"Well, these are really the first paintings. I had done very few things before. Very bad I think. I destroyed all I could get hold of. I showed this first at the Lefevre gallery in '46. Then everybody absolutely loathed those, really hated them. I think they hate them now. I did think I was going to do a whole crucifixion - these were going to be the images around the base, but I never did the rest of it."

Francis Bacon, Carcasses and crucifixes, The Times, Monday May 20, 1985.

"Mr Francis Bacon is a very capable artist…But the subject of his pictures are so extraordinary, and, indeed, so extremely repellent, that it is scarcely possible to consider anything else. His themes are as vivid and as meaningless as a nightmare… Perhaps the nastiest of his ideas is what seems to be some sort of visceral specimen, a pale and flabby bag of flesh.”

"The human beings in Bacon's pictures seem half-animal, or half-reptilian. Sometimes they have the whiteness of death; sometimes they are white and red, like joints of meat... He wants to make the animal come through the human being; and he wants the paint itself to carry its own implications..."

Francis Bacon: The Observer Profile; The Observer Weekend Review, Sunday, 27th May, 1962.

"Bacon had worked on a triptych in the last years of the War, his traumas put on board with rough strokes. He admitted to the influence of Picasso’s work in the ‘twenties, but he had gone further in distorting the organic form that related to the human image. The triptych was to receive some hostility for its ferocity, one critic writing that Bacon had discovered ‘in the art of painting the felicities of the death warrant [and] covered the lamp-shades of his immediate predecessors with human skins.’ He did shock, he did strike for the bowels, the inner nerve."

Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon – His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishing, New York 1993.

"For most people, Bacon causes a shock. He says himself that his work is making images, and these are shock-images. The meaning of this shock does not refer to something 'sensational' (which is represented), but depends on sensation, on lines and colours. You are confronted with the intense presence of figures, sometimes solitary figures, sometimes with several bodies, suspended in a plane, in an eternity of colours... You can sense power and violence in him along with great charm As soon as he sits more than an hour, he twists in every direction; he really looks like a Bacon. But his posture is always simple, given a sensation that he might feel."

Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Texts & Interviews 1975-1995, The MIT Press, 2006.

"Bacon himself dated his artistic coming of age to the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944 and imposed the orange triptych (now famous, but which Eric Hall, Bacon’s companion, had trouble persuading the Tate to accept it as a gift) as the fons et origo of everything he had painted. Thenceforth by order of the artist no works prior to 1944 were allowed into the canon – although bacon had been painting for some twenty years previously… John Russell’s perceptive monograph begins with the Three Studies, and the interviews that David Sylvester conducted and edited brilliantly make only the briefest mention of anything that happened before. Similarly, in later life, Bacon insisted that all retrospectives show nothing prior to 1944."

"He has certainly been very important to me. It was he who, later on, gave the Three Figures of the Crucifixion to the Tate Gallery. At first they didn't want them. He had to insist before they finally accepted them." Michel Archimbaud: "What was his name?" Francis Bacon: "Eric Hall." ... M.A: "Why did you go back to that work which to a certain extent, in its first version, is your key work - the one which you consider as having signalled your real debut as a painter?" F.B: "I don't know. I had always intended to rework that painting in a much bigger format, and then one day I decided to do it. But it didn't recreate exactly the same work. It's slightly modified compared to the 1944 version, particularly in terms of colour, as orange predominates in the first version and red in the second."

"Bacon’s Three Studies collapses the traditional Cartesian coordiantes of representational space. In so doing it symbolically dismantles Cartesianism tout court (with Cartesianism itself serving as shorthand for a subject-centred metaphysics). The painting places us in an environment where we cannot get our bearings, cannot define meaningful reference points. However, even though Bacon continues to offer us improbable geometries throughout his later paintings most are by no means as disorienting as the Three Studies. In fact, we regularly find Bacon’s figures held within the confines of a spectral cube defining precisely the regular, schematised Cartesian space that we cannot locate in the Three Studies."

Luke Skrebowski, The Vitality of the Accident; Francis Bacon's Metaphoric Figuration; Metamorphosis Issue 05, London Consortium, 2004.

"If there’s one thing the new horror flick Teeth teaches us, it’s that nothing sours a romantic soirée like a vagina dentata. The phrase — Latin for 'vagina with teeth' — conjures men’s primal fear of sex, the opposite sex, the word 'vajayjay,' and dentistry. Teeth writer and director Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of the late pop artist Roy Lichtenstein) has said that he first heard of the 'vagina dentata' in the ’70s, in a college class taught by feminist social critic Camille Paglia. These days, it’s used mostly to describe art: an abstracted naked lady with a praying-mantis face in Pablo Picasso’s 1930 painting Seated Bather; the monster grins of human-dinosaur mutants in Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. It’s also been applied to the fanged space bugs that menace moist tunnels in the Alien films."

Greg Cook, Let Me See Your Grill - The origins of the vagina dentata, The Phoenix, January 22, 2008.

"Bacon’s oblique depictions of the Eumenides (Erinyes) date back to the work he situated as his ‘Opus 1’, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Obviously, for this mythological form there was no recourse to a realistic pictorial precedent, in the form of either painting or a photograph, and in any case his prime concern was to capture the sensation aroused in him by the idea of the Furies. The Furies, which in this secular Three Marys were emblems for malevolence and personal disaster, reappear in his iconography from 1974 onwards, and most conspicuously in the 1981 triptych. Triptych – Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus was begun by 1979, and in an early state the left panel incorporated the trickling blood but omitted the suspended Eumenides … considered Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as a development of Picasso’s ‘forms’, and not until about 1950 did he come to regard the human body as his principle subject.”

Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Extreme Points of Realism; Francis Bacon - The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, 2006.

"In a recent conversation with the Editor of Cambridge Opinion, Bacon spoke of a certain kind of organic form as an alternative to the creation of the human image which ‘could open up all sorts of possibilities, probably of a secondary intensity’, and actually his first triptych, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, executed in 1944, was a contribution to this kind of organic invention. The forms bear a relation to the human figure but are placed outside the human pale by extreme distortion and the sense they convey of existing in a state total and perpetual rage. Alley records that Bacon has referred to them in a letter as sketches for the Eumenides. (The word means ‘gracious ones’ and is a propitiary name for the Furies who exist for the purpose of avenging crimes against the ties of blood)."

"Bacon's Three Studies put forward a less comfortable point of view. They suggested that people would always go on doing dreadful things to one another, and that other people would always come by to gloat. That was not the whole meaning of the Three Studies, but it was one of their meanings, and it made a lot visitors hightail it out of the gallery. On any reading, these were terrifying images. The three figures in question had anatomies that were part human, part animal and part conundrum. They could probe, bite and suck, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least of them were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged. Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony and a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was as if cornered, and only waiting for a chance to drag the observer down and savage him."

John Russell, Time Vindicates Francis Bacon’s Searing Vision, The New York Times, June 9, 1985.

"In his cultural history of the horror genre, The Monster Show, writer David J. Skal compares Francis Bacon's famous 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to equally disturbing special effects work in John Carpenter's The Thing. The surrealistic imagery conjured by Rob Bottin to depict the transformation of a human being into a shape-changing thing from another world is nearly unimaginable, and Milton is one of its few precedents. It must be seen to be believed, and it represents a kind of high-water mark for fevered creativity in the horror film...The Thing can clearly be categorized as part of a movement in genre film that dealt with biological horror... The Thing looks, unblinking, into the abyss, where it finds our own anxieties, suspicions, and phobias reflected in the eyes of shapeless, unknowable monsters."

Bryant Frazer, John Carpenter's The Thing, Deep Focus Movie Reviews; June 1999.

"Lynch started as a painter, and continues to work in that medium, and it is perhaps more useful to consider his films as you would paintings. He mentioned at the GFT that Francis Bacon was a great hero and influence, so I ask about Bacon's famous 1944 triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (which, by the way, is worth looking at as a possible inspiration for the look of the baby in Eraserhead). Bacon's masterpiece - like, say, Mulholland Drive - has characters and seems to contain some sort of narrative, but it's not entirely clear what that is. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' Lynch smiles, delighted by the comparison. 'If you had those paintings on the wall and 100 people came in and you said, Tell me the story that you get from that triptych,' you'd get 100 different stories. But there could be some beautiful stories.' There also seems to be a common mood between Bacon's paintings and Lynch's films. 'Sure,' he agrees. 'A kind of lonely despair and sickness.' He laughs. 'Yeah.'..."

Peter Ross & David Lynch, Trance mission, Sunday Herald, Scotland, November 4, 2007.

"Since he exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's nightmare was fundamentally his own. Coming as it did at the end of World War II, in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation. Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday."

Michael Kimmelman, The Master of the Macabre, Francis Bacon, The New York Times, October 26, 1989.

"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion seems derived from Picasso's Crucifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [ to me ] symbols of outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays."

"The paintings of Francis Bacon embody his passionate and determined challenge of ‘fate’ in its various guises. His marked fascination for Aeschylus' Orestes or Christ rests with their having questioned fate, while the Eumenides or Furies of Greek mythology, first presented in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion (1944), became a leitmotif in the English painter's work. Even the manner in which Bacon approached the canvas was described by him as a struggle between the artist's will and the 'inevitability' of the paint. But what is fate for many of us Bacon preferred to call chance or accident. The distinction for him rested with the artificial explanations or beliefs we impose upon life. Bacon attacked these relentlessly because they engender an unquestioning and destructive acceptance of the vagaries of life, or, simply put, they result in a fantastic approach to life."

"The work was really beginning to take shape now, resulting, in 1944, in the massive and enormously powerful triptych entitled Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Although the triptych may be regarded as a point of reference for Bacon's work as a whole, we know very little about the circumstances leading to the creation of this piece, which was painted as the war dragged interminably to its conclusion and before the full extent of its horrors could be appreciated. As Bacon was to say thirty years later to Sylvester, the studies were designed to stand for 'the usual figures at the base of the cross.... But I never did that; I just left these as attempts' - as creatures of his imagination, half nightmare, half monument of an age. Bacon never wanted any of his earlier works to be shown, regarding the triptych as his point of departure, and it is with these strange monsters on their orange background that the career of this disturbing artist really began."

Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon - Taking Reality By Surprise, Thames & Hudson, 1996.

"I've had a desire to do forms, as when I originally did three froms at the base of the Crucifixion. They were influenced by the Picasso things which were done at the end of the ‘twenties. And I think there’s a whole area there suggested by Picasso, which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it... I've never known why my paintings are known as horrible. I'm always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim alter a horror piece? Its one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studded with thorns like nails, but oddly enough the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is the horror in the sense that it is so vitalising; isn't that how people came out of the great tragedies? People came out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence."

Francis Bacon, Interviews with Francis Bacon; David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1993.

"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is the most important Bacon work in our collection. It's a kind of expressionist painting in the triptych format of a religious painting. But it isn't itself religious; actually it's a deeply atheist painting. The absence of the Christ figure is apparent, and Bacon said that it wasn't about Christian iconography; more the Three Furies (the avenging goddesses of Greek antiquity). When it was first exhibited in 1945, images were leaking out of the concentration camps, it resonated with the spirit of the time and was a bleak picture of humanity. Bacon's picture became part of the intellectual climate, characterised as 'existentialist'. While the image itself is somewhat repellent, in terms of colour and framing the painting is rather sumptuous. Bacon offers a picture of the world as a brutal place, but one that is also exhilarating. It chimes with his view of the world. Bacon painted in a rather loose way. He was self-taught and constantly experimenting. Bacon was hugely important in showing the ambitions of British art, but he transcended national identity. He was a world artist."

Toby Treves, Tate Britain Curator, Great British Bacon, The Radio Times, 19-25 March, 2005.

Wieland Schmeid, The Crucifixion; Commitment and Conflict, Prestel 1996.

"Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944, oil and pastel on cardboard, each 95 x 73.5 cm, Tate Gallery, London. This painting was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1945 to a public still reeling from the the effects of the Second World War. The screeching, stretching forms with their bandaged eyes and bared teeth horrified and disgusted who had come to the exhibition to forget. Their minds stuck fast in front of the half-animal, half-human forms perched like humped, bobbing birds on their pedestals reaching to bite and suck. However these three monsters, inspired from the savage furies that chase Orestes in Aeschylus' Eumenides go further than the Second World War. Their thrashing bodies evoke a deeper torment. This is a Crucifixion not the Crucifixion and these are creatures 'that gather as ghouls around any scene of human degradation' (Russell, Thames & Hudson, 1993). The figure in the central panel suggests a phallus on a tripod, its grimacing mouth and perfect square teeth precedes the cavernous scream on the right. The left-hand figure lurches forward, its neck protruding from mutilated wing stumps. Thickly painted orange paint resonates like blood and a patch of grass stabs like nails. From the title Crucifixion, Bacon has kept only the feeling of damnation without redemption."

"Since the second world war, Francis Bacon has consistently been regarded as a major artist, indeed, many would concur with the judgement of Alan Bowness, Director of the Tate, that he is 'surely the greatest living painter'... His public career effectively began with the exhibition of Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944, at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945. This triptych, now in the Tate's permanent collection, contains many of the elements which were to recur in Bacon's later work. These include the use of extreme anatomical and physiognomic distortions as the principal means of expression; a general tenor of violence and relentless physicality; and iconographic and formal allusions - through reference to the Crucifixion, the triptych format, etc. - to an abandoned tradition of Christian religious painting. Three Studies also reveals a disjunction between contorted foreground figures, and the illusory space which contains them. The later is constructed, pictorially, through relatively bland expanses of background colour, in this case a garish orange, broken by the suggestions of the space-frame device. Bacon was to make frequent use of these compositional conventions in later paintings."

Peter Fuller, Francis Bacon. London; Exhibition Reviews, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 127, No. 989, August 1985.

"Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was bandaged. The left-hand figure had the hairstyle of a female jail-bird. At shoulder-level it had what might have been mutilated wing-stumps. An inch or two below these there was drawn tight what might have been either a shower curtain or a pair of outsized pajama trousers. Set down on what looked like a metal stool, the figure was trashing round as if to savage whatever came within biting distance. The central figure, anatomically somewhat like a dis-feathered ostrich, had a human mouth, heavily bandaged, set at the end of its long, thick tubular neck. What that neck might have looked like without the bandage was indicated by the right-handed figure. It had big ears at the corner of its mouth, and was able to open that mouth to an angle of about ninety degrees. It's one visible leg was as much a sofa-leg as an animal leg, and the patch of grass on which it stood was nearer to a bed of nails than to the shaven lawns of Oxford and Cambridge. Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was if as cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level. They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way."

"As Russell suggests, visitors and even critics were so unnerved by the Three Studies that they fled – a reaction that would have pleased Bacon more than praise. It confirmed his capacity to disturb, and having drunk deep at the fount of surrealism as an aspiring young painter Bacon knew that truly original art was bound to offend, the more deeply the better... What sets the Three Studies apart from all Bacon's previous known work is its scale and its deliberateness. The searchings of fifteen years' sporadic apprenticeship come to a dramatic conclusion here. It is as if, freed from self-doubt and inhibition (and, clearly, from the presence of his father), the artist had been goaded into making a statement of exacerbated authority. If Bacon may be said to have found his own voice in these panels, it is the unsilenceable scream of his open-mouthed monster on the right. But the basic questions continue to return, after decades of attempted interpretation. What does this howl mean? How did these ungainly, menacing figures come about? What gives the whole triptych, with its roughly delineated space and suffused orange background, its power as an emblem of brute suffering, ravening greed and generalized evil? Despite the rawness, and for all the artist's lack of formal education, the work grew out of a highly developed visual and literary culture as well as out of emotional urgency. the most important - but by no means only - source for this picture, as for those that led up to it, was Picasso."

"The triptych arrangement enabled him to join three repugnant creatures in one work. At the same time, it isolates each presence within gilt frames so that none can alleviate he other's torment. The female figure on the left, saddled with a pair of limp feelers hanging from her shoulder-stumps, cranes forward. She seems to be trying to slide off her perch and discover what is happening in the central panel, but cannot move. Paralysis also affects the monster on the right, a hump-back oddity with starved ribs who can only stretch out its distended neck and utter a helpless roar. The realistic human ear attached to this screaming head clashes with the animality of its body. And the same principle of shock through contrast applies to the patch of grass growing so unexpectedly in the orange ground which gives the whole triptych such a parched and eye-smarting air. The impulsive handling of paint and pastel, smeared, scraped, slashed and dragged over the hardboard rather than applied with conventional refinement, shows the urgency with which Bacon set down this atheistic vision of hell. But discipline counters the rhetoric wherever you look. Spare black outlines brushed in behind the figures lend order to the triptych, and direct out attention towards the middle. Here, the focal image offers no trace of a body on a cross. Instead, a beast as brutish as its companions bares jagged teeth at us. The beast could be growling, like an enraged dog warning strangers not to get too close. Or it might be yelling because its eyes, like poor Gloucester's in King Lear, have been put out. The ambiguity has been exposed, for Bacon understands that a cry can signify aggression just as easily as pain."

Richard Cork, 1992; Francis Bacon - His Life & Violent Times; Andrew Sinclair, Crown Publishing, New York 1993.

"THEIR heads are eyeless and tiny, their mouths huge. Two of them are baring their teeth. All have long, stalk-like necks. The one on the left, hunched on a table, has the sacked torso of a mutilated woman; the body of the centre creature is more like an inflated abdomen propped up on flamingo legs behind an empty pedestal; the third could be a cross between a lion and an ox: its single front leg disappears into a patch of scrawny grass. They exude a sense of nature’s errors: errors caused by some unspeakable genetic pollution, embroidered with physical wounding. One has a white bandage where eyes might have been. All are an ominous grey, tinted with flesh pinks: they are set off against backgrounds of garish orange containing suggestions of unspecified architectural spaces. Francis Bacon painted this triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now in the Tate Gallery, in 1944. It was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery the following April, where it hung alongside works by Moore, Sutherland, and others who had sought to redeem the horrors of war through the consolations of art. Although Bacon referred to traditional religious iconography, he did not wish to console anyone about anything. Indeed, he seemed to want to rub the nose of the dog of history in its own excrement. When Three Studies was first shown, the war was ending and it was spring. Bacon was out of tune with the mood of his times. Certainly, as far as the fashionable movements in art were concerned, he was to remain so. And yet his star steadily ascended. By the late 1950s he was one of an elite handful of ‘distinguished British artists’... Creatures like those depicted in Three Studies can no more be observed slouching around London streets than haloes can be seen above the heads of good men, or angels in our skies. Of course Bacon’s violent imagination distorts what he sees."

Peter Fuller, Roulette Realist, The Art of Francis Bacon, Monthly Reviews, The Age, November 1st., 1983.

"Bacon's is an art of breakdown, meltdown and entropy - a fact he makes plain by taking the classic forms of Western European religious art (the triptych, the icon) and twisting them to his own ends. One of the first pictures to be seen in the exhibition is that with which the artist made his London exhibiting debut, in 1944: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The writer John Russell, who went to see the painting in an exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery just a month before the end of the Second World War, has left a fine description of the appalling impact it made on the fragile optimism of its first audience. 'Immediately to the right of the door were images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe and suck, and they had very long, eel-like necks ... Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them.' Yet the mood at the Pompidou Centre is one of reverence. The paintings are hung within spaces and arranged in configurations that suggest the sacredness of the chapel. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which Bacon has now come to seem all too easily accessible an artist. These days Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion does not seem to prompt shock but (and this may itself be shocking in another way) an almost straightforward sense of recognition. On the day when I visited the exhibition, I saw a young couple approach Bacon's howling, sneering, squatting maenads, consider them for a moment or two in silence, nod sadly and move on. Yes, the choreography of their bodies seemed to say, yes, this is what the world is like. Ghouls like these ones lurk everywhere - in corners of the mind best left unvisited, in the shadow lands of society, in war zones."

Andrew Graham-Dixon, The artist formerly known as British, The Independent, July 16, 1996.

"Nobody seemed familiar with him or his work. Finally I found someone who knew him, the painter Michael Wishart. My instincts had been correct. The youngish man was indeed Francis Bacon, and the house opposite ours belonged to his cousin, a Miss Watson, who owned virtually all that was left of the serveral hundred paintings Francis had destroyed. Forget about her, Michael said, come and meet Francis. Francis lived across from South Kensington Station in a vast gloomy studio that had belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Millais... Michael had told me about the illicit roulette parties that Francis, who was an accomplished croupier, liked to organise. He also told me about the rough trade and the drinking and the fishnet stockings. What he had not mentioned was Francis's sightless old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who sat knitting in a rocking chair, mumbling away about the wickedness of the Duchess of Windsor: 'They better bring back the gibbet for her.' At night, the kitchen table doubled as her bed. Nanny Lightfoot, I suddenly realized, must have given Francis the idea for the central panel of his early masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. She must have taught him the same game that many old-time nannies (mine included) taught their charges: how to turn a fist into a face. Make a fist, stick the tip of your thumb between the knuckles of your first and second fingers and the black ends of two matches either side of the second and third ones, drape a handkerchief over the fist, and it turns into a head like the one in the Bacon. I thought it wiser to keep this discovery to myself."

John Richardson, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.

The press view at Tate Britain for its latest retrospective of Francis Bacon (the first was in 1960, the second in 1985) buzzed with a level of anticipation I’ve not often encountered. A self-taught painter, Bacon mutilated most of the work he produced between 1933-45 at the time, but once his work became known his popularity was quickly established, lasting throughout his life, and is, it seems, growing by the day.

Tate’s current retrospective is very much a ‘best of Bacon’, taking a chronological approach through a selection of 71 works, broken only by two thematic rooms that group his Crucifixion works (a theme the artist drew on throughout his career) and selected archival material taken from Bacon’s studio that, after his death, was painstakingly uplifted and moved in its entirety to public display in his birthplace of Dublin.

I was more than slightly interested to see this show, principally because I’ve never really been able to make up my mind about Francis Bacon’s work. I first came across Bacon’s name as a teenager under the spell of Lucian Freud’s drawings – in particular Freud’s 1951 portrait of Bacon – but never quite felt the impact that Bacon intended in his works so that the ‘paint comes across directly onto the nervous system’ – but I wanted to. Granted, the colour, scale (from the 1960s onwards Bacon rarely deviated from the 2-metre high by 1.5 metre wide format; three for the triptychs) and compositions are both arresting and impressive. But the paintings’ essence of human vulnerability, of man existing as just another animal or mound of flesh in a godless void (Bacon in a butcher’s shop apparently wondered why he himself wasn’t one of the carcasses), didn’t for me deliver the haunting psychological darkness and brutal isolation evident in the harrowed lines and down-turned eyes of some of Freud’s etched sitters. And walking through the Tate galleries, it still doesn’t. Put simply, it’s a big idea, boldly done, to the same effect each time. But it’s also an idea that’s been given more depth of treatment elsewhere, for my money in words more than paint. It’s not for nothing that Bacon references the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Aeschylus in his paintings from 1967-84. I wonder what he made of Beckett.

It may be that some of the impact of Bacon’s paintings has diminished with familiarity and time. The same is not true of the artist’s persona. Only recently did I discover Freud’s opinion that his portrait of Bacon, stolen in 1988 while on show at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, was probably lifted by a fan of Bacon rather than one of his own. Bacon’s reputation for mutilating paintings, frequenting Soho drinking dens, having intense and abusive relationships in a time when homosexuality was illegal, and as the figurehead of London bohemians in a period now revered for its creativity, has secured his iconic status.

And the sort of material emerging from the detritus of his studio will do nothing to harm this image. It includes photography by John Deakin of Bacon’s close friends only (Isabel Rawsthorne, Freud, his lover George Dyer) commissioned by the artist who then painted them in isolation, using the image as reference. In addition, scraps of magazine and newspaper cuttings with photography of sportsmen and wrestlers or drawings by Michelangelo have been resurrected from the litter of Bacon’s studio and smartly framed and hung on the wall. I can’t help feelings it’s slightly voyeuristic to riffle so fastidiously through this material – particularly when these sources were often and openly acknowledged by Bacon during his lifetime. Tate curators have brought to our attention the lists of potential subjects they have found in the studio – lists Bacon denied making, instead asserting the spontaneity of his approach. There’s also a wall of so-called drawings – another process that Bacon denied – but these are simple outlines of position rather than the finished drawings being produced by Bacon’s contemporaries. No doubt interesting discoveries will be made about Bacon’s process and technique, but the real essence of Bacon is, ultimately, in his scream alone.

Was Francis Bacon serious?

Cassandra Langer, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, September 1, 2009

FRANCIS BACON'S LIPS don't lie; they scream their truths with bared teeth. His male bodies are hot, steaming chunks of meat that make Mickey Rourke's portrayal in The Wrestler look like Adonis. These male bodies are on the meat rack of life and express Bacon's take on the gay condition as taken directly from the wretched depths of his personal experiences. That said, there is no social sacred cow that Bacon is afraid to slaughter in his portrayals of the human condition.

Bacon's long-awaited centenary retrospective - he was born in 1909 - arrived last May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, fresh from its triumph at London's Tate Gallery. The exhibit inspired New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz to ask (March 25, 2009): "Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?" Neither question really does justice to the Irish-born English artist, who fits neither of these descriptions.

Francis Bacon is an artist who lived a ruinous life. Friends describe him as a "devil, whore, alcoholic, sacred monster and a drunken, faded sodomite swaying nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho" (New York magazine, 3/25/09). The artist himself claimed he was "rotten to the core." In the end, Bacon was an artist who could not escape his demons, which lived inside of him and frequently rose to the surface. His art is the stark manifestation of his nightmares. Influenced by a variety of 19th-century and modern artists ranging from Daumier to Picasso, Bacon's bodies shriek their agony and shout their pleasure.

A product of postwar Europe, Bacon's early work portrays violently contorted, sweaty, bloody bodies isolated in vast spaces. Bacon claimed he wanted to address the viewer's "nervous system directly, to unlock the valves of feeling," using distorted forms derived from chance and accident. His early paintings - including Crucifixion (1933) and especially Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The work is based on the Eumenides, or Furies, of Aeschylus' The Oresteia (1944), about which a four-year-old viewer standing near me at the Met exclaimed, "Mommy, look at the pee pees!"- dissect male anatomy in a non-literal but startlingly direct way. Not surprisingly, American critics of this era tended to sideline Bacon's art because of his apparent, however unstated, homosexuality. All this changed in the 1960's and 70's with the advent of feminism and postmodernism. Younger critics relished writing about his bravura brushwork impasto thickly applied paint that projects from the picture surface. Such works as Childe Hassam's Allies Day (1917; National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C. , and the thick, luscious applications of painterly paint and sexual content. These hallmarks of his signature style abated somewhat only after he had settled down with his last lover, John Edwards, in the 1980's.

As a child, Bacon's imaginative world was more Brothers Grimm than Hans Christian Andersen. Growing up, he was given morphine for the asthma that ultimately contributed to his death. In this world, homosexuality was a defect and a "limp." When Bacon was sixteen, his father, a failed horse trainer, caught the teenager wearing his mother's underwear and a pair of fishnet stockings that became an essential part of his wardrobe for the rest of his life. (I can only imagine what a Freudian analyst would make of this fetish.) In an attempt to cure the boy, his father had him horsewhipped by the grooms. Bacon later claimed that afterwards they would sodomize him. When the whipping treatment failed to rid him of his perversion, the elder Bacon asked a family friend to "straighten the boy out" by taking him to Berlin. The friend then bedded the teen, subsequently abandoning him to his fate in a city that was a buggerer's seventh heaven. Attracted to males, the boy remained in Weimar Berlin, where he fully indulged his taste for rough trade.

When the artist died in 1992, hundreds of people both straight and gay came to bid him a final farewell. Nevertheless, Bacon's personal mythology is ineluctably tied to his gayness, which rendered him a marked man living on the margins of society. For half a century Bacon envisioned in his work the unimaginable passions and forbidden ecstasy of same-sex sadomasochism as no other modern artist had ever done. His paintings of male nudes evoke stages of incompletion, damage, and fragmentation as totalities in themselves. His compressed, majestic, muscular naked figures hunch, crouch, and shiver in the cold light of the artist's unforgiving gaze. His dreadful bodies raise questions about the individual, but more importantly (and this is what gives them their universality) of the individual in relation to the Other. His Two Figures (1953) locked in a violent, erotic embrace embody a raging bull of tenderness that most of his critics seem to have missed in their rush to notice the brutality of his work. Yet the plastic voluptuousness of these two sexy, tough men bound together in their drive for satisfaction shocks us and requires us to begin to reevaluate Bacon's resistance to normative heterosexuality and the courage this required. Whether we are seduced or repelled by what we see, we are compelled to look and to take it seriously.

The phantoms that haunted Bacon's oeuvre are noteworthy for their autobiographical elements. In 1952, at the age of 43, he met former Royal Air Force pilot Peter Lacy. "I'd never really fallen in love with anyone until then," he later remarked. "Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start." The two lovers pushed the limits of S&M to the breaking point. Just before his May 1962 retrospective opened at the Tate in London, Bacon learned that Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from alcohol poisoning. Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer, a petty thief who had broken into his studio to rob him. Their stormy relationship lasted seven years. History repeated itself when on October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon's retrospective opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer overdosed on drugs and died in their hotel room. Bacon was 61 at this time. The artist painted a number of black triptych memorials, including his powerful In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 and Triptych August 1972. The bleakest and perhaps the greatest of these testaments is Triptych May-June 1973, a work of monumental and grave simplicity in which the circumstances of Dyer's death are gravely re-enacted. What is clear from this magnificent triptych is that Dyer remained forever in Bacon's heart, inextricably Bacon's models are caught in transitory positions not easily registered by the naked eye. To achieve this effect, he used a camera for reference. The captivaing, thing about these paintings and drawings, whether the subject is male or female, is their complex content and painterly technique. An inmate of his own concentration camp, slaughterhouse, closet, Bacon employed lyric passages of paint to express his deepest emotions. He cuts, slashes, and literally butchers his forms on the canvas to create viscerally unforgettable images. Despite Bacon's constant need to hide his weaknesses, his feelings and materials fight brutal battles that disclose everything. These pictures are raw and redolent with the textures and smells of his life.

Bacon's artistic inspiration comes from a variety of sources, among them Velazquez' Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), which resulted in Head VI, 1949, with its sensuous purple cape. It was Bacon's earliest variation on a theme and my first encounter with his work. He mined this picture with obsessive intensity throughout the following decade and intermittently into the 1960's and 70's. His experience of the Velazquez was entirely by way of reproductions, a dependency that, far from limiting the artist, encouraged him to take extravagant license. Add to this his use of the silent films of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, notably Strike and Battleship Potemkin, both from 1925, notably a scene from the latter in which a screaming nurse is shot through the eye on the Odessa steps, as well as hundreds of images from magazines and newspapers, and one sees unmistakably that Bacon drew material from a wide variety of visual sources. Bacon revered Degas, who held a discreet distance from his young ballerinas and bathers. He replaced the dance studio with the locker room and brought his subjects much closer in. For me, his male nudes are intensely powerful as they twist and turn in their cramped spaces. I feel their vulnerability in the constriction of their ligaments and in the tautness of the musculature as their bodies press up against the limits of the fore-ground. This intimacy makes us just a bit uncomfortable because it confronts us with our own passions, our voyeuristic impulses.

Despite being in a stable relationship, Bacon had not given up on extracurricular desire. In his last years and in declining health (a cancerous kidney was removed in 1989), he enjoyed a passionate relationship with a cultivated young Spaniard that he met some time in the mid-1980's. Against his doctor's advice, Bacon made a trip to Madrid in April 1992. Within days of arrival, he fell critically ill and was taken to a medical clinic. On April 28, he suffered a heart attack and died in the presence of two nuns from the Servants of Mary. Bacon's remains were cremated in Spain and, in accord with his request, there were no services. His ashes were transported to England, where they were scattered in a private ceremony. Bacon named his lover, John Edwards, as the sole heir to his estate. At the time of his death, a single unfinished portrait stood on the tall easel in his Reece Mews studio. It had been there since the previous November. The identity of its subject, the assertive profile caught halfway between a self-portrait and a portrait of George Dyer, has so far defied interpretation.

The biggest disappointment of the Bacon Retrospective is the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. It delves into virtually every aspect of Bacon's messy life in a way that completely empties it of the vital forces that his paintings so brilliantly capture. In trying to create an intimate narrative of his life before, during, and after his leap to fame, the writers manage only to analyze the man and his work to death. He emerges from their handiwork as a zombie from Night of the Living Dead, controlled by unseen forces rather than driving his own artistic destiny.

Cassandra Langer is a freelance writer and art critic based in New York.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) at Tate Britain heralds the artist’s centenary in 2009. It is the first retrospective since 1985, enabling a re-assessment of his work, although the exhibitions in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (2005) and Norwich, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre have been significant. The present exhibition is informed by the revelation, following Bacon’s death in 1992, of the contents of his studio. His working methods were revealed, especially his reliance on photographs.

In interviews, Francis Bacon insisted that he never drew, and that his compositions were intuitive. These claims were refuted by the posthumous revelation of figure studies from the 1950s. Bacon usually commenced painting a figure on to the blank canvas. In 1962 he claimed that the genesis of his paintings came whilst daydreaming. In fact his methods were often more orthodox. The works on paper and lists that came to light after his death indicate that he collected a wide range of material to use as points of reference. The present exhibition, which makes a powerful impact on the viewer, comprises 65 paintings and 13 major triptychs. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date, which examines the artist’s sources, processes and thoughts. It is accompanied by an excellent, scholarly catalogue; edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens; with essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh.¹

Widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon can also be seen as one of the most powerful and searing commentators of the human condition in Britain since the Second World War, expressing unflinching images of sexuality, violence and isolation. The exhibition is profound, haunting and iconic. Bacon’s philosophy as an atheist is explored: man in a godless world is presented as simply another animal, subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear. In this Bacon personified the age. The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s was such that the human image in art became increasingly difficult to portray. The existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea (1938), found a visual counterpart in the images of despair and alienation of Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions of Arthur Boyd. For the most part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated because, after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found images of humanity impossible to create.

John Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently wrote:
“He repeatedly painted the human body, in discomfort or agony or want. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical”.² In spite of the hellish drama expressed, Bacon’s work is inspiring in the very dedication to the craft of painting, and the intellectual dialogue created. This is a profound exhibition, at once challenging and awesome. In spite of the bewilderment that can so often be experienced in confrontation with his painting, there is an unexpected affirmation in the choice of formal language and the precision and care applied to the act of painting: the placement of each head, each brush stroke, every subtle hue, the manner in which the figure inhabits the space, the form within the picture plane. A quiet authority is established by the artist amid the shrieking pain, due in large part to the dialogue he has with art from the past.

Bacon’s sources have been divided by various commentators now, to include ‘high art’ sources and ‘low art’ sources. Bacon chose only the most remarkable artists to aspire to: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Picasso. He also chose inspiration from the modern world: men in suits, modern furniture, dangling light bulbs, gay comic books. He depicted a low-life from gangster boyfriends, heavy drinking and sexually dissipated Colony Room artists and intellectuals, a collision of high and low culture, survival and destruction. Chance played an important role in Bacon’s work – spontaneity was of key importance in a Post-Surrealist context. Although he retained the human figure in his work, he embraced the Abstract Expressionists’ love of chance in art as in life. A primordial energy is central to many works, the Bullfight paintings in 1969 being perfect examples of how Bacon infused the image on canvas with a reckless, fatal movement. Describing the collision of illustration of facts and an expression of the very deepest feelings, Bacon noted: “one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”³ Bacon had the highest ambition from a young age, claiming that his work should either be in the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between. His ambition as a painter was to define his existential, atheistic stance in a post-photography world. Bacon was a habitual destroyer of paintings; in 1962 he remarked that over-working was a form of destruction, of clogging. Spontaneity was a vital quality, which Bacon sought to capture.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of his life in London, working as a self-taught painter from the 1930s. The human figure was central to his work throughout his long and productive career. He died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Time has played an important part in the appraisal of Bacon’s work; his unflinching approach to violence and the human condition is more poignant than ever. In 1973 he attributed his preoccupation with violence and war to the times in which he grew up, interwar Germany and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland:

I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long time…And then I was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole life had been lived through a time of stress, and then World War Two, anyone who lived through the European wars was affected by them, they affected one’s whole psyche to that extent, to live continuously under an atmosphere of tension and threat.⁴

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which the most scholarly essays, explore the lasting significance of his work for the present day. Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the inescapable suffering of human existence dominate the exhibition.

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain is broadly chronological. Room One, Animal, examines Bacon’s early work from the 1940s where his attitude to humanity is already evident. His bestial depiction of the human figure combined personal feelings of anxiety with broader references to the Second World War. He used reproductions from books, catalogues and magazines. The male figure is used repeatedly in Bacon’s long career; he often includes a scream or shout to reveal the internal repressed and violent anxieties. The open mouth represents the tension that exists between the individual and the broader context of time and place.

Room Two, Zone, examines Bacon’s work of the 1950s where he carried out complex experiments with pictorial space. He described the processes, in 1952, as ‘an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment’. This work established his easily recognisable images with boxed figures in cage-like structures. Hexagonal ground planes establish tense psychological zones; the use of shuttering, the vertical lines of paint merge the foreground and background. This is the period in which Bacon came of age as a painter. Yet his personal circumstances were extremely difficult: homeless, in debt and in a tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy. During this time he searched for and found appropriate subject -matter with which to express his deepest anxiety. In the 1950s Bacon used the painting by Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, (c.1650), as his starting point to explore the insecurities of the powerful. For Bacon, the choice of the portrait of a Pope had nothing to do with religion; as a non-believer he was concerned with the way man behaves to each other. For Bacon the portrait by Velazquez was one of the greatest portraits ever painted for it opened up feelings and prompted the imagination, beyond any real individual or other art work. The colour is magnificent, prompting Bacon to give his own images a sense of tragic grandeur, a sense of authority in painterly terms. The Pope as a unique figure in the world suited Bacon’s ambition to create a powerful image in which power is stripped of its essence.

Room Three, Apprehension, explores the pervading anxiety in all of Bacon’s work. The Cold War anxiety that limited movement and personal freedom was combined in Bacon’s case with the illegality at the time of homosexuality. His sometimes, violent relationship, with Peter Lacy, is captured in the Man in Blue series, which concentrates on a single anonymous figure in a dark suit. Although inspired by the greatest artists from history, Bacon powerful images are achieved by combining the authority of the history of art, with contemporary life. The figure is portrayed in isolation, sitting at a table or at a bar. Like many artists in the twentieth century, including the Italian Futurists, who worked with the figure, Bacon drew from the photographic work of Edweard Muybridge’s, The Human Figure in Motion, (1887) sequential photographs of animals and humans, which Bacon described as ‘a dictionary’ of the body in motion.

Room Four at Tate Britain is devoted to one of Bacon’s most famous and iconic series, of the Crucifixion. He made works throughout his career at pivotal moments. As an atheist Bacon saw the Crucifixion as a particularly poignant act of man’s violence. Brutality and fear are developed in a particularly cruel evocation of the famous religious scene. The ritual of sacrifice is given a new dimension, the brutality emphasised with extreme abandon. Meat carcasses are used by Bacon to diminish the human notion of superiority in the wider scheme of life according to Christianity. In an early interview Bacon describes how existing images breed others. He chose the Crucifixion by Cimabue as a starting point, but readily admits that without all the paintings that have been done on the subject, his could not have produced his own. Often under the influence of alcohol, and prone to drug abuse, and frequently suffering acute exhaustion, Bacon would create Crucifixion images of profound despair. He also juxtaposes fragments of films, such as those of Eisenstein, and isolated stills allowing accident to play a major part in the creative process. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (c.1944) is a key work and one that paved the way for his use of the triptych format, and numerous later themes and compositions. The bestial depiction of the human figure was central to Bacon’s oeuvre. Displacing the traditional saints in Crucifixion paintings, Bacon later referred to them as Furies from Greek mythology. In interview with David Sylvester in 1966, he was asked about the use of meat carcasses in these and other works. He stated, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses”.⁵ Being human in Bacon’s world was utterly debased. Bacon took works from the history of art that were created within a spiritual context and slashed them to bits. In this he felt completely justified, for the Vatican never openly condemned Nazism. This was Bacon’s vendetta for the hypocrisy played out in the name of God. Where artists such as Hieronymous Bosch created devastating images of humanity in works such as his Judgement Day paintings, Bacon chose the traditionally edifying form of portraiture, which entails a degree of trust between painter and sitter, and destroyed it. His disturbing papal images are like the burning of an effigy, leaving the viewer with a sense of physical revulsion.

Room Five Crisis, focuses on the period 1956-1961. Bacon travelled widely in Monaco, France and Africa, mostly with Peter Lacy. He used new methods of painting, choosing thicker paint, strong colour, often violently applied. Using a self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, as his source and inspiration, Bacon painted works that were criticised for their ‘reckless energy’. With hindsight the energy and drama in these works was necessary in introducing chance into the painting process itself.

Room Six is the Archive in the Tate’s exhibition, based on the revelations made by scholars after Bacon’s death. The source material found in Bacon’s studio revealed his reliance on photography and other sources that had not been fully examined during Bacon’s lifetime. There were photographs of athletes, film stills and reproductions of works of art. Further, his practice of commissioning photographs of his friends by John Deakin was fully realised, and formed an important component of the exhibition in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, (2005). Bacon also took many photographs himself, preferring to draw from photographs, for they were already two-dimensional images. In his studio there were also lists of potential subjects and preparatory drawings, which Bacon had denied making, preferring to emphasise the spontaneous nature of the act of painting directly onto canvas.

Room Seven Portrait, is important given the findings in Bacon’s studio. In descriptions in interviews, most famously those with David Sylvester, Bacon describes his intention to reinvent portraiture. He drew upon the works he admired of Velazquez and Van Gogh. His abiding concern was how a painter should create portraits in an age dominated by photography. He distorted the sitter’s appearance in order to extract a greater, more complete likeness, informed by internal issues of personality and mood. George Dyer his lover is depicted with a mixture of affection and contempt. Three Figures in Room, (1964) expresses a range of human characteristics including absurdity, pathos, and isolation.

Room Eight Memorial, is dedicated to George Dyer, Bacon’s closest companion and model from the autumn of 1963. Two days before the opening of Bacon’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer committed suicide. The void created by Dyer’s death, under such tragic circumstances prompted Bacon to produce a number of works in his memory. The large-scale triptych suited the grand nature of Bacon’s statements, enabling him to isolate and juxtapose simultaneously. The energy in these works is overwhelming. The depths of despair experienced in the loss of his lover, are expressed with consummate skill and heartfelt anguish. Bacon told Sylvester shortly after Dyer’s death: “You don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal” He referred to his repeated depiction of homosexual copulation as a form of exorcism. Although he regretted its ‘sensational nature’, he was compelled to paint, Triptych, May-June, 1973, “to get it out of his system”. As well as repeated posthumous images of Dyer, he also made numerous self-portraits.⁶

Room Nine, Epic, examines the work Bacon produced in response to poetry and literature, particularly the work of T.S Eliot. Bacon was emphatic in wanting to make works that evoked the meaning and mood of the written word. They were not illustrations.

For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me. As for my latest triptych and a few other canvases painted after I read Aeschylus. I tried to create images of the episodes created inside me. I could not paint Agamemnon. Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting when all is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an image of the effect that was produced inside me. Perhaps realism is always subjective when it is most profoundly expressed.⁷

Bacon felt a great affinity for poetry, perhaps more so than contemporary art. He appreciated a wide range of poetry ranging from the work of Aeschylus, W.B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and especially T.S. Eliot. From Aeschylus’ Oresteia Bacon found an evocative image: “the reek of human blood smiles out at me”.⁸ In turn Bacon admired T.S. Eliot’s recasting of Greek tragedy, seeing in it an appropriate model for modern society. Bacon appreciated Eliot’s preoccupation with, ‘mortality, the pathetic futility and solitude of life’, and the manner in which he located ‘those existential conditions within a specific set of modern circumstances’.⁹

Bacon’s description of the tightrope between abstraction and figuration can also be used for poetry. “You have to abbreviate into intensity”, he remarked, also an apt description for Eliot’s poetry. Bacon chose painting to assuage the futility of life as he saw it. “I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game within reason... You can be optimistic and totally without hope”. Later, he said, “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our existence”.¹⁰ By contrast, Eliot had a Christian faith and belief in an afterlife.

The use of triptych, Bacon insisted was its resistance to narrative: “it breaks the series up and prevents it having a story, that’s why the three panels are always framed separately”. Yet the sequence created by three canvases side by side could equally create a story through the interrelatedness of the three images and specific references within each. Specific intended meaning is always speculative in Bacon’s work. The triptych emphasises Bacon’s fascination with theatrical devices to observe the human condition. Likewise Eliot’s Wasteland, ‘describes specific scenes and events but does not tie them to a single story’.¹¹

Room Ten Late, examines the last decade of Bacon’s life. The confrontation with mortality was an abiding theme in his work, having lost key figures in his life already. In 1993 he stated: “Life and death go hand in hand …Death is like the shadow of life. When you’re dead, you’re dead, but while you’re alive, the idea of death pursues you”.¹² The very black paintings made in the 1970s which confronted the death of George Dyer, gave way to more contemplative works, with a palpable restraint and composure. In several paintings he draws on his admiration for the work of the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Numerous reproductions of Ingres’ work were found in his studio, which he combined with incongruous images from sporting figures. Bacon also employed a controlled element of chance by throwing paint at the canvas. The aftermath of violence, blood gushing from a victim onto the pavement, for example, Bacon found exhilarating. Blood on Pavement, (c1988) is presented with the artist’s extraordinary detachment. “Things are not shocking if they haven’t been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it’s just blood splattered against a wall.”¹³ The theme of detachment from violence and suffering is achieved throughout Bacon’s oeuvre, from an early Wound for a Crucifixion (c.1934) to the Bullfight works in the 1960s to Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, (1983). The last paintings are the antithesis of Bacon’s early frenzied works, and have been criticised for being formulaic and lacking in tension. They have a monumentality and order, yet returning to the same themes that had occupied him for forty years. His last triptych of 1991 returns to the issue of sexual struggle, which permeates much of his life’s work. His most private feelings are laid bare, and to which he referred in 1971/3, “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not trying to say anything”.¹⁴

Rebecca Daniels praises the curators' discriminating selection of works in Tate's impressive Bacon exhibition.

Despite claims that the Tate's Francis Bacon exhibition is the biggest retrospective of him ever staged, it is, in fact, substantially smaller than the gallery's 1985 show. However, the decision to be more selective has resulted in a very high-quality exhibition. It is really a celebration of Bacon's larger paintings and the few smaller works included, such as Study for Head of George Dyer (1967; private collection), tend to be over-shadowed. The focus on large-scale works is justified given the crowds likely to flock to this show and the paintings have been generously spaced, maximising the chances for an unimpaired view of them.

This is particularly apparent in the opening room, which is hung with only seven works, introducing the paintings that Bacon completed after Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (around 1944; Tate). The absence of that seminal work from Room 1 (it is included in a later room devoted to the Crucifixion) prevents the viewer from appreciating it as Bacon subsequently intended: he made clear that it was the painting that launched his career and anything he completed prior to it should be destroyed. Also missing, undoubtedly due to its fragile condition, is Painting 1946 (1946; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a work that held a lifelong importance for Bacon. These exclusions from Room I highlight the fact that this is the first exhibition held here since Bacon died and, without the control he exercised over the previous Tate show, the curators have had a new freedom in the presentation and reassessment of his art.

There are two principal thematic detours from what is a loosely chronological hang, and these provide the most dramatic and visually powerful displays in the exhibition. The first features Bacon's recurring preoccupation with the theme of the Crucifixion, the earliest version being the haunting Crucifixion (1933, Murderme, London), which Herbert Read illustrated in Art Now (1933), when Bacon was unknown. Bacon's art is often characterised as violent and brutal but, with a few exceptions, this does not hold up under analysis. However, the Crucifixion triptychs are indeed violent, as the exhibition's curator Chris Stephens noted in a BBC interview, and the decision by him and his co-curator, Matthew Gale, to hang Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Crucifixion (1965; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fig. 2) facing each other, as if in gladiatorial combat, is inspired.

A source for the mutilated bodies that appear in both the 1962 and the 1965 Crucifixion paintings is probably, as Martin Harrison has observed in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, an illustration in a book Bacon owned, The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (1957). The prominence of carcasses in both triptychs was prompted by a feature on abattoirs in Paris Match in November 1961 (which was found in Bacon's studio). Furthermore, the controversial inclusion of a swastika in the 1965 Crucifixion was influenced by photographs of Hitler and his entourage. Therefore, the inspiration for the motifs in these important triptychs is drawn, as in so much of Bacon's art, from magazines, newspapers and books. Yet, despite the importance of this material, several reviewers have denounced the exhibitions inclusion of a room devoted to archival material as a distraction from the paintings. To me, the archive room enhances the experience of Bacon's work, as it adds to an understanding of Bacon's preparatory methods in the same way that Michelangelo's preliminary studies (incidentally a major source of inspiration to Bacon) enhance an understanding of his finished frescoes.

The second thematic room, 'Memorial', is devoted to triptychs of George Dyer, Bacon's lover and muse. The three large triptychs were all completed in the years following Dyer's death in October 1971. The first, Triptych - In memory of George Dyer (1971; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Fig. 1) is unusual in Bacon's oeuvre as it appears to illustrate episodes in Dyer's life, while Triptych, May-June 1973 (1973; private collection, Switzerland) recalls events of his lonely suicide by graphically showing him vomiting in a sink in one panel and in another slumped on a toilet (where he was found dead). Despite Bacon's dislike of narrative interpretation, these triptychs seem to encourage a biographical reading, an approach that the curators have invited by collecting these works under the heading 'Memorial'.

While it is tempting to analyse these works solely as a sentimental and nostalgic pining for lost love - and there is undoubtedly an element of that poignantly expressed in Bacon's diary on 24 October 1972 ('George died a year today') - it must also be remembered that shortly before his death Dyer had planted drugs in Bacon's studio, leading to Bacon's arrest and trial only four months before Dyer's suicide. It is perhaps because such complex personal emotions underlie these works that Bacon, unusually, has been unable to frustrate a narrative reading of his works.

Bacon's penchant for painting in themes is well represented and there is a good selection of popes, businessmen, crouching figures and animal paintings. The decision to hang the paintings at an extremely low level (often just above the skirting boards) enables the viewer to examine the variations in Bacon's application of paint. Nowhere is this more marked than in Head II (1949; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Fig. 3), where the top half of the canvas has paint so thick that it seems impenetrable (Bacon was trying to capture the effect of rhinoceros skin) but the lower left is just raw canvas (revealing also that Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas). Subtle nuances in technique and colour can be appreciated with the low hang of the series works, particularly of the Popes, where the marked differences in such compositional elements as the 'space frames', curtains or 'shuttering' and the depiction of the throne are worthy of close attention.

The one problematic aspect of the hang is the decision to break up the series paintings, particularly the crouching figures, which are displayed over several different rooms and therefore offer no chance to view them comparatively. Nevertheless, in the case of the businessmen - which are all hung in one room - interspersing them with animal paintings forces one to view them independently of each other, and subtle differences appeared that I had not noticed before. The exhibition also has a wonderful range of Bacon's important late works, particularly a room filled predominantly with triptychs from the 1960s to 1980s, including Triptych (1976; private collection), which was recently sold in London for the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art.

The quality and range of the works on display provide an opportunity to show Bacon at his best to a new generation too young to have seen the 1985 show. I left the exhibition feeling, as one should, visually exhausted but exhilarated.

Rebecca Daniels is a researcher on Francis Bacon: The Catalogue Raisonne.

Architecture and Design in the Bacon Era: Texture

Mark Cousins

The Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain Auditorium, Wednesday 1 October 2008

I can’t remember now whether it was in the catalogue of the current exhibition of Bacon or whether on it was on one of those panels but at some point there was a quotation from Bacon saying “I suppose in the end we’re just meat” and I wanted to try and start off, as it were, some thoughts about both texture and also materiality by considering some of the problems, what we might call the aesthetic problems, of meat especially in that difficult area that we call ugliness or which other people call ugliness, I want to try and suggest this evening this is not how it’s normally portrayed and if properly handled is an extremely powerful and valuable artistic and architectural instrument.

Let me invite you first to engage in a thought experiment. You look at some ones face as we scan some ones face we look, as it were, for signs of expression, in some sense for the way in which the face is thought to be able to represent emotions or states of mind or whatever. As we do it invariably we have a fantasy that this expression does not simply belong to the surface but it has a depth and we frequently actually experience that as a depth but of course it has this peculiarity because the depth is not remotely localised.

If we say he looked sad we don’t say it looked about two centimetres deep in the sadness of it. Now nowhere I think is it more remarkable than if you add in to this picture of a face which you experience partly through the dimension of the depth of its expression then imagine suddenly in some process, the face suddenly manifests a wound and you suddenly see that underneath the infinitesimally thin layer of skin there’s blood and there’s flesh and there’s bone; normally people have a kind of visceral turning away from this experience. Now if you try to follow through this action of turning away, we might wonder: what is it that we’re turning away from?...

The appearance of the wound indicates suddenly the collapse – a collapse of what; I mean, I’m going to say representation but I don’t mean it in a representational way. It’s as if I can’t continue having a fantasy about the depth of your sadness or the extent of your pleasure; I can’t do it any longer because, as it were, it is disrupted by the appearance of a wound. Essentially unless your medically knowledgeable, what you’re seeing, and I think Bacon was correct to use it in a general sense, is what he calls meat. Let’s kind of make a formula in some sense as saying: what meat is at a kind of level of experience, is almost the collapse of representation or of signification…

This collapse of representation is I think part of what we might call the experience of ugliness, the turning away, at which point we might begin to hypothesise that this is not what I think it is, it is what I think people experience it as; an experience of the ugly in that sense is this: it is without signification it is without being a part of the a space of representation, it is stuff, it is meat… People’s experience of the ugly - again I’m not saying that’s what it is - is a defence against this moment - a moment which is too raw and is too, almost, unnerving; we might say that the popular experience of the ugly is: it’s that which is there but at the same time, is perceived as it shouldn’t be there - or sometimes it’s the same but the other way round: it’s that which is not there but should be.

In Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment when the scene shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he has seen the ghost in box five; he describes the ghost to the girls and he says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly we know exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose and that no nose is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that isn’t there but should be… I want to suggest that one dimension of the achievement of Bacon is in a sense to take this problem on board directly and, in a way that it is very difficult to describe in his achievement, but has the achievement of as it were, bringing back meat into our understanding, bringing back meat into a kind of poetics, that which is always, as it were, normally excluded; I was at the exhibition on Sunday and it’s not just a question obviously of meat, it is those strange puddles of existence which you see so clearly in the three triptychs in homage to George Dyer - it is, indeed, a sublime moment…

Now in a sense all I’ve said is an attempt to say that what people describe as being ugly we should consider it a defence and if you can undo this defence, if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst of meat and find it not only human but essentially human, then, as it were, you remove some of the defences which so often kind of disable, I don’t mind putting it bluntly, disable public taste. It is a struggle. Now if something like this is the case, that I’m more than aware that I haven’t said directly anything about architecture and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the issues this evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career what also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level of a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to say, to undermine the public defence against the ugly and actually to propel it towards something new and powerful and human not in a humanistic way but human almost in a somewhat unnerving way. Thank you very much.

Painting the Pope: an Analysis of Francis Bacon's Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X

In many discussions of his work Bacon is disparaging about, and more specifically, Christianity. And yet, in spite of hisunequivocal stance, throughout his oeuvre he was relentlessly drawn towards the symbols of the Christian tradition, especiallythe motif of the Crucifixion and the Pope. In this article I want to compare Velázquez's painting of Pope InnocentX (1650) and Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (1953) in order to assess the reasons that explain Bacon's obsession with the image of the Pope. His descriptor‘study after’ in the title qualifies his aims whichentailed deconstructing the Velázquez painting and reappropriatingit for his own ends. I think it fitting to describe Bacon's version as being a mirror-image or photographic negative ofVelázquez's. And although Bacon virulently critiquesthe institutions of the Church, he is dependent upon the wealthof theological sources for his imagery as well as the positionof theism, which alone gives credence to his practice.

Francis Bacon's Art of Distortion

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the greatest painters of the 20th century & his powerful images will be explored in this lecture by Dr Rina Arya. Senior Lecturer in Critical & Contextual Studies at the University of Chester. Although Bacon's central subject is the human figure he cannot comfortably be described as a figurative painter in the conventional sense. He uses abstraction & distortion to give us a sense of the body and the bodily which is far more intimate than figuration on its own would allow.

Here, however, lies the task of philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even if they are catastrophic. …Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic (Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion: 83).

What I want to do is distort the thing far beyond appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.
…To me, the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made. I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed. But how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making (Bacon in Sylvester, 1980:40, 105).

You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision (Giacometti in Sylvester, 1994:234).

The painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is of importance to contemporary thought because it shares with contemporary theory important insights concerning the real. Bacon understood, as did thinkers like Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), that we never know the real, merely the appearances behind which it hides. Art, for Bacon, was about feeling and sensing until an appearance could be rendered which stands in for the real. According to this view, the simulation – the painting – is understood as more real than what we see. It is these characteristics of Bacon’s work that are most appealing to contemporary theorists who, like Baudrillard, believe that theory is a challenge to the real. For Bacon the artists “feelings” (and what he often referred to as “sensations”) are very much what Baudrillard saw as vital to “the soul of art”. By looking at the ways in which the thought of these two radically independent thinkers dealt with the real we see how artists and theorists can share important epistemological insights. In the case of Bacon and Baudrillard it is an epistemology which values enigma, unintelligibility, and a resistance to collective meanings or truth.

This paper examines the painting and thought of Francis Bacon alongside of the thought of Jean Baudrillard. In this I follow an important caution from Deleuze who said: “We do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say” (Deleuze: 81). Bacon’s interviews with Sylvester (1980) and Archimbaud (1993) provide a cogent rendering of his philosophy of the real and appearances. Going beyond Baudrillard’s eleven rather cryptic mentions of Bacon, I argue that looking more closely at Bacon’s painting alongside of contemporary thought concerning the real and meaning, adds an important dimension to the effort to mend the epistemological break under which we labour. This is a break that relegates anything not deemed “scientific” (such as art) to a realm of non-knowledge. Looking at artists like Bacon and theorists like Baudrillard along side each other provides a striking example of the way so called “social” thought and art may continue to intersect as part of the struggle against the hegemony of a banal, colourless and emotionless epistemological empiricism.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being has passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime (Bacon in Archimbaud, 1993:40).

For Baudrillard, “...the soul of Art” was its “power of illusion” and “its capacity for negating reality”. Baudrillard called this the “setting up an ‘other scene’” – one opposed to reality and in which “things obey a higher set of rules”. In art, “beings, like line and colour on canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d’etre”. For Baudrillard, and Bacon’s portraits do this very well, the sitter for a portrait in a painting (like his own ideas in his writing), is to be pushed to their extreme limit and possible destruction. Baudrillard, bewildered by the excess banality of the contemporary art which surrounded him, years prior to registering his satisfaction with Bacon, had come to believe that, art “in this sense… is gone” (The Transparency of Evil:14).

Baudrillard said that he preferred Bacon’s “singularity” (Paroxysm: 104) and Bacon’s ability to “go beyond the dimension of art, aesthetics and well tempered culture” (Ibid.91). He was deeply impressed by the lack of “play acting” and the “staging of the self” in Bacon’s interviews (Ibid.) For Baudrillard, Bacon was a very “creative individual” who “no longer regard’s himself as a representational being – but as an obsessive, temperamental object” (Baudrillard Live, 1993: 149, 99). Another very appealing aspect about Bacon was the painter’s lack of anxiety regarding his own position in the history of art despite his concern for artists that provoked a response from him (Velasquez, Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh and Soutine to name a few). Echoing the claim: “I write for myself” (Baudrillard Live: 182), Bacon said “I don’t paint for others, I paint for myself” (in Archimbaud: 29). The fierce individualism of both Baudrillard and Bacon makes their shared epistemological and art historical values all the more striking. For Bacon: “All painting is accident” – a process in which chance, the making of involuntary marks, and unconscious decisions play an important role (in Sylvester, 1980: 50 ff.). “Half of my painting activity” said Bacon, “is disrupting what I can do with ease” …“I can quite easily sit down and make what is called a literal portrait of you. So what I’m disrupting all the time is the literalness, because I find it uninteresting” (Ibid.: 121). This self description of Bacon’s painting also applies to Baudrillard’s understanding of his own writing – a kind of “revolt against the establishment” as Bacon described it to Archimbaud (1993:128).

Bacon’s assessment of Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X is especially important to his view of art and the epistemological insights he shared with contemporary thought. Bacon said that Velasquez’s portrait helps us to understand how the painter “walks along the edge of a precipice… so near to what we call illustration and at the same time… unlock the greatest and deepest things that man can feel” (Ibid.:28). Velasquez’s painting is not merely a rendering of the pope’s likeness, but also a deep tension (in the pope’s face) which Bacon said tells us a good deal about Velasquez’s ambivalent feelings for this particular sitter. Velasquez is not rendering so much aspects of the pope he is certain of, but rather, feelings and sensations about unknowable and disturbing aspects of Innocent’s character. Here Bacon’s ideas sit well alongside those of Baudrillard once again as for Bacon, painting has little to do with the real but is more about the making of appearances – getting at the more real than the real – where the real is abolished and vanishes into simulation (Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange: 11). Velasquez’s Innocent X is more than merely a good likeness of an important historical figure, but also a record of Velasquez’s sensations of Innocent’s cruel and evil character. As Baudrillard has it: “With a few exceptions like Bacon, art no longer confronts evil, only the transparency of evil” (Conspiracy of Art: 77).

Even a close friend like Isabel Rawthorne retains, for Bacon, certain mysterious and unknowable aspects when she sits for a portrait and these are represented by Bacon with abstract or fragmented brushstrokes. While the style is different, Bacon like Velasquez presents his feelings for a sitter and these unknowable aspects in the final work (a shared problem). For many artists in the 20th century the ultimate unknowability of the real led to a freefall into total abstraction. For Bacon abstraction is not up to the task of painting which is to record feelings, and sensations – to master the game a painter has to occupy a space in between illustration and abstraction. Perhaps Bacon’s efforts to represent human angst and suffering capture this aspect of his work best as in the early painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

For Bacon then: “Painting has nothing to do with illustration, any more than for Baudrillard writing has anything to do with straight forward universally understood meanings. Bacon’s painting is the opposite of illustration “…it’s the result of a sort of conflict between the material and the subject” (in Archimbaud: 104, 145) as Baudrillard’s writing is the opposite of banality. This is what Bacon calls the “tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction” (in Sylvester, 1980:12). In Baudrillard’s terms it is taking a world that is given to us as enigmatic and unintelligible and making it even more so.

For Bacon the challenge of the real faces every artist: “The problem is how you’re going to make the figuration. How are you going to make this thing look real, how are you going to make it real to the way you feel about the thing or real to the instinct” (Ibid.: 64). The abstract and/or fragmented aspects of Bacon’s paintings, especially his portraits, are his way of acknowledging the mysteries and unknown aspects – what others have called the “zone of shadows” and “terra incognita” (see Proust, II:123) – of the sitter, including a self portrait. As Bacon tells Sylvester: “…there is a kind of sensational image within the very, you could say, structure of your being, which is not to do with a mental image – when that image, through accident, begins to form” (Ibid.: 160). The painting of other people, good artists, could also provoke sensations: “…to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking areas of sensation – other than simple illustrations of the object – isn’t that what all art is about” (Ibid.:57).

The link between Bacon and contemporary theory, which I have chosen to illustrate here by way of Baudrillard, is his effort to work away from meaning in the direction of the enigmatic and unintelligible. The real is always there; ever unknowable, hiding behind appearances and the sensations we have of these appearances. Both Bacon and Baudrillard employ the notion of a “trap” which is useful in understanding Bacon’s motives as a painter as similar to Baudrillard’s as a writer. For Baudrillard: “Theory can be no more than a trap set in the hope that reality will be naive enough to fall into it” (Transparency of Evil:110). For Bacon …the difference from direct recording is that as a painter one has to set a trap by which one hopes to trap the mysterious aspects of a sitter alive: “There are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people are stronger than others … with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them” (in Sylvester, 1980:34). What Baudrillard says of thought, Bacon believes for painting – painting (like thought) is a challenge – a trap set for the real to tumble into (Paroxysm: 37).

In a world which is given to us as enigmatic (the real hiding behind appearances), and unintelligible (in terms of any hope of shared truth or meaning), Bacon’s painting like the best of contemporary thought, provides a strong challenge. Bacon is committed to truth only so far as it exists along local and restricted horizons. Of far greater interest to him, as for Baudrillard, is the enigmatic qualities and ultimate unknowability of the world and its occupants. Painting like writing is a form of simulation in which reality is always recreated according to the feelings and sensations of the artist or writer. As Bacon said of Van Gogh: Van Gogh really did find a new way of depicting reality, and that method wasn’t realist, but was much more powerful than simple realism. It was really a work of recreating reality (Bacon in Archimbaud: 42).

...one never believes in anything. ...Belief is an absurd concept… (Baudrillard, Seduction 1990:142).

Bacon’s oeuvre works against firm meanings and in doing so contributes to the world’s enigmaticalness and unintelligibility. His painting is an ally of epistemological approaches in social theory that seek to work beyond simple empiricism. For Bacon, our feelings and sensations are vital in facing illusion which prioritizes the importance of looking: “The most important thing” according to Bacon, is to “look at a painting… not in order to understand or know it, but to feel something” (Ibid. 77). This view of painting (which Bacon extends to poetry and music and “art” generally), sits very well with Baudrillard’s thought concerning meaning:
…do we absolutely have to choose between meaning and non-meaning? … The absence of meaning is no doubt intolerable, but it would be just as intolerable to see the world assume a definitive meaning… (Impossible Exchange: 128).

For Baudrillard, meaning (like truth or the real) appear(s) only locally, as a partial object (Simulacra and Simulation: 108). If we go by Baudrillard’s exacting standard for art – the kind of art he felt “was gone” – then the work of Francis Bacon, when we pry into its epistemological underpinnings, may well be a reason to imagine that a return to art is possible. This points us toward tremendous implications not only for a kind of art we thought was gone, but also for theory as it continues to intersect ever more frequently with the trajectory of art.Study after Velázquez (1950)

The intersections between social theory and art which have become increasingly evident in recent years have only been possible because certain variants of contemporary theory have sought an escape velocity from the dead weight of empiricism – precisely the kind of literal painting or practical writing that would reduce Bacon and Baudrillard to banality. What Baudrillard achieves in texts Bacon achieves in his paintings in a pre-verbal manner. I cannot say what Bacon’s impact on the art world will continue to be but it seems likely that his lasting impact will be on epistemology as much as art. Bacon here emerges as a central player in the current meeting points of theory and art against the hegemonic censorship of thought by empiricism. It is little wonder why Baudrillard found such an artist of interest. Bacon’s concern for the real, seen through a Baudrillardian lens, shows us the importance of art (including music, poetry, and literature etc.,) to theory.

Francis Bacon’s painting is not only a challenge to the real (as is Baudrillard’s thought) – it is also a great challenge to an art world which has, by and large, forgotten what painting is, and a good deal of what art is as well. Similarly, in the artifical departmentalization of what the university has attempted to do to thought, theory too lost its way and became the hand maid of empiricism. Bacon’s painting and Baudrillard’s writing, taken together, point to a more promising horizon for thought and for art. The contemporary university (itself too much under the guidance of so called “social scientific” principles) stakes its value on what is, in fact, a denial of the world’s enigmaticalness and unintelligibility. For Bacon, like Baudrillard, “reality” is present in the abstractness of appearances (in Sylvester, 1980: 40) and we see it only “through veils and screens” (Ibid.: 82). Bacon like Baudrillard is always attempting to lift these veils: “...we no longer believe the truth is there when all its veils have been removed” (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place: 77). A significant portion of the future of contemporary theory may well rest outside of the university.

Today theory and art still remain largely separate areas of endeavour as does the analysis of each. This allows the merciless and monstrous slaves of empiricism (such as contemporary “social ‘science’”), to enforce a powerful censorship on much social thought. The greatest challenge we face today is the effort to begin mending an appalling epistemological break which makes this censorship (including the banishment of the arts from social thought) possible. The break has usurped the name of science and it relegates all other forms of thought to a “senseless prehistory” of what is considered “knowledge” (Mirror of Production:113). It is four decades since Baudrillard first attacked this break and in the interim the problem has only worsened despite the efforts of many now committed to transdisciplinarity (which itself is showing signs of congealing into a kind of academic INTERPOL).

Unlike the fundamentalists of empiricism, Bacon (like Baudrillard), was a man without belief (Sylvester, 1980:23). Bacon and Baudrillard also shared a despairing optimism and it is one well suited to seeing us through to more artful possibilities for epistemology. Painting, of the kind theorized and accomplished by Francis Bacon, is vital to our hope to mend our fractured epistemology as it quietly joins forces with Baudrillard’s writing. Recently many of us have begun to imagine intersections of theory and art which are devoted neither to truth nor to empiricist principles. Against the hegemony of empiricism over social thought Bacon and Baudrillard each point to the importance of things in which not to believe. It is precisely their refusal to believe that allowed them paint and write so artfully.

Empiricism is to theory what literalness is to painting – a recipe not for challenge but for banality. As for science – it isn’t really centred on empiricism as many (especially in the social sciences) today may believe, but rather, about uncertainty and things in which not to believe – mysteries – zones of darkness – the grand terra incognita of thought that theory and art will continue to explore together. Indeed, uncertainty (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) is science’s gift to contemporary thought. Through a return to the excluded – art – theory which has commitments other than empiricism will continue to re-envision how we know. Rather than chase a real we can never know we may, like Bacon the painter and Baudrillard the theorist, develop sensations of what lay beyond appearances. Again the ghost of Barthes appears in contemporary theory as knowledge is much more personal than we have cared to admit in our previous quest for universal truth.

Art and theory can make powerful allies against our epistemological break. Bacon showed us that art is once again possible when looked upon as a challenge to the real. Baudrillard did likewise with theory claiming that “theory is simply a challenge to the real” (Forget Baudrillard: 124). The best of theory today is more closely aligned than ever before with all forms of art – painting, poetry, literature, etc. Not surprisingly, theory committed to mending the epistemological break under which we have long suffered, is a very artful endeavor. It is little wonder why Jean Baudrillard and others including myself find the painting and thought of Francis Bacon so attractive.

Michel Archimbaud. Francis Bacon in Conversation with Michel Archimbaud. London: Phaidon, 1993.

Jean Baudrillard (Mike Gane, Editor). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London: SAGE, 1993.

Jean Baudrillard. “Forget Baudrillard: An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer” in Forget Foucault/ Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.

Jean Baudrillard. “The Politics of Seduction: An Interview with Suzanne Moore and Stephen Johnstone. Marxism Today. January, 1989.

Jean Baudrillard. Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit. New York: Verso, 1997.

Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Jean Baudrillard. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1995.

Jean Baudrillard. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Jean Baudrillard. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Gilles Deleuze. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time (Volume II): Within a Budding Grove. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

David Sylvester: Interviews With Francis Bacon (1962-1979). London: Thames
and Hudson, 1980.

Dr. Gerry Coulter gcoulter@ubishops.ca His essay “Baudrillard, Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World” will appear in Nebula in February 2009. His essay “Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming” appeared in the SAGE journal Games and Culture (Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) – also available on-line at: http://www.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358. His recent Article: “A Place For The Non-Believer: Jean Baudrillard on the West and the Arab and Islamic Worlds”, appears in Subaltern Studies: http://www.subalternstudies.com/?p=476; An essay “A Way of Proceeding: Joseph Beuys, the Epistemological Break, and Radical Thought Today” appears in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text, and Image (May - June, 2008): http://intertheory.org/gcoulter.htm; and his quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine: “Kees van Dongen and the Power of Seduction” (Spring 2008) is available at: http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=13=1&content=156. An interview will appear in the philosophy journal Khora in early 2009. His teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s University’s highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner Prize.

Desmond Morris on Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944)

The face of the figure is distorted into a scream of horrific intensity. He painted many screams in later works, but none can match the impact of this one. It is the scream of the torture victim at the very moment that the lash cuts the flesh. The victim, of course, is Bacon himself. He was heavily into bondage and masochistic ritual in his private life, and he relived his painful eroticism in many of his images of trussed up, agonised, distorted figures.

Francis was fascinated by extreme forms of facial expression, and the mouth stretched open to full gape was his favourite. One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile." The truth was that he could get no kicks from an image of a smiling face. It was not part of his complex sexual obsession.

Others may see in this screaming face a reflection of the agonies of war-torn Europe, a statement about the horrors of modern existence, or the entrapment and isolation of modern man in his urban cell. I see nothing of the sort. I see a devout masochist enjoying the thrill of encapsulating the secret joys of his most private moments. The great mystery about Bacon's work is why this lifelong fetishistic indulgence should have resulted in the creation of such truly great art. But then mystery is the very essence of art. As Picasso once said: "I don't understand it and if I did, I wouldn't tell you."

- Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was presented to Tate by Eric Hall in 1953.

Francis Bacon fixed the starting point of his artistic career on Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, executed in 1944, although he had been painting for over a decade, had created a number of extremely interesting paintings, and had appeared in several exhibitions, sowing the first seeds of his future notoriety as an artist. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion manifests a terrible, expressive violence. It does not represent any violent act. But some undefined and inhuman violence that occurred in an unseen space and time beyond the limits of the painting has impressed its horror on the forms and the coloured area surrounding them.

The composition is separated into three distinct canvases that are coordinated so as to form a triptych. The arrangement is of such disturbing originality that Bacon afterwards used it on a frequent basis, whenever the pictorial motif seemed to require this type of treatment. The orange hue spread across the space of the three canvases so violently strikes the observer as to overwhelm all powers of perception and eliminate the possibility of reading the forms according to common conventions of rational logic. A single sentiment unifies the figures, each of which is isolated on its own canvas: it is a furious, suffering, and horrified expression, of victims and witnesses to something whose effect is an atrocious sense of tragedy.

The human and bestial elements composing the figures, all rendered ambiguous by their respective deformation, are so impenetrable and enigmatic as to thwart comprehension of any explicit meaning. Any attempt to deduce prior intention in the morphology of these bodies by means of logic will fail, collapsing in admission that this painting leads into an unknown area, at whose boundaries conventional logic must halt. In Bacon, painting is not a field for the imitation of apparent reality, but an independent and artificial act emerging from the innermost and most instinctive needs of the individual, dominated exclusively by the profound, wild force of expression.

What the contradictory composition and mingling of the bodies' grey magma with other colours transmits in Three Studies is the lacerating expression of a cry, regardless of its nature or its cause. It is a cry reduced to its wild force, beyond the normal human need to identify and resolve the cause of malaise. More animal than human, so excessive as to become unaware of its own expressive implications: it is no longer capable of communicating anything intelligible. The very obscurity of the origin of this sensation and the likely identity of the visible subject allows the image to avoid any particular illustrative signification and penetrate instead to the quicker and more intuitive level of the mind: where sensations act, such as the modes of awareness that precede logic and run deeper than it.

Bacon needs to renounce natural logic and upset it in the act of painting in order to reveal and transform into comprehensible terms something originating in the unconscious: the complex, multiple, and contradictory mass of emotions and the obsessive images that arouse it. This is its material, nothing other than the experience of human existence and the unconscious subtrate over which it passes. Through revelation of the unconscious in painting, the insignificant existence of the individual rises to the grandness of a mythical experience: to a condition that transforms an infinitude of empirical experiences into the tragic story of mankind.

The magnetic orange surface is blinding, to the point that space is perceived more at the psychic than logical level. The struggle of pictorial composition reveals the traces of lines, partial geometrical figures interrupted during the construction of space. They are residual fragments of what painting in the past had used to delineate an organic configuration of man's architectural or natural environment around the human figure, the setting in which he was the measure and central point of reference. This representation of space dominated by man could express much of the narrative and symbolic intelligibility of the image. Of this impossible perfection, which fell to pieces in the wreckage of modern civilization, nothing survives in the chromatic magma of Bacon's work other than fragments that are perceptible with the same immediacy, plunging into the depths of the unknown abyss of the mind and the other sensations that constitute the material of painting. They are the traces of a tragedy that is identified with the progress of history, in the innermost way, not in distinct episodes, but with the same rhythm: the terrifying and vital rhythm of the transformation of man and his culture.

Biomorphic typologies burst into this work from the history of human civilization, recalling certain figures of bathers by Picasso from the 1920s, at the limits of the comical and the grotesque. They are forms that emerge from artistic culture, but with the same forcefulness of a mental obsession. The resulting figure is a traumatic expression of the horror that originates in profound feelings, revealed by artistic memory and the history of painting, felt as if it were living matter. It is as if Bacon encountered Picasso's creatures along the course of his imagination, as if it were a beaten path. He himself would define his conception of his historical source in art as "a formal armor."

An infinity of clues in the painting, and an infinity of clues in the historical memory of the subject looking at the work show that the horror is provoked by the immanent drama of a catastrophe for which mankind is responsible. (This triptych dates from 1944, a time when the conscience of Europe was upset by the horror of war). But the true object is the expression of horror in itself, superior to any specific and transitory cause. A relative cause might allow it to be overcome. But horror, as an integral force of existence, beyond all the contingent evidence that experience might have known, permits neither distractions nor progress. What Bacon does is grasp the most universal expression of horror through the force of painting: by giving from to a wail. Because the figures do not illustrate any action, the key to understanding the nature of their presence is implicit in the expression, "Studies," that enigmatically appears in their title. This expression is foreign to the representation of reality, belonging instead to the most specifically academic tradition of artistic work. Indeed, the figures are in the preparatory state of suspension in which every artist of any epoch places his model when he starts to transform it into the image of his inner world.

If Bacon gives the work a title like "Studies," which refers to a neutral condition of artistic work, it is because this preparatory act of traditional painting practice becomes the very object of the image. And in imposing this limit, he manages to transform his own existential experience into sensation and to express it as a universal force. Indeed, this is one of the most radical ambitions in modern art, where the real subject of the work is art itself.

Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion were painted over the course of two weeks in 1944 in the ground floor flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which had once been the studio of the artist John Everett Millais. During the day the converted billiard room served as Bacon's studio, and at night as an illicit casino.

B recalled that at the time he was drinking heavily and that he painted the studies in an alcoholic haze. Later he was to admit that he hardly knew what he was doing, though he believed that alcohol had loosened his style. Yet, despite this unpromising genesis, the triptych of three writhing, anthropomorphic figures, with their featureless, scarcely human faces contorted into what might be either pain or exquisite ecstasy, set against a background of visceral oranges, reds and blacks, marks a watershed in British painting.

Bacon had been painting the Crucifixion since 1933, commissioned by his then patron, Eric Hall, but he considered the works unsuccessful and destroyed them, and, for a while, abandoned painting. When he did return to the subject of the Crucifixion 11 years later he was influenced by his reading of Aeschylus's savage drama The Oresteia (itself a trilogy) which tells the tale of the curse of the House of Atreus and the pursuit, by the avenging Furies (or Eumenides), of those responsible for murder. Generally considered to be his first masterwork, Bacon was at some pains to suppress the showing of any paintings that pre-dated the Three Studies.

Executed in oil and pastel and, for economy, on light Sundeala boards rather than canvas, Bacon's Eumenides are barely recognisable as human figures, for they have no eyes but only gaping, silently screaming mouths. The creature on the left, seated on a table of sorts, is the most recognisably human. Partially draped in a length of cloth, this bent form, with its hunched white shoulders, its stumpy, malformed arms and bowed head topped with a mop of dark hair, might be a mourner at some unnamed wake, while that in the central panel, with its grimacing mouth set directly into its elongated neck, is blindfolded by a white cloth - a motif taken, perhaps, from Matthias Grnewald's Mocking of Christ - and resembles some large, flightless bird. The figure on the right appears to have most of its upper face missing. Its head is thrown back, its mouth stretched open to reveal its teeth, as if in the grips of some bestial orgasmic spasm.

The heads of all three figures point downwards, following a series of converging lines that radiate out from the central plinth and imply a room or an enclosed space. The mood is one of bleak isolation and violent angst. This work is to painting what Sartre's Huis Clos is to literature; a paean to existential despair.

This is also a Crucifixion with a difference, for there is no evidence, not even a shadow, of the actual event. No trace of Christ or his cross, though Bacon did say in a letter in 1959 that Three Studies were, "intended to [be] use[d] at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may still do". Yet how genuine this remark was is hard to gauge from the bleakly nihilistic non-believer who once said, "I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence..." "we are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."

Distortion and fragmentation are the tools that Bacon used to explore these elemental states, for he was at enormous pains to eradicate what he saw as any figurative illustration. What he wanted to convey was something visceral, a presence beyond mere likeness; of beings controlled by chthonic urges and base instincts, the Dionysian Calibans of human existence rather than the Apollonian Ariel's; his territory was what Freud would have called the id.

The sense of futility that Bacon was trying to capture is not surprising, given that it was 1944, and that rumours of the Nazi death-camps had begun to leak out. Such nihilism is also present in much of the work of TS Eliot. Bacon had come to know Aeschylus through Eliot's 1939 play, The Family Reunion, in which the central character, Harry, is haunted by "the sleepless hunters/ that will not let me sleep." Here the Furies embody the guilt and remorse felt by Harry, who harbours a dark secret.

Like many other artists and writers of the early 20th century, Bacon had read Nietzsche, and shared something of his hypothesis of "a strong pessimism". He had been particularly attracted to The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche's passionate rejection of Christianity, and his passion for life resonated with Bacon, who said: "... you can be optimistic and totally without hope. One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff."

The American critic, Donald Kuspit, thought Bacon's figures were "sick with death - not necessarily literal death but rather the feeling of being nothing." Their loneliness, he suggested, depicted a "general sense of oblivion."

Bacon had always been fascinated with images of the mouth, in particular diseased mouths, after he found a second-hand book in which these were illustrated in a series of coloured plates. He spoke of "the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth", and said that he "always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." He was also taken with a photograph by the Surrealist J-A Boiffard in the radical magazine, Documents, in which the editor, the French writer and philosopher of the abject, Georges Bataille, had written a short text on La Bouche. Bataille rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion.

For Bacon, as for Bataille, the open, gaping, screaming wound of the mouth expressed something of our most intense emotional experiences and brought us close to our bestial selves. The linking of the noble and the base, of man and beast so as to blur the distinction between them, was part of Bataille's attack on the "idealist deception" that man practices upon himself. The open mouth of Bacon's right-hand figure ends in a savage, snarling, snout of teeth. For the promiscuously gay and sadomasochistically inclined Bacon the mouth had obvious sexual connotations. He was also, almost certainly, thinking of the scene in Battleship Potemkin where the wounded nursemaid stands screaming on the Odessa steps; in addition to making a reference to the despairing mother in Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents.

First shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, the triptych caused a sensation. The critic John Russell was shocked by "images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half- animal..." Yet by 1971 he was able to write, "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one... can confuse the two." More than 60 years later it has still not lost any of its power.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 of English parents, the second of five children. He was asthmatic and had no conventional schooling. In 1925 his father threw him out for wearing his mother's clothes. In London he worked as a decorator and began to paint. In 1936 he submitted work to the International Surrealist exhibition but was rejected as "not sufficiently surreal". Between 1941-4 he destroyed all his work, and was pronounced unfit for military service. In 1945 he resumed painting. In 1953 Three Studies was acquired by the Tate. In 1955 he had his first retrospective at the ICA. In 1960 he had his first exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. In the early 1960s he and George Dyer became lovers and he painted Three Figures in a Room.

Francis Bacon was widely acclaimed as an Expressionist: violent emotions burst through his paintings, wrenching sharp, nervous responses from an audience fomenting the ideals (and illusions?) of peace and humanity. Bacon was not the first to do it - before him we had Edvard Munch (see The Scream), or Egon Schiele (see Seated Couple)... to illustrate only two Expressionist forerunners.

Why was (and is) Bacon so disturbing then? Why do his comments on the meaninglessness of this world continue to reach so deep into us? Well, for one thing, when he exhibited in 1945, his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in London, Europe had just been through a war. Not a time to "revel" in Bacon's humanoid Furies, which, half-human and half-animal (John Russell)1, with missing limbs and bandaged, could very well remind one of dismembered mutilated cadavers, if it were not for their movement and much alive mouth and ear.

To a shocked audience, Francis Bacon responded by saying that he was trying "to unlock the valves of feeling" and not trying to be "horrific". 2. Also, Bacon - a declared atheist - maintained that his figures were references to the Furies, those goddesses which lead Greek tragic heroes to destruction by reminding them of their sins - after the Second World War, portrayal of angry goddesses like these makes sense.

Not to say that this interpretation brought only ovations. Here's the voice of critic Raymond Mortimer, "I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [to me] symbols of outrage rather than works of art." 3

One should keep in mind however, that the Furies interpretation is not the only one possible. First of all, the title still points to a Christian subject, and that should be investigated. Even though Francis Bacon said the triptych does not necessarily refer to Christ's Crucifixion 4, just take a moment and look carefully at the three panels. If you still stare blindly at the bandage and at the contrast between the central figure and the wriggling two on the sides, have a look at a Crucifixion piece by Antonello da Messina.

You'll see that the figures "at the base of the Crucifixion" could very well be Christ and the two thieves. Don't expect Francis Bacon to give you too much of an interpretation though. After all, as with Picasso and Guernica, see and understand what you will: the painter has done his job already. Now the painting is yours to interpret, according to your personal propensity.

But, in case you want a final word from Francis Bacon, David Sylvester is bringing you one - so here's the late Francis Bacon, honest (supposedly - he has been known to stray from the truth once or twice) but evasive:
"It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. It's one of the only pictures I've been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer." 5*

End Notes:
1. FrancisBacon.cx2. Tate Gallery3. FrancisBacon.cx 4. Tate Gallery 5. Francis Bacon; Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester* (NB: Bacon is talking about his 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion here and not the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion).

Writer's Bio:
"I have a BA from Hanover College, IN, where I majored in Spanish and minored in Art. I work as a graphic designer, and paint when time allows. As for art history, I'm a reader, traveler and museum visitor. I hope to be able to share my love of art with other About.com members."

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992), painter, was born on 28 October 1909 at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, the second of five children of English parents, Edward Anthony Mortimer Bacon, army officer, and his wife, Christina Winifred Firth. Bacon's father moved his family to Westbourne Terrace, London, during the First World War, when he worked in the ministry of war. After the war the family moved between England and Ireland and Bacon himself went to Dean Close School in Cheltenham, where he boarded from 1924 to 1926, frequently running away, before moving to London on an allowance provided by his mother.

Early influences

In 1927 Bacon travelled to Berlin with a male friend of his father, who was entrusted with educating the young man. There Bacon was plunged into the decadent night-life of Weimar Germany, which after the puritanism of his Irish upbringing had a permanent impact. No less important were the subsequent months Bacon spent in Paris, where, in the summer of 1927, at the Galerie Pierre Rosenberg, he discovered Picasso's recent drawings. Picasso's depictions of figures on the beach at Dinard had a profound effect on Bacon.

In 1928 Bacon returned to London, where from 1929 to 1932 he lived in Queensberry Mews in South Kensington. There he worked designing modernist rugs and furniture, stylistically indebted to Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray. He rapidly established a reputation as a designer, being featured in a double-page spread in Studio in 1930 and receiving celebrated commissions including furniture for the kitchen of the politician R. A. Butler and a desk for the writer Patrick White. He also began to paint in oils for the first time, producing works that owed much to surrealism and cubism. Influenced by his friend and mentor, the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, in 1930 Bacon held an exhibition of five paintings and four rugs at his studio. Thereafter he turned increasingly to painting but it was another three years before his first significant paintings were exhibited, in two group shows at the Mayor Gallery, London, in 1933. One of these works, Crucifixion (1933; priv. coll.), was prestigiously illustrated in Herbert Read's Art Now (1933), opposite one of Picasso's paintings of a bather.

In February 1934 Bacon staged an unsuccessful exhibition of thirteen works in a cellar in Curzon Street in Mayfair. Visiting Paris again in 1935, Bacon purchased a book illustrated with colour plates entitled Diseases of the Mouth and this, together with seeing for the first time Sergey Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, had a profound effect on him. Not only did he use stills from the film as source material but it also encouraged a tougher figurative dimension. Bacon's path was set and in the years that followed his painful vision of man and his predicament became one of the most recognizable, if horrific, bodies of work of the second half of the twentieth century.

Bacon's work was proposed for inclusion in the celebrated International Surrealist Exhibition, of 1936, being organized for London by Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and André Breton, but he was famously judged by the Englishmen to be insufficiently surrealist. It was, however, a fortuitous rejection since subsequently it was Bacon's ‘realism’ that was at the centre of the claims made for him.

In January 1937 Thomas Agnew & Sons staged an exhibition, ‘Young British Painters’, which included a painting that Bacon had only just completed but which he subsequently destroyed. Entitled Abstraction from the Human Form, it depicted a semi-human figure and demonstrated that even before the Second World War Bacon had not only formulated but also was publicly exhibiting his tormented vision of the world. Already he was using photographs of contemporary events; drawing attention to the mouth; and presenting metonymic segments of the body, which is shown as bulbous and swollen.

Major works

A chronic asthmatic from childhood, Bacon was declared unfit for military service, and spent the Second World War in London, where with the aid of his former nanny he held gambling parties. By 1942 Bacon was living in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, where he began to build on his pre-war imagery to produce his first major paintings, including a work that did more than any other to establish his reputation as one of the most powerful and horrifying painters of the twentieth century: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944; Tate collection). Against a fiery orange background three barely human figures provide a compendium of injuries: torsos are swollen and deformed, ribs scarred and dirtied, heads wounded and bandaged, and each mouth strains at the end of a taut spinal column. The exhibition of this triptych at a group show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945 established Bacon's post-war reputation. Subsequently Bacon claimed this as his first mature work, even going so far as to destroy as much earlier work as he could. The result of this was to identify Bacon's work with the Second World War and to provide it with roots in the 1940s, not the 1930s. This had profound implications for readings of the artist's work, not as late flowering surrealism but as contemporary realism.

In November 1949 the Hanover Gallery, London, staged the first one-man exhibition of Francis Bacon. One of the seminal events in post-war British culture, this show was a revelation. The exhibition included full-length figures as well as a series of tormented heads culminating in one of Bacon's most confident early paintings, Head VI (1949; Arts Council collection, Hayward Gallery, London). A half-length portrait, this was the first painting in the most celebrated series that Bacon ever produced: a series from 1949 showing a boxed, screaming pope which established Bacon's international reputation. Bacon developed this theme during the early 1950s, taking as a starting point Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650; Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome). Bacon's pope, enthroned and enclosed by a box, drew attention to the discrepancy between the belief systems present at the time of Velázquez and modern discrediting of religious authority. Their contemporary resonance gained potency through the publication of photographs showing the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, boxed behind glass for their own protection. Although the origins of Bacon's vision lay with paintings of oppressors, including Nazi leaders, the subsequent status of these paintings depended on reading the tormented individuals as Everyman figures: a conflation of oppressor and victim.

Contemporary assessment of Bacon's work

The first major essays on Francis Bacon established readings which remain largely in place. The two most important were by Robert Melville in the British publication Horizon in 1949 and Sam Hunter in the American Magazine of Art in 1952. The former became the basis for subsequent European responses to the artist, most pervasively that of David Sylvester, who became one of the artist's greatest champions, while the latter criticism was almost entirely neglected by all subsequent critics except Lawrence Alloway. Although both pioneering essays derived from conversations with Bacon, their emphasis was fundamentally different. Hunter provided an emphatically British context, including references to Wyndham Lewis, William Blake, Gainsborough, Turner, Sickert, and even Beardsley, and wrote of the importance of London to the artist. Melville, in contrast, developed a European context for Bacon's tormented vision through references to Dostoyevsky and Kafka, to Dalí and Buñuel's film Un chien andalou, Picasso's ‘air of extreme hazard’, and Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin.

Both authors also emphasized the contemporary resonance of Bacon's work, a feature that helped him assume pre-eminence in the London art scene of the 1950s. However, while Hunter's text and accompanying photograph of Bacon's source material made a direct link between Bacon's paintings and his collecting of photographs of major international events and political leaders, including photographs of Goebbels and of Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution, Melville instead gave a more elevated reading. This lacked such direct references and instead argued that ‘Modern Painting has suddenly been humanised’, proposing that ‘Un Chien Andalou has greater visual force and lucidity than anything achieved in the art of painting between the two wars … only the recent paintings of Francis Bacon have discovered a comparable means of disclosing the human condition’ (Melville).

In keeping with his belief that the image should act as an assault on the nervous system rather than a stimulus for the intellect, Bacon denied that he made preparatory studies for his paintings, preferring to emphasize the immediacy of chance to generate his images. This denial did much to discourage writers from pinning specific sources to his imagery and instead to stress a conflation of sources that extracts his work from being mere story-telling or illustration: a painting may be a portrait of an individual, but rarely is he, or occasionally she, identified. Only after his death were drawings by, and attributed to, Bacon publicized, published, and exhibited. Generally scrappy and weak, they were clearly personal notations that he did not consider worthy of exhibition but which none the less provide a revealing insight into his studio procedure and indicate a greater degree of planning than interviews with Bacon had suggested.

International reputation

Bacon's international reputation grew dramatically. As early as 1948 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought his important early work Painting, 1946. Then in 1953 he had his first one-man show at Durlacher Bros. in New York and in 1957 at the Galeries Rive Droite in Paris. In 1954 he also received major official recognition, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale together with Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson.

Such events provided an international context for Bacon and consolidated existentialist readings of his work. Indeed, from as early as his first one-man show in 1949, he was associated with existentialism, as in a review by Nevile Wallis:

Bacon's work is the most profoundly disquieting manifestation I have yet seen of that malaise, which since the last war, has inspired the philosophy of Sartre [There is] a literary parallel in Kafka's nightmares of frustration, which largely owed their inspiration to Kierkegaard's philosophy of despair. (N. Wallis, ‘Nightmares’, The Observer, 26 Nov 1949)

Sylvester, too, provided just such a context for Bacon. In 1952, in his first major essay on the artist, an article for The Listener, he referred to Bacon's enclosed spaces with direct reference to Sartre's Huis clos, quoting Garcin's ‘Eh bien, continuons’ and asserting that ‘life is hell and we had better get used to the idea’ (D. Sylvester, ‘The paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener, 47, 3 Jan 1952, 28–9).

In 1955 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held the first retrospective exhibition of Bacon's work, presenting thirteen paintings. In that same year an Arts Council retrospective of the work of Alberto Giacometti was also held in London. These two retrospectives did much to stimulate figurative art in Britain and to encourage supportive critics to discern an element of torment within their presentation of the human condition. Certainly Bacon paralleled Giacometti, in whose sculptures movement, whether potential or actual, suggests vulnerability and fear. Bacon's decisive, transitional group of paintings of a head that he began in 1948 has striking formal and conceptual links with Giacometti's caged nose, The Nose (Centre Pompidou, Paris) of the previous year. Both are concerned with movement: Giacometti allows actual movement while Bacon suggests twisting. Both use boxing to draw attention to the space in which the subject moves: Giacometti provides a box and Bacon an armature. Both emphasize a single element of the face as a metonym of the whole: Giacometti emphasizes the nose and mouth, Bacon simply the gaping mouth. Both, too, concentrated on the single figure and sought to deny narrative readings of their work.

Connecting directly with the nervous system

Bacon became notorious for his social life. An inveterate drinker and gambler, he loved chance, risk, and danger in his life. A focus in London was the Colony Room drinking club in Soho, which opened in 1949 and whose founder, Muriel Belcher, later one of the artist's subjects, employed Bacon to bring in people. Other regulars included a circle of Bacon's artist friends, among them the figurative painters Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, and Frank Auerbach. Bacon's day began early and despite the incorporation of chance effects in his painting he followed a disciplined routine. Exhausting mornings of work in his small studio gave way to the release of life as a drinker and gambler in Soho when he mixed as freely with East End criminals as he did with the landed aristocracy. His extraordinary appearance—with his moon face and leather jacket—and his life of immense highs and lows contributed much to his status as the leading British artist of the last half-century: an extremist in both art and life.

Bacon was celebrated for the emotional impact of his work and for his desire to connect directly ‘with the nervous system’ rather than the intellect. He wanted, he explained, to show the effect, but not its cause, for example preferring to paint the anguished figures at the base of the crucifixion rather than the crucifixion itself. This allusiveness was praised for facilitating the metaphoric potential of his work as a revelation of the human condition, although this indirectness may also have had a more personal resonance that was fuelled by the artist's own anxiety. Indeed in one of Bacon's most powerful early works there is an intimation of why the painter's anxiety might have been so acute.

Two Figures (1953; priv. coll.) presents a darkened room in which two men, himself and Peter Lacy, make love on a bed. The vertical lines that run down the picture veil the figures and suggest a view glimpsed through a curtain, thereby placing the viewer outside the room, as if spying on the men. In this way the painting embodies the clandestine nature of an action at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. In Two Figures anxiety about the state monitoring and constraining the individual was expressed at a time of acute insecurity for homosexuals. A manifesto painting, Two Figures remained unexhibited until the Tate Gallery's retrospective exhibition of Bacon's work in 1962.

Dust and shadows

Whereas in Bacon's pre-war and wartime paintings the range of colours had been wide, and paintings of the mid-1940s had used a strong, dominant orange, from the later 1940s until 1956–7 Bacon instead presented a dark realism of dust and shadows in which man is alone in a void.

Colour returned to Bacon's work in the Hanover Gallery's dramatic exhibition in 1957 of his recent paintings. However, this was a show that suggested a crisis of direction for the artist. While American abstract expressionism was resurgent in Europe, Bacon presented some of the least convincing and most uncharacteristic paintings of his career. The exhibition was dominated by a series of paintings based on a photographic reproduction of Van Gogh's Painter on the Road to Tarascon, which had been destroyed in the Second World War. The dark and dusty paintings upon which Bacon's reputation rested were replaced by heightened colour and the recent use of thin stained grounds and dusty smearings gave way to thick, free, all-over painting. Despite their suggested movement, Bacon's earlier paintings had coherence; these latest pictures seemed uncomfortably hurried. The application of paint is slapdash rather than exhilarating, and the picture surface a dead end, not a space to be explored. Fortunately for his reputation, this moment was short-lived and Bacon subsequently derided most of these paintings. However, the lessons he learned about colour dramatically transformed his work through a series of paintings heralded by Bacon's triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Guggenheim Museum, New York), which formed the climax of his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1962.

By the time of this exhibition Bacon had moved from the Hanover Gallery to the Marlborough Gallery where he stayed from 1958 until his death. The devoted support and understanding he received there, above all from Valerie Beston, together with the Tate Gallery's retrospective, did much to consolidate Bacon's reputation.

Multi-figure compositions

From the early 1960s Bacon created some of his most ambitious multi-figure compositions in which, for the first time, he placed at the centre of his efforts the exploration of his themes through the use of a large-scale triptych format, first used in 1944, to produce some of his most ambitious paintings. In 1961 he found a new studio at Reece Mews where he remained until his death. Although he had other studios, it was here that he did the majority of his paintings for the next thirty years. During the 1960s his range of colours widened and Bacon developed the interior settings that had previously been so stark, and introduced an ambiguous psychological dimension to his work. The possibilities of the triptych, using three canvases, each separately framed, allowed Bacon to show his figures to be at the same time related and separated. Several of these figures were based on Bacon's partner, George Dyer, with whom he became involved in 1963. Controversially, in one of the most powerful of all these triptychs, Crucifixion (1965; Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich) one of the onlookers wears an armband bearing a swastika to suggest a more specific contemporary resonance than Bacon usually allowed. During 1965–6 he gave increasing attention to painting small triptychs of heads. He had painted the first of these, Three Studies of the Human Head (priv. coll.), in 1953, but now followed this early precedent in a memorable series of portraits of friends, including Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher, and Lucian Freud. Reviewers likened this use of three views of the same subject to police mugshots of full-face and profile. This interpretation was encouraged by knowledge of Bacon's own use of public photo machines to provide him with source material.

By the late 1960s the settings of Bacon's paintings had become more sophisticated, with spatial distortion often turning rectangular boxes into spheres to suggest subjects trapped in a paperweight. Mirrors also began to play a central part in allowing Bacon to combine more than one view of the subject and to chart different forms of fragmentation and dissolution. An immensely cultured man, Bacon drew inspiration from multifarious sources, sometimes making these explicit through his use of titles, as in Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot's Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (1967; Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) and Triptych Inspired by the ‘Oresteia’ of Aeschylus (1981; priv. coll.).

World acclaim

In October 1971 the Grand Palais in Paris staged a major Francis Bacon retrospective that was dominated by his triptychs. Sadly the event, which should have been one of the triumphs of Bacon's life, was marred by tragedy: on the eve of the opening, Bacon's partner, George Dyer, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room. Bacon commemorated Dyer's death in ensuing paintings, including a triptych entitled Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (November–December 1971; Foundation Beyeler collection, Switzerland). From 1974 Bacon had an apartment in Paris, such was his love for the city and its culture. He did little work there but established deep friendships, and the leading French intellectual Michel Leiris became one of his most articulate champions. In 1974 Bacon met John Edwards (1950–2003), with whom he formed a close paternal relationship, and Edwards was later named as his sole heir.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, 1968–74, in 1975, was the first time that works by a contemporary British artist had been shown by the museum. In the same year David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon were published. Immensely revealing, the interviews provide insights not only into Bacon's art and times but also the art of the past. By the 1980s Bacon received major accolades, exhibitions, and tributes. In 1983 a first retrospective of Bacon's work was held in Japan, travelling to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya. Two years later the Tate Gallery held its second Bacon retrospective, an exhibition that travelled to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 1988 even the Soviet Union staged a Bacon retrospective, an almost unprecedented honour for a Western artist that was balanced by transatlantic acclaim the following year, when a major exhibition was held in America, travelling to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Later years

By this time one of the striking features of Bacon's œuvre had become the consistency of his vision and the rigour with which he focused on his themes. He occasionally also made surprising, powerful statements on subjects that were otherwise peripheral to his concerns. In the 1950s Bacon had painted memorable depictions of animals, most movingly in paintings of 1952 and 1953 of a prowling dog, and in the early and mid-1950s of a caged chimpanzee. Although landscapes are virtually absent from his œuvre, Bacon did produce a turbulently evocative painting of dusty ground and windswept trees entitled Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963; priv. coll.). Two extraordinary paintings of the 1980s, both set in indeterminate indoor–outdoor spaces, provide a remarkable climax to this little pursued theme: the smudgy Sand Dune (1981; priv. coll.) and the ejaculatory Jet of Water (1988; Marlborough International Fine Art, London). Together these paintings not only demonstrated Bacon's brilliant handling of paint, but also provided a riposte to a Romantic vision of nature. His increasing use of the airbrush as a painting technique resulted in innovative textural effects. There were spectacular successes during this decade, especially his portraits of John Edwards of 1986–8, but there were also accusations that his work had become formulaic, less engaged, and lacking in tension. Bacon decided to paint a second, larger version of his seminal early painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. This new version, Second Version of Triptych, 1944 (1988; Tate collection) replaced the poignantly scruffy original with an altogether grander, more imperial version, something Bacon had long wished to do. The result was not without critics: they felt that the grander dimensions and slicker painting technique of this second version resulted in pastiche, which robbed the original of much of its charge. He nevertheless continued to provide new insights into existing themes through increasingly spare paintings in which he pared down the settings and concentrated on essential anatomical details. In Triptych, 1991 (priv. coll.), Bacon's last triptych and his final statement of mortality, his general theme, there is a tremendous sense of desolation and loneliness. Much of each canvas is left bare and a defining feature is the dark square against which the figure is set: an engulfing void with intimations of death. A few months later, on 28 April 1992, Bacon died in Madrid where he had been visiting a friend. He was buried in Almudeña cemetery, Madrid. He was internationally the most acclaimed British painter of the twentieth century.

James Hyman

FRANCIS BACON AT THE BBC

Celebrating the life and work of a great British artist

The BBC Archive celebrates the life and work of Francis Bacon, one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. This collection is inspired by the retrospective of Bacon's work at Tate Britain.

These archive programmes and documents chart Francis Bacon's TV and radio appearances, from the early 1960s until shortly before his death in 1992. The artist discusses his influences, his best-known paintings and his opinions of other artists, while art experts and historians explain the background to his vision.

Since he exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's nightmare was fundamentally his own.

Coming as it did at the end of World War II, in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation.

Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday. The show remains here through Jan. 7, after which it is to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 31 to Aug. 28). With nearly 60 works from public and private collections around the world, this is the first major overview of the painter's achievements held in the United States since 1963. The exhibition has been organized by James T. Demetrion, the Hirshhorn's director, who obtained many of Mr. Bacon's best-known paintings.

There is, for example, one of the startlingly coloured works the artist based on van Gogh's Painter on the Road to Tarascon. There are a handful of the Popes that the artist created by combining elements of Velazquez's portrait of Innocent X with the image of a screaming nurse from The Battleship Potemkin, the Sergei Eisenstein film. The artist's arresting Man With Dog of 1953 can be seen here, and so can at least one canvas, depicting a paralytic child walking on all fours, that Mr. Bacon derived from Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer whose studies of figures in motion have had a profound impact on the painter.

There are a dozen or so small and strangely beautiful portrait heads of friends and associates as well as a handful of large triptychs from the 1960's and 70's, including a work from May to June 1973 that is Mr. Bacon's wrenching meditation on the death of a friend, George Dyer.

There is not, unfortunately, the Three Studies of Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion from the 40's, which was deemed too fragile to travel from the Tate Gallery in London. But a second version of this work that Mr. Bacon completed last year is on view, and to see it is to realize both how much the artist has changed over the years and how much he has stayed the same.

Mr. Bacon has stayed the same in the sense that his subjects have not really varied, nor have the essential elements of his imagery. His focus remains on the human body. He continues to twist it, mangle its features, X-ray it and make it evaporate, transmogrify and bleed. His figures huddle and struggle in windowless rooms lighted only by a bare bulb that dangles from the ceiling. They vomit into a sink, find themselves pinned to the bed with a hypodermic needle or face to face with one of the ancient Greeks' Furies.

When two men are engaged in sex, as they sometimes are in his paintings, they seem to be wrestling each other to the death. When the artist paints himself in a state of repose, it appears as if he is recovering from a crippling hangover. Even when Mr. Bacon is creating imaginary creatures, as in the second version of Three Figures the references to sex and violence cannot be missed. Mr. Bacon's images are rarely subtle.

Francis Bacon

Bacon’s work doesn’t comply neatly with attempted divisions between portraiture and explorations of the body, and this exhibition, The Human Body, is to a degree an artificial contrivance, especially for an artist who in many ways considered the head as just another limb on a torso. The works are hung strangely close to the floor in the Hayward’s artificially lit lower galleries, against sad, grey walls and a threatening dark ceiling. Light levels are low because of the artist’s improvidence of technique and the consequent delicacy of the work: the raw canvas he left exposed is vulnerable to darkening and embrittlement. Overall, the repressive effect makes the works look gaily pretty and cheerful.

This is the first significant opportunity to consider Bacon’s work since Michael Peppiatt’s critical biography of 1996, and makes the artist’s rigid withholding of his co-operation from any biographer understandable. Peppiatt is not party to the strange collaboration between those that accord the artist a greater singularity than is the case, and he makes an evaluation of Bacon that is neither characterised by either adulatory homage (to a Soho Disneyland of romanticised Existentialism) nor by kneejerk disgust. His book is more fondly querying of Bacon’s art than his many (equally committed but perhaps more constrained, credulous, or misinformed) predecessors. David Sylvester, who curated this exhibition and wrote the catalogue essay, has begun - just - a well-earned relaxation from the artist’s royal grip.

Details of Bacon’s upbringing, sexuality and relationships have autobiographical correspondences in the paintings which make them (in what would be an absolute anathema to the artist) much more narrative than intended. Bacon’s deliberate insistence on a non-analytical and non-narrative reading of his work (and potent enigma resulting from this), is now less possible to sustain. For example, Untitled (1943 or 1944), a work never exhibited or published before, (a variant on one of the triptych panels for Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944) seems particularly hectoring. Elsewhere, Bacon’s narrative is by degrees inarticulate and confused, but certainly present. This is most clearly seen in Triptych May-June 1973 (1973). The painting depicts the undignified suicide of the artist’s lover in cartoon strip style. The spiritual details of Bacon’s story of abuse, repressions and counter-repressions may be seen, with increasing clarity, elsewhere in the show.

Bacon’s outlook of religiosity (both absolutist, irreducible intent and frequent religious subject matter), politics and sexuality (of pain) may now be considered without constraint. The various biographies, newly revealed work and the simple passage of time allows us to consider him in relation to various traditions other than just a Modernist one. These might include the art of the right wing, 19th century Christian art, as well as the history of artists concerned with sexualised control, such as Richard Lindner, or even Aubrey Beardsley. Bacon’s use of raw canvas left in reserve is like Beardsley’s use of white paper, seen in his illustrations of Edgar Allen Poe, for example. There may even be a case for consideration of Bacon in relation to the English nonsense tradition in literature.

Bacon’s often very beautiful, grandee swirlings and sexualised skidmarks of paint are depictive of certain principal categories of subject. These are either other right-wing libertines like himself, or suicides and alcoholics - alcoholics, of course, just being suicides in slow motion. The libertine theme, and its policy of non intervention toward the emotionally or spiritually disadvantaged, can be seen in the falling freemarket of souls on the canvases, and their hierarchy of vulnerabilities in relation to each other, reflected within the structural devices the artists used.

The good paintings in this show have a continuing magic power, effecting an almost involuntary response. As Bacon’s often strained theatrical intensity becomes more painfully obvious though, his successes may perhaps be due more to his fabulous colourist skills and consummate fluency with paint than his existential pronouncements. As the duration of induced sensation in the viewer becomes diminished, through habituation and an increased tolerance to his devices, either complacency or a discriminating embarrassment at the accrued defects in the paintings sets in.

The Human Body further qualifies the reasonable objections to be made against the grandeurs and pomp claimed for Bacon’s work, but it also confirms his merits. Importantly, it also provides an opportunity to reconsider Bacon’s considerable influence on much contemporary art practice, and therefore to consider aspects of contemporary art practice itself.

Bacon’s insistent references to Paul Valéry’s - ‘the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’ - is seen reflected in the repeated significance of ‘sensation’ in much contemporary art practice, and its analogues in advertising, recreational drug use and the entertainment media. Bacon’s outsider status, ruthless survival strategy and self mythologising, as well as his great talent, also have correspondences in younger artists’ makings and marketings of art, although many of these are now safely institutionalised themselves. The bonds between Bacon and many contemporary artists may expose those working in his wake to stresses and counterbalancings dependent on the rise or fall of his retrospective fortunes.

Francis Bacon

History gives and it takes away. The number of verified Rembrandts has diminished recently, while the importance of Francis Bacon has increased with the discovery of several paintings. When history ‘gives’ in this way, it creates the same sense of surprise as being given a second car. The inevitable historians are trotted out, glowing like proud new mothers. For this exhibition, Sam Hunter, David Sylvester and John Russell have written the exhibition catalogue. Discrimination from a special jurisdiction is required: that old time religion, connoisseurship, must be dusted off and put into service. Three questions are asked in quick succession: A. Are the pictures genuine? (beyond a doubt); B. What were the artist’s final intentions towards works of art that were not acquired from him during his lifetime? (the key question); C. What do they add to the oeuvre? (because they always add up to something).

The most engaging paintings from this ‘new vein’ are from the 50s and early 60s, a period when Bacon was known routinely to destroy canvases with which he wasn’t satisfied. Amongst this group are four relative spellbinders: Study for Nude Figures, Study after Velázquez, Study After Velázquez II (all c.1950), and Pope and Chimpanzee (1962). All of these explore the howling subjects with which Bacon struggled - Existentialism, Abstract Expressionism and the primal drama of a world newly acquainted with the Bomb. The Velázquez studies and the Pope/chimp canvas in particular elaborate on a theme that especially preoccupied Bacon: the obliteration of faith by instinct.

The painting of Innocent X’s screaming face, (Study After Velázquez II) flickering between the grey ribbons cascading all around him (which better recalls Titian’s Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto, 1561-62), broadcasts unbridled terror. But whereas Velázquez so perfectly depicted Innocent’s hands at ease on the arms of his magnificent throne, Bacon presents them like the white-knuckled hands of the condemned prisoner in the electric chair whose Christian serenity has seized up at the instant of the switch, unsure of what is poised to take over. It’s an awful truth that faith is always vulnerable. In Pope and Chimpanzee, feral instinct is hurled toward the personification of Catholic faith. The clinging savage viciously grapples with an inert papal body crowned by a holy, repulsive, mangled face: faith made mush.

These pictures are undoubtedly part of Bacon’s oeuvre, but what part? Where will they finally find their place in the language of Bacon? One of them, Study after Velázquez II (1950) was assumed destroyed. And now, either through oversight or Bacon’s revised artistic insight, it is here with us and he is not. Is it useful and appropriate to ask if this discovery causes any revision of our appreciation and understanding of Bacon. I think not; these paintings don’t add up to enough to justify a revision - they’re not as substantial as those that formed our judgements of Francis Bacon so many years ago. It is clear that the new Study After Velázquez (1950) is not as realised or even rectified as Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X made just three years later, and that Figure in Frame (1950) adds little to our understanding of Dog (1952). In the final analysis, if there are breaches in the oeuvre, these pictures do nothing to illuminate them.

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."

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.

Hunt for 'missing' works of Francis Bacon

by Cal McCrystal, The Independent, March 12, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealer 'snatched Bacon paintings away'

Court hearing on claim that could run to £100m highlights artist's unique relationship with 'minder'

John Ezard

The Guardian, Thursday April 26, 2001

An art dealer acted as the painter Francis Bacon's "keeper or minder", removing his paintings to her gallery "as soon as the paint was dry", a high court judge was told yesterday.

This was said to be one of the principal roles of Valerie Beston, who organised the artist's life for more than 30 years.

The allegations were made by Geoffrey Vos QC, who called Bacon Britain's greatest 20th century artist. He was acting for Bacon's estate in a claim which could run as high as £100m. The estate is suing Marlborough Fine Art (London) and the Liechtenstein-based Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment for breach of duty and undue influence over Bacon.

Mr Vos was speaking at a preliminary procedural hearing of a complex case which is expected to bring the dead painter's often desperate life back into the limelight when it is fully argued in January.

Mr Vos told Mr Justice Patten: "The relationship which is 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. This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run of the mill about it."

The Marlborough gallery exclusively represented Bacon from 1958 - shortly before he became celebrated and was sometimes getting only a few hundred pounds for a canvas - until he died in 1992 as the world's highest-priced living artist.

Marlborough are contesting the claims of the estate, of which Brian Clarke was appointed executor in 1998. It is urging the judge to strike out the case this week.

The estate accuses the gallery of retaining up to 70% of the sale value of Bacon's paintings. It says a fair share of the proceeds would have been about a third. It alleges Marlborough has not yet demonstrated that it has paid for all the paintings it received. The estate is demanding a full accounting of the gallery's role to show that a fair balance was struck between its interests and those of Bacon. It also alleges that Marlborough have failed to account for the proceeds of a sale of 47 series of Bacon lithographs.

Mr Vos told the court Ms Beston could be described "as the defendants would have it, as Bacon's assistant", or "as one might say, his keeper or minder".

"But what is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK at all times material to the case, 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".

Outside court, the estate said in a statement: "It is right that the truth about the UK's pre-eminent artist and the treatment of his work be established and not buried."

Bacon left his £10m fortune to his longstanding friend John Edwards, 51, an illiterate east Londoner who now lives in Thailand.

The case continues.

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

A legal contest between the estate of Francis Bacon and his former gallery, involving up to £100m in claims, should go ahead, probably next year, a High Court judge ruled yesterday. Mr Justice Patten refused an application by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art to have the case, brought by Bacon's trustees, thrown out before a full hearing.

Marlborough insists the estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence" are unfounded. But the estate, headed by the executor, Bacon's friend, Professor Brian Clarke, claims the painter was underpaid for works, some of which, it alleges, remain unaccounted for. From 1958 until his death from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, aged 82, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery.

The estate says it is seeking "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon". In a statement, Marlborough has said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years after Bacon approached the gallery with the request to represent him.

The full trial is expected to last 12 weeks and may begin next January. Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied on the material presented to him that "there is at least an arguable case" that a fiduciary relationship existed between Bacon and the gallery from 1964.

The question of whether such a relationship existed would depend on a detailed examination at trial of Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough both before and after that date.

"It is, I think, beyond dispute that Bacon was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century but both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate," the judge said.

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

A High Court action brought by the estate of the artist Francis Bacon against his former gallery has been settled, lawyers announced yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bacon Estate and Dealer Settle A Two-Year Suit Over Pricing

By CAROL VOGEL

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.)

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.

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

Ashlee Jacob, The Blank Review, March 1, 2008

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

Ashlee Jacob, The Blank Review, March 8, 2008

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)

Author: Constantine J. Falliers

Journal of Asthma, Volume 33, Issue 5, September 1996, pages 349 - 350

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

The Cunning of Francis Bacon

By Julian Bell

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

Francis Bacon in the 1950s catalogue of the exhibition by Michael Peppiatt an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, May 5–July 30, 2007.
Yale University Press, 200 pp., $50.00

Francis Bacon's Studio by Margarita Cappock Merrell, 239 pp., $59.95

Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict by Wieland Schmied Prestel, 183 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester London: Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real catalogue of the 2006 Düsseldorf exhibition edited by Armin Zweite, with Maria Müller London: Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., £32.00

In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting by Martin Harrison London: Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., $39.95 (paper)

Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiatt Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 366 pp., $30.00

Some 40 percent of a plate has been ripped out of the Atlas-Manuel des maladies de la bouche, a French translation of an 1894 German medical textbook. The torn-away trapezoid shows "Fig. 1": a heavily retouched photo of lips prised apart by forceps to reveal gums disfigured by an abscess, chipped teeth, and froth about the tongue. The chromolithograph with its flesh reds stands as an oval vignette on the creamy fragment of coated paper. But then the scrap has been scuffed by brushes loaded with green and cerulean; there are fingerprints to the right in blue-black and mauve, little splats of yellow and scarlet. The paper's edges are frayed and nicked, it has a riverine crack where those clutching fingers have bent it: a vertical sever being a further result of decades of overhandling.

The item is among the several thousand catalogued in 1998 during the clearing of a smallish workroom in Reece Mews, Kensington, London SW7. This room was occupied by the artist Francis Bacon from 1961—when he turned fifty-two—till his death in 1992, thirty-one years later. For six years Bacon's studio lay in an undisturbed limbo, but in 1998 negotiations between the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which houses one of Ireland's leading collections of modern and contemporary art, and Bacon's partner and heir John Edwards resulted in its entire contents (not only each scrap of paper, but even the paint-encrusted walls) being packaged and transported to the museum. There they were reassembled in a purpose-built display room, in exactly the disorder in which Bacon had left them in London. In this manner the painter (whose English father bred horses in Ireland) returned to the land of his childhood. The Hugh Lane's curator, Margarita Cappock, reviews and analyzes the attendant inventory in her copiously illustrated volume, Francis Bacon's Studio.

Mostly Cappock has papers to describe. Her team found printed pictures ripped not only from medical textbooks but from news magazines; trampled snapshots of Bacon's friends; quick sketches for compositions; crumpled, scribbled agendas for imagery ("flesh-coloured shadows, "bed of crime," "mea

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Early influences

Major works

Contemporary assessment of Bacon's work

International reputation

Connecting directly with the nervous system

Dust and shadows

Multi-figure compositions

World acclaim

Later years

Sources

Archives

FILM

Likenesses

Wealth at death

FRANCIS BACON AT THE BBC

Celebrating the life and work of a great British artist

Francis Bacon