sat on." Yet this small but stunning triptych turns these very irregularities into a painterly tour de force of sweeping curves, chiaroscuro effects and remarkable plasticity. This portrait of the artist as a vulnerable, far-from-young man has the stuff of fairy tale: of the repellent frog metamorphosing, before our eyes, into a handsome prince.

The curators at K-20 have had to contend with equally difficult spaces for the Francis Bacon show, but have failed to provide their Irish guest with suitable accommodation. A recycled exhibition architecture, originally conceived for last year's Matisse show, consists of a labyrinth-like setting with "cut-outs" that offer glimpses of works to come. This was a splendid concept for the Matisse show, which emphasized the borderline between interior and exterior spaces. The scheme makes no sense with Bacon. There is much that seems simply quirky here, but from which budding curators might learn a lesson or two. For example, if the decision has been made to situate labels to the left of works, stick to that principle unless the architecture forces you to do otherwise. And give folks a place to sit down.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon embalmed   Richard Calvocoressi Margarita Cappock FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO 239pp. Merrell. £35 (US $59.95).  1 85894 276 4 Art & Architecture  TLS The Times Literary Supplement  March 29, 2006

The dismantling in 1998 of Francis Bacon’s London studio, wall by paint-spattered wall and object by distressed object, and its painstaking reconstruction in the Dublin City Gallery, ranks as one of the more extraordinary conservation projects of modern times. What Bacon would have made of the prospect of thousands of visitors every year gazing through internal windows in the Dublin museum at the hermetically sealed dust and intimate chaos of 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, is not hard to guess. He was a ruthless editor of his own work, destroying half-finished, and even finished, pictures, concealing as many of his sources as he revealed, and suppressing books and catalogues about himself that he did not approve of. It is said that on one occasion he even burned two sackfuls of crumpled photographs and press cuttings from his studio floor, in order to deprive a hopeful Tate Gallery of a potentially invaluable addition to its archive. In fact, as Margarita Cappock admits in this useful and beautifully illustrated book, colour photographs of Bacon’s studio taken in 1974 show it to have been even more congested than it was at his death: “. . . for all the sources that have survived, a great many must have mouldered away”. It is nevertheless due to Dublin that we know considerably more about Bacon’s voracious but eclectic interests than before. The illustrated database compiled by Dr Cappock and her team at the City Gallery catalogues no fewer than 7,500 objects found in Bacon’s studio, including illustrated publications, photographs, press cuttings, notes, drawings, artist’s materials – among them several pairs of Marks and Spencer corduroy trousers used to apply paint – and slashed canvases. This remarkable research tool has already, in the four years since the studio opened, begun to change the face of Bacon scholarship. For instance, we now know that Bacon, contrary to what he maintained, sometimes made rough preliminary sketches, suggesting, as Cappock observes, that he “was much more premeditated in his approach to painting than he cared to admit”. Dr Cappock herself adds to our understanding of Bacon’s complex relationship to photography. Some 1,400 photographs were found in Bacon’s studio, a considerable number of them portraits by the photographer John Deakin, including 129 alone of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. (The series of Lucian Freud on a bed may have been taken by Walker Evans, not Deakin.) Cappock argues that these photos, many of which were commissioned by Bacon, functioned as more than mere aides-memoire. Bacon stopped working from life in the early 1960s and relied increasingly on memory, or so he implied, when painting portraits of his friends. Deakin’s photos, writes Cappock, “were not just a means to reality; they often were the reality”. She coins the memorable phrase “destruction as a form of enquiry” to describe Bacon’s deliberate intervention in the surface of the prints – cuts, tears, creases, folds and paint marks. Bacon’s aggressive manipulation of the photographic image for his own imaginative ends placed him in the role of editor rather than that of passive consumer. Sometimes disparate fragments would be joined by safety pins or paper clips; at other times Bacon would mount particularly telling details on to card. He even, on occasion, took photographs himself – most notably of his long-term companion and heir John Edwards, which informed a handful of comparatively benign late portraits. But it is in his painterly transformations of Deakin’s photographs that Bacon’s true originality lies, reinventing the human figure for an apparently post-humanist world. These records of his subjects’ appearance were recalled long after their deaths. Dyer’s features, for instance, dominated Bacon’s painting for some years following his suicide in 1971. And Bacon would sometimes transpose gestures or expressions captured by Deakin’s incisive lens from one subject to another. Various photographs of Bacon himself were found in the studio, including several by Deakin, which the artist made use of for his own self-portraits. The automatic photo booth, where Bacon, frequently drunk, could experiment with different poses and indulge in the performative side of his character, was another catalyst. The potential of the multiple photo-strip to suggest a view of human personality as changeable and contingent would have appealed to Bacon’s sense of people in a state of flux. From the early 1960s he produced several small triptychs which show contrasting aspects of the same head. Analysing the numerous books, magazines, loose leaves, newspapers and press cuttings recovered from the studio floor, Cappock identifies the principal themes that fascinated Bacon. Warfare, crime and political leaders supplied images of violence and power. Medicine, sport, wildlife and human locomotion – Bacon left four copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion – nourished his visceral and erotic iconography of the body. Humans and animals in extreme situations or moving at high speed provided the basis for many of his anatomical distortions, while Bacon’s interest in detailed photographs of injuries and skin disorders from medical textbooks influenced his palette as well as his depiction of flesh. Cappock speculates that the increasingly pathological view of human flesh in Bacon’s late work may also reflect the artist’s own physical decline. The French publication on diseases of the mouth, which, Bacon told David Sylvester, was the origin of his obsession with the open mouth, was not found in the studio; but a fragment of a hand-coloured illustration of gum disease, almost certainly torn from it, was. Two copies of another book whose influence Bacon openly acknowledged, K. C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, were also found. But the most curious discovery made by Cappock and her colleagues was a well-thumbed and paint-smeared copy of a 1920 book on mediums, ectoplasms and other psychic phenomena by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, which Bacon never mentioned to anyone. As Martin Harrison in his recently published study of Bacon and photography has demonstrated, faked spiritualist photographs made a decisive impact on Bacon’s painting from an early stage. That there is still more to be learned about Bacon is evident from this book, comprehensive though it tries to be. Faced with so much material, it has clearly not been possible for Margarita Cappock in the time available to follow up every lead. However, it would not have required much detective work to spot that the “Leaf from an unidentified book with black-and-white stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin . . . Date unknown”, has been torn from Roger Manvell’s 1944 book Film. This seminal little paperback includes five pages of stills from the famous Odessa Steps sequence that so haunted Bacon. Further research needs to be done on Bacon’s relation to the silent cinema, with its expressive facial close-ups. It is also tempting to look at Bacon against the backdrop of European avant-garde portrait photography, which, after the mass slaughter of the First World War, lost faith in the ideal of an integrated human face – and perhaps, by extension, in the notion of human identity as something immutable.

 

 

 

 Francis Bacon

   Gay Art History  

   tribe October 28, 2006