This association exists to collect and catalogue the Italian drawings of Francis Bacon.

The collection consists of a large number of drawings, created between 1970 and 1990.

The drawings were a gift from Bacon to his Italian friend Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino.

The story of these drawings can be read in Umberto Guerini’s book “The Tip of an Iceberg”.

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," "meat seen in a box"). There were weathered volumes of wildlife photography and art books reproducing Velázquez and Ingres. All these had been cast down among champagne cases, paint rollers, brushes, pots, and cans over the course of three decades, mounting up and moldering in ragged drifts around a walkway to the easel. On worktables, uncapped paint tubes had fused into mountainous conglomerates. By the walls and windows and also underfoot, a hundred slashed canvases lay strewn, with holes where faces once had been. Earlier photographic records indicate that a circular mirror with pocked silvering—a relic of the painter's prehistory, his attempts while young to work in interior design—was one of the few items that had always stood proud of this dismal, dusty morass.

There is something giddying about the systematic resurrection of such an environment in another city, three hundred miles away. When the would-be cultural guerrilla A.J. Weberman coined the term "garbology" in 1971, he was teasingly dignifying his habit of sneaking around celebrities' refuse in a quest for telltale signs of ideological duplicity. (Had Bob Dylan turned from political protest to heroin addiction? Had Muhammad Ali been snacking on pork? Surely, sooner or later, the used needle, the emptied meat can would turn up!) Garbology has since been taken into the fold of academic respectability by archaeologists who recognize in it a fast-track variant on their own science. Object-based information is the great desideratum, from their perspective: distaste and decorum only form the fuzziest of qualifying considerations.

Naturally, professional archaeologists were involved in bringing Reece Mews to Dublin—Cappock includes their draftsman's floor plans of the clutter in her documentation. And yet turning over remnants as soiled and sad as that scrap of paper with the abscessed mouth, one is brought back to the sense of trespass that Weberman was playing with in a less information-fixated age. Is it really our business to be snooping around here, in another man's trash? What crime do we suspect him of? This Dublin high-tech display complex with its meticulously simulated chaos, this book that so forensically analyzes its constituents: doesn't it all amount to a loss of human proportion?

Well, there is a crime of sorts to be accounted for. That medical textbook, picked up in Paris in 1927 when Bacon was a teenager on the run from his father, would eventually supply a cue for the triptych with which he made his mark on the London art scene in April 1945. In the central canvas of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the same gaping mouth has been grafted onto a head on a lithe snake neck, descending from the body of a plucked turkey, with a white bandage over its eyes: this mutant being perched on a pedestal inside an expanse of glaring orange (see illustration on page 6). No one encountering that blind, voracious phantasm—whether in a London gallery at the traumatic moment when the Holocaust's horrors were just becoming public knowledge, or even now, reproduced in any primer of modern art—has found it easy to forget. But Bacon was far from done with his oral prompt. Those forced-apart teeth helped to catalyze the series of "screaming popes" that cemented his reputation during the 1950s. Echoes of them repeatedly punctuated the rushing, slithering flesh-flurries he specialized in painting during the following decade, as he settled into Reece Mews and into a niche of international renown far beyond that of any British contemporary.

There was nothing particularly covert, however, about his use of the image. Bacon himself spoke about his passion for the Atlas-Manuel, with its "beautiful" pictures of diseased mouths, in the course of a 1966 interview. He was talking with David Sylvester, a formidable London art writer who became his chief critical advocate. The eloquence with which Bacon expanded on such singular reference points was one of the reasons Interviews with Francis Bacon, published in book form in 1975, became a major art text of its time. That volume offered its readers photos surveying the already legendary studio muddle. Cappock's book provides further shots taken across the decades, including a couple from 1974 which set against it an impeccably natty artist, all dressed up to hit the drinking clubs or gaming tables that habitually completed his daily round.

The more you get used to this milieu and the mentality behind it, the more you sense that the pomaded fifty-four-year-old in the Jermyn Street shirt would himself have been controlling the shutter by proxy. He would have been exactly aware of the image he was giving out: he is said to have rejoiced in this "compost" around him, from which his images had sprouted. Have you been snooping around some private citizen's refuse? No, you have been granted a glimpse inside a monarch's palace. Arguably, Reece Mews was not simply a style statement, but the artist's lone work of sculpture—Bacon's equivalent to Duchamp's Étants Données, the installation that was only made available to the world after the artist's death. And if he was the master operator throughout, obscurely willing the studio's relocation from beyond the grave, then what of that scrap you took for a clue: Was it merely a decoy, a plant? Is it your credulity that those paint-smeared fingers have been gripping?

These thoughts occur because Bacon's own accounts of himself, to a remarkable degree, continue to dominate the literature on him. Interest in Bacon shows no signs of abating. Among the various Bacon exhibitions of the last two years, Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real in Düsseldorf and Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, which originated in Norwich, England, and is now traveling the United States, have each generated substantial catalogues, the latter including a long essay by Bacon's biographer Michael Peppiatt. The curator of the Düsseldorf show, Armin Zweite, concludes his text with the remark that when it comes to Bacon's art, "continued efforts are called for to explain the process and the product," and this injunction is certainly being heeded.

Besides Cappock's account of the studio, there is Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict, a new general study by Wieland Schmied; and Martin Harrison's In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, an extensive examination of Bacon's use of source materials. All these publications have worthwhile aspects. (It should be mentioned that Cappock's book is elegantly drafted, commandingly knowledgeable, and offers many telling local insights.) It remains the case, however, that whichever you read, the lines that sing out and stay in the mind are Bacon's own. "To unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently," for example, and "realism has to be reinvented." The Düsseldorf Violence of the Real catalogue functions as an extended, highly learned gloss on those Bacon dicta, with Zweite trying to ground them in texts by Kant, T.W. Adorno, André Breton, and Gilles Deleuze. And yet after bearing with his studious philosophizing it is to their loose gestural pungency that you long to revert.

Bacon's continued hold on the meaning of his own art is quite distinctive. If you turn to his initial artistic inspiration, Picasso—or for that matter to that other great post-Picasso painter, Jackson Pollock—you meet artists who habitually, for most of their careers, refused to offer verbal sops to interpretation. Writers on Picasso and Pollock contradict one another vigorously and incessantly; when it comes to Bacon, the commentariat is docile and orthodox. What is it that engenders this pattern of viewer behaviour?

Let us imagine a first encounter with a Bacon from what most agree was the heyday of his art. You round a gallery partition and meet the Three Studies for a Crucifixion of 1962 (now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York), glaring six and a half feet tall in fields of orange and red (thus reiterating, more expansively and slickly, the layout of the near-homonymous Three Studies from seventeen years before). To the left, you register the blobby silhouettes, floating like bacilli in blood, of two walking males, with paired sides of a beef carcass transecting the foreground. At the center, a far fiercer image arrests you: a bed seen end-on, its striped mattress swelling and drooping, on which there lies a knot of whirling, skimming brushmarks, pinkish-yellow and black, splattered with blood red and ejaculatory trails of white. The knot's loops don't quite untie into distinct limbs, yet a set of parted teeth confer on it a face. Loudest of all is the creation to the right: a winding gloop of black and blubber-pink that slithers down a post to a puddle and a ring of bones at its base, with a ripped-open ribcage and below it a screaming, eyeless head—yet further parted teeth, the acutest detail of the whole convulsive ensemble being a single canine tooth isolated against the mouth's black hollow.

The fleshly brushloads rasping the canvas rasp at your tactile empathy. You're prompted to imaginatively inhabit these heaves of paint, investing them with your own sense of body; and yet how could you? That would mean casting off all your comportment, all your muscular control: you would be skinless, virtually shapeless. To approach these images judders the guts. If nonetheless you stay before them, that is because they are also mysterious. How do those mutated presences behind the reflective glass (a constant of Bacon's framing procedures) relate to one another? To what on earth else might they refer? Both your discomposure and your curiosity create a keen demand, therefore, for something to hold on to. Obligingly, the gallery label offers the word "crucifixion."

That helps: reach out for religion, tradition, old church art. So that blubber on the post is some latter-day "study for" Christ's agonies? Yes, but as you read on—as the channels of curating head you toward Bacon's pronouncements—you learn that as of the twentieth century, this transfixed body is decisively bereft of divinity; that there is now no redeeming meaning to what a body might undergo, whether in torment or in orgasm; or rather, that meaning now inheres in the act of painting itself, and in the relation it bears to the naked realities of existence, to "facts, or what used to be called truth," in Bacon's phrase. For his pictures bear on "the inanity of our situation in the world as ephemeral beings, more capable than other living creatures of brilliant and pointless ecstasies," as his friend the philosopher Michel Leiris expressed it^[1] ; they address what his spokesmen generically term the human condition. An encompassing, empowering phrase: equipped with it, perhaps you can regain your equipoise, master whatever threatened it, give it a name. It may even help you to discover in these uncanny images what used to be called beauty.

Master of the initiatory ordeal, master of the revelatory dictum, the atheistic Bacon—club-cruiser, gambler, gourmet, and leather-clad submissive—did as much as any artist to restore the missing quotient of belief to twentieth-century painting. Wieland Schmied is a distinguished devotee. He opens his essays on Bacon's art with the customary pieties of such writing: humanity's "agonies on the killing-floor of life," "the existential anxiety of modern man," and "the horror and despair that lurk beneath the surface of things." He moves on to salute the Triptych May–June 1973, done after the death of a boyfriend of Bacon's, as "the most tortured and desolate rendering of the human condition in the entire history of art." Hyperbole? Well, I like the warmheartedness. Schmied is a senior twentieth- century-art expert, based in Munich, who became acquainted with Bacon toward the end of the artist's life. Like Zweite, he takes Kantian calipers to the art, tackling the compositions via remarks such as "the purpose of space is individuation"; but also he can fondly evoke "the youngest 80-year-old I have ever met," who "moved with a nimble grace, almost skipping as he walked."

The former rector of the Bavarian Academy brings an Adam-like innocence to his description of a component in a "screaming pope" canvas—"Its appearance suggests some kind of metal frame, but this is not in fact the case: it is quite simply a brushstroke...." (Beware, professor! The trick's widespread. It's known as painting. Italics, admittedly, added.) Only he, perhaps, would dare reprimand the artist for failing properly to confront the papal image he was defacing: "That Bacon never saw the original of the Velázquez portrait is regrettable for several reasons...." Yet Schmied is a telling phrase-turner himself:

Bacon's ideal would have been to paint like Velázquez, using the methods of Pollock.... [His] dream...was that one day he would be able simply to throw a handful of paint at the canvas and a fully formed portrait with a perfect likeness of the subject would emerge of its own accord before his eyes.

That gets close both to the physical grain of the paintwork and to the cultural and historical crisis that Bacon felt he was confronting—even though, as Schmied notes, he had no liking for his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. It comes in a chapter on "The Painting Process and Its Goal" which is in fact as alert and as precise an account of Bacon's picture-making as I have read. Adhering to Bacon's creed of existential crisis in no way prevents Schmied from offering an illuminating perspective on his tactics and purposes.

Adhering to Bacon's dicta can, however, lead to doctrinal somersaults. One of the commonplaces of all the texts under review is that this work is not "illustrational." The point stems from the artist's interviews with David Sylvester, in which he posits an ideal of painting that makes a radically direct impact on the viewer, bypassing all rationally organized procedures for recording appearance—"without the brain interfering with the inevitability of the image," as he expressed it. If instantaneity is of the essence, then structures of time will be blown away, as Schmied pithily asserts: "Bacon is not a story-teller, but a destroyer of stories." Yet then he goes on to read triptych after triptych as a "sequence of events," busily inferring internal relationships between their figures. Michael Peppiatt, as Bacon's biographer, not surprisingly does the same. He supplies a lowdown on that big 1962 triptych—I annotate:

Read very briefly from left to right, it appears to recount Bacon's expulsion from the family home by his father [for borrowing his mother's underwear: father and son being the male silhouettes] through a traumatic sexual encounter [the squirm on the mattress]...to an inverted Crucifixion (no doubt of Bacon himself) in the last panel....

This interpretation of "humiliating exile and suffering" is one the art historian Martin Harrison also accepts in his book In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting. In fact narrative paraphrases abound wherever you look: the Violence of the Real catalogue captions are glutted with them.

Is this all a crass traducement of Bacon's art? I don't think so. The point is that his talk of transcendent immediacy was an aspiration, a handsome modernist reverie, at odds with equally strong countervailing instincts. His pictures can judder the stomach, yes, but they are also adept at mystifying; they tease the viewer's imagination as much as they assault it. The abrupt handiwork he uses to conjure up figures—an interplay of quick-snatched curls and streaks with down-driven, explosive splats—gets increasingly overlaid, in the course of his career, by finicky texturings with powder pigment and fine bridging lines; for the prevailing direction of his art is toward aesthetic suspense. Increasingly, he dangles those clotted bodies in clean-planed interiors that hark back to his early experience working as a modernist designer; and always he keeps them removed under glass.

Seen in the light of this aestheticism, Bacon's paintings become no less interesting, but they do become less icon-like. Is it really essential to assent to a certain crisis-tinged doctrine of the human condition in order to appreciate what this particular artist is offering? A touch of irreverence might give us more room to enjoy his fiendish ingenuity; moreover, to distinguish the indisputable inventions of genius that issued from Reece Mews from the numerous non-events—among the latter, the cover image of Schmied's book, a dry, affectless specimen of Bacon's old-age aerated manner. (Incidentally, the publishers have also shortchanged Schmied by printing his text in an insultingly small font.)

It is in this broadly revisionist, canon-shuffling spirit that Michael Peppiatt worked on the exhibition of 1950s paintings now touring the United States. The accompanying volume, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, forms a kind of postscript to Peppiatt's 1996 biography, reverting to the period just before his own acquaintance with the artist began. Yes, we know that Bacon was a great reiterator, with that one set of Crucifixion studies succeeding the other (and yet more in his later years); but, says Peppiatt, the long interval between the two reveals him also as a plural-minded, restless, and reckless experimentalist. And indeed, it proves fascinating to follow the master of mangled flesh as he tries his hand at portraying Lady Sainsbury directly from life (quite against his normal practice); at essaying vibrant expressionistic variations on a self-portrait of van Gogh walking in Provençal sunshine; or conjuring up vistas of an African elephant fording a river, or of the Great Sphinx. Some of these ventures are blurted and botched, others—such as some mid-1950s figure studies, immersed in deep blue—unexpectedly beautiful: the extraordinary originality of Bacon's obsessions shows through throughout.

The 1950s, writes Peppiatt, were a period of turmoil for Bacon. In 1951 the recently arrived celebrity of the London art scene loses his one surviving fixture from his Irish childhood, the light-fingered Jessie Lightfoot—a nanny-turned-retainer who had taken to shoplifting to provide for the bohemian ménage that her former charge kept up with his lover Eric Hall. Distraught, he abandons both this address and this partner and spends years flitting through the gay demimonde, from country cottages to bordellos in Tangier, with no fixed studio. He falls into a grim love affair with the owner of a collection of rhino whips, who wished to keep him "chained to the wall, living like an animal on a bed of straw."

This tale of life lived on the edge—with its interwoven strand of steely artistic determination, which eventually brings Bacon to the stability of Reece Mews—makes for flavorsome reading. Peppiatt portrays his old friend with easy authority, acting at once as an ad hoc psychologist (as in his reading of the Crucifixion triptych) and as an insouciant phrase-twirler—"a drunken, farded sodomite," he dubs him at one point, an "affable, elegant boulevardier" at another. In truth I think the exercise is slightly overextended, even if it brings a number of unfamiliar Baconological minutiae into the public domain. It was interesting, however, to read how Bacon used what Peppiatt calls his "magpie eye" when he descended in 1959 on St. Ives, the Cornish base of what was then Britain's leading school of abstractionists.

Bacon liked to dismiss abstraction as "watered-down" art, telling Sylvester that his taste for it was mere "fashion." But he himself was keenly alert to fashion, and in the late 1950s the wind of "colour field painting" was blowing in from New York: heavy-laden angst was becoming passé, making way for the broad uninflected surfaces of Barnett Newman and his like. Three months on Britain's western coast, far removed from his customary urban bolt-holes, saw Bacon filching a slick new flattened presentation from the colorists around him—such as Patrick Heron—whom he affected to disdain.

From this point onward his art took on an expansive, deadpan hauteur, as the former flailing, abrupt obsessive got subsumed within the persona of the prince-guru of Reece Mews. This is the self-restyling that Peppiatt's Bacon in the 1950s is attempting to pick away at; though in fact the transition is described with deeper art historical grounding in Martin Harrison's In Camera. It is Harrison who, thanks to a wonderfully well-informed, re-tentive eye, is able most effectively to locate Bacon's painting within the broader development of twentieth-century visual culture. Harrison's researches are closely tied to Cappock's sifting of the studio papers, while showing a shrewd mistrust of the clues that Bacon chose to present to his public. "The layers of obfuscation surrounding a great artist are only just beginning to be penetrated," Harrison writes. His inquiry takes him to some considerably obscure places in the backwaters of British painting, but it also clarifies how this artistic act, which has struck so many viewers as utterly sui generis ever since 1945, relates to more familiar reference points.

As I interpret Harrison, Bacon starts out in art under the shadow of Picasso, the great figure-obsessed breaker-up of figures. Also fixated on the human figure, he regards the prospect of further pictorial fragmentation—the path that leads to Pollock's abstraction—as a downward detour for art. Up on the heights stands Velázquez, the supreme interpreter of human appearance. But there's no straight path that heads that way. Because—and this is what Degas and still more his British disciple Walter Sickert teach Bacon—the recording of human appearance has now been taken out of human hands. Through and through our culture is pervaded by mechanized picturing; we can only insert our art within that process, like the Atlas-Manuel's draftsman inserting his retouchings between the photograph and the chromolithograph..^[2]

That, rather than any facet of twentieth-century public history, is for Bacon the cultural crisis that matches the spiritual crisis occasioned by God's failure to continue existing. It's a crisis that calls for Picasso's aggressive, disfiguring tactics, redoubled in ferocity as he clenches and throttles the lineaments of the reproduced image he has picked up off the studio floor, as he spatters it with gouts of white and red. Only that way, heading down rather than up, via inverted crucifixions and hollowed-out popes, is there hope of touching on what Velázquez touched—which is "what used to be called truth"; which is synonymous with what Bacon still calls art.

That, very roughly, seems to be Bacon's minimal rationale. Harrison's examination of how Bacon developed, practiced, and then modulated it is far more richly informed and imaginative than this résumé can convey. It returns the reader to the sheer variety and inventive cunning of Bacon's paintings, which people will probably still be poring over long after his particular theory of the human condition in crisis has become a footnote in cultural history.

Notes

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

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

Francis Bacon Detritus.

Ivory Press 2006. Director: Elena Ochoa Foster

Francis Bacon's Detritus 2006

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

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

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

Francis Bacon -

The Violence of the Real

Triptych, 1970 oil on canvas each 198,1 x 147,3 cm
National Gallery of Australia Canberra. Purchased 1973

The exhibition Francis Bacon - The Violence of the Real was nominated as Exhibition of the Year 2006 by the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

K20 Kunstsammlung Nordhrein Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Dramatic depictions of human forms – writhing painfully, dissolving, struggling with or engulfing one another – shape the motivic repertoire of Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), the most eminent 20th century British painter.

Everything anecdotal or narrative has been excluded in favor of a concentration on the physical presence of human flesh. Bacon scenarizes bodies which appear mutable, vulnerable, or decrepit, while simultaneously asserting themselves with an aggressive, even boastful vitality. In aesthetically heightened form (for Bacon‘s images are always suggestively beautiful), such contradictoriness is conveyed in the form of the disquieting experience of the grandeur and finitude of human existence. Bacon said: “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence ...” (Francis Bacon to Hugh Marlais Davies, 1973).

Bacon sought to rend the veil of false perceptions and ideas that continually superimposes itself on the factual. He shows us forms and human traits whose artistic appearance is as fascinating as their physical deformations are alarming. His beings – which occasionally regress to the zoomorphic level – remain for the most part isolated, moving tentatively on stage-like platforms, in empty, windowless rooms or in structures resembling cages. Bacon discovered stimuli for his agitated image world in the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Degas and van Gogh, although he was inspired by reproductions rather than by originals. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic sequences of human and animal locomotion, books containing medical illustrations, newspaper photographs showing current events: all provided him with impetus.

Like a kind of “mill,” Bacon reworked this flood of reproduced visual material. Only after being transformed and profoundly defamiliarized were individual subjects incorporated into his paintings. Manifesting itself in Bacon’s œuvre is an aesthetic image world that is inextricably entangled with the existentially abysmal.

The 60 exhibited works – produced between 1945 and 1991, among them 10 triptychs, and photographic material from the artist‘s studio – provide insight into an unsettling yet captivating image world. Francis Bacon envisioned the human individual as a subject deprived of any stable (masculine) identity. Here we find a self that is exposed to “invisible forces,” one rendered incapable of locating itself securely in the world. To a large extent, this accounts for the continuing actuality of Bacon‘s creative achievement.

An offbeat homage to an unlikely pair

By David Galloway

The International Herald Tribune Monday October 9, 2006

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

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

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

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

Francis Bacon embalmed

Richard Calvocoressi

Margarita Cappock

FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO
239pp. Merrell. £35 (US $59.95). 1 85894 276 4

Art & Architecture TLS The Times Literary Supplement March 29, 2006

The dismantling in 1998 of Francis Bacon’s London studio, wall by paint-spattered wall and object by distressed object, and its painstaking reconstruction in the Dublin City Gallery, ranks as one of the more extraordinary conservation projects of modern times. What Bacon would have made of the prospect of thousands of visitors every year gazing through internal windows in the Dublin museum at the hermetically sealed dust and intimate chaos of 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, is not hard to guess. He was a ruthless editor of his own work, destroying half-finished, and even finished, pictures, concealing as many of his sources as he revealed, and suppressing books and catalogues about himself that he did not approve of. It is said that on one occasion he even burned two sackfuls of crumpled photographs and press cuttings from his studio floor, in order to deprive a hopeful Tate Gallery of a potentially invaluable addition to its archive. In fact, as Margarita Cappock admits in this useful and beautifully illustrated book, colour photographs of Bacon’s studio taken in 1974 show it to have been even more congested than it was at his death: “. . . for all the sources that have survived, a great many must have mouldered away”.

It is nevertheless due to Dublin that we know considerably more about Bacon’s voracious but eclectic interests than before. The illustrated database compiled by Dr Cappock and her team at the City Gallery catalogues no fewer than 7,500 objects found in Bacon’s studio, including illustrated publications, photographs, press cuttings, notes, drawings, artist’s materials – among them several pairs of Marks and Spencer corduroy trousers used to apply paint – and slashed canvases. This remarkable research tool has already, in the four years since the studio opened, begun to change the face of Bacon scholarship. For instance, we now know that Bacon, contrary to what he maintained, sometimes made rough preliminary sketches, suggesting, as Cappock observes, that he “was much more premeditated in his approach to painting than he cared to admit”.

Dr Cappock herself adds to our understanding of Bacon’s complex relationship to photography. Some 1,400 photographs were found in Bacon’s studio, a considerable number of them portraits by the photographer John Deakin, including 129 alone of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. (The series of Lucian Freud on a bed may have been taken by Walker Evans, not Deakin.) Cappock argues that these photos, many of which were commissioned by Bacon, functioned as more than mere aides-memoire. Bacon stopped working from life in the early 1960s and relied increasingly on memory, or so he implied, when painting portraits of his friends. Deakin’s photos, writes Cappock, “were not just a means to reality; they often were the reality”. She coins the memorable phrase “destruction as a form of enquiry” to describe Bacon’s deliberate intervention in the surface of the prints – cuts, tears, creases, folds and paint marks.

Bacon’s aggressive manipulation of the photographic image for his own imaginative ends placed him in the role of editor rather than that of passive consumer. Sometimes disparate fragments would be joined by safety pins or paper clips; at other times Bacon would mount particularly telling details on to card. He even, on occasion, took photographs himself – most notably of his long-term companion and heir John Edwards, which informed a handful of comparatively benign late portraits. But it is in his painterly transformations of Deakin’s photographs that Bacon’s true originality lies, reinventing the human figure for an apparently post-humanist world. These records of his subjects’ appearance were recalled long after their deaths. Dyer’s features, for instance, dominated Bacon’s painting for some years following his suicide in 1971. And Bacon would sometimes transpose gestures or expressions captured by Deakin’s incisive lens from one subject to another.

Various photographs of Bacon himself were found in the studio, including several by Deakin, which the artist made use of for his own self-portraits. The automatic photo booth, where Bacon, frequently drunk, could experiment with different poses and indulge in the performative side of his character, was another catalyst. The potential of the multiple photo-strip to suggest a view of human personality as changeable and contingent would have appealed to Bacon’s sense of people in a state of flux. From the early 1960s he produced several small triptychs which show contrasting aspects of the same head.

Analysing the numerous books, magazines, loose leaves, newspapers and press cuttings recovered from the studio floor, Cappock identifies the principal themes that fascinated Bacon. Warfare, crime and political leaders supplied images of violence and power. Medicine, sport, wildlife and human locomotion – Bacon left four copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion – nourished his visceral and erotic iconography of the body. Humans and animals in extreme situations or moving at high speed provided the basis for many of his anatomical distortions, while Bacon’s interest in detailed photographs of injuries and skin disorders from medical textbooks influenced his palette as well as his depiction of flesh. Cappock speculates that the increasingly pathological view of human flesh in Bacon’s late work may also reflect the artist’s own physical decline.

The French publication on diseases of the mouth, which, Bacon told David Sylvester, was the origin of his obsession with the open mouth, was not found in the studio; but a fragment of a hand-coloured illustration of gum disease, almost certainly torn from it, was. Two copies of another book whose influence Bacon openly acknowledged, K. C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, were also found. But the most curious discovery made by Cappock and her colleagues was a well-thumbed and paint-smeared copy of a 1920 book on mediums, ectoplasms and other psychic phenomena by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, which Bacon never mentioned to anyone. As Martin Harrison in his recently published study of Bacon and photography has demonstrated, faked spiritualist photographs made a decisive impact on Bacon’s painting from an early stage.

That there is still more to be learned about Bacon is evident from this book, comprehensive though it tries to be. Faced with so much material, it has clearly not been possible for Margarita Cappock in the time available to follow up every lead. However, it would not have required much detective work to spot that the “Leaf from an unidentified book with black-and-white stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin . . . Date unknown”, has been torn from Roger Manvell’s 1944 book Film. This seminal little paperback includes five pages of stills from the famous Odessa Steps sequence that so haunted Bacon. Further research needs to be done on Bacon’s relation to the silent cinema, with its expressive facial close-ups. It is also tempting to look at Bacon against the backdrop of European avant-garde portrait photography, which, after the mass slaughter of the First World War, lost faith in the ideal of an integrated human face – and perhaps, by extension, in the notion of human identity as something immutable.

Francis Bacon

Gay Art History

tribe October 28, 2006

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Anglo-Irish figurative painter. He was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. His artwork was well-known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.

Early life

Francis Bacon was born in 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, to English parents. His father, Eddy Bacon, was a forty year old retired Hussars Captain, recently turned thoroughbred racehorse-trainer. His mother Winnie (née Firth) was twenty-six and noted for her outgoing, gregarious nature, in stark contrast to her highly-strung and argumentative husband. Francis was cared for by the family nurse, thirty nine year old Jessie Lightfoot. A sickly child with asthma and a violent allergy to dogs and horses, Bacon was often given morphine to ease suffering during attacks. The family changed houses often, and moved back and forth between Ireland and England several times during this period, leading to a feeling of displacement that would stay with the artist throughout his life. In 1911 the family lived in Cannycourt House near Kilcullen, County Kildare, but later moved to Westbourne Terrace, London, close by to where Eddy Bacon worked at the Territorial Force Records Office.

Abbeyleix

On returning to Ireland after the War, Francis Bacon was sent to live for a time with his maternal grandmother Winifred Supple and her husband Kerry at Farmleigh, Abbeyleix, County Laois. Eddy Bacon later bought Farmleigh from his mother-in-law, though they soon moved again to Straffan Lodge in Naas, County Kildare, the birthplace of both parents. Though Francis was a shy child, he enjoyed dressing up. This, coupled with his effeminate manner, often enraged his father and created a distance between them. A story emerged in 1992 of his father having had Francis horsewhipped by their Irish groom. By the age of fourteen he was - he claimed - engaging in sodomy with these grooms. In 1924 his parents moved to Gloucestershire, first to Prescott House in Gotherington, then to Linton Hall, situated near the boundary with Herefordshire. Francis spent eighteen months boarding at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, from the third term of 1924 until April 1926. This was to be his only brush with a formal education, though he ran away after several weeks.

At a fancy-dress party at the Firth family house at Cavendish Hall, Suffolk, Francis dressed up as a flapper with an Eton crop, beaded dress, lipstick, high heels, and a long cigarette holder.

In 1926 the family moved back to Ireland, and Straffan Lodge. His sister, Ianthe (b. 1921), recalls that Bacon made drawings of 1920s ladies with cloche hats and long cigarette holders[2]. Later that year, Francis was banished from Straffan Lodge following an incident in which his father found him admiring himself in front of a large mirror draped in his mother's underwear.

London, Berlin and Paris

Bacon spent the autumn and winter of 1926 in London, with the help of an allowance of £3 a week from his mother's trust fund, living on his instincts, simply 'drifting', and reading Nietzsche. When he was broke, Bacon found that by the simple expedient of rent-dodging and petty theft, he could manage a reasonable economy.

To supplement his income, he briefly tried his hand at domestic service, but although he enjoyed cooking, he quickly became bored and resigned. He was sacked from a telephone answering position at a shop selling women's clothes in Poland Street, Soho, after writing a poison pen letter to the owner.

It has been suggested (by his cousin Diana Watson) that the seventeen-year old Bacon may have taken a few drawing lessons around this time at St Martin's School of Art.

Bacon discovered that he attracted a certain type of rich man, an attraction he was quick to take advantage of, having developed a taste for good food and wine. One of the men was an ex-army friend of his father, an uncle, again a breeder of race-horses, named Harcourt-Smith. Bacon later claimed that his father had asked this friend to take him 'in-hand' and 'make a man of him'. Doubtless, Eddy Bacon was aware of his friend's impeccable reputation for virility, but not of his penchant for young men.

In the early Spring of 1927 Bacon was taken by Harcourt-Smith to the opulent, decadent, "wide open" Berlin of the Weimar Republic, staying together at the Hotel Adlon. It is likely that Bacon saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis at this time.

Bacon spent two months in Berlin, though his uncle left after just one - "He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman...I didn't really know what to do, so I hung on for a while, and then, since I'd managed to keep a bit of money, I decided to go to Paris."

Bacon then spent the next year and a half in Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin, pianist and connoisseur, at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of his own need to learn the French language, Bacon lived for three months with Madame Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly. At the Château de Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents, a painting to which he was often to refer in his own later work.

From Chantilly Bacon went to an exhibition that was largely to inspire him to take up painting, a 1927 exhibition of 106 drawings by Picasso at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris. His interest aroused he often took the train into Paris five or more times a week to see similar shows.

Bacon saw Abel Gance's epic silent film Napoléon at the Paris Opéra when it premiered in April 1927. From the autumn of 1927, Bacon stayed at the Paris Hôtel Delambre in Montparnasse.

1930s

Bacon returned to London in late 1928 or early 1929, and started work as an interior designer. He took a studio in a converted garage, 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, and shared the upper floor with Eric Alden (who was later to become his first collector) and his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot.

In the first issue of Cahiers d'Art for 1929, Bacon saw Picasso's painted biomorphic figures, reproduced in an article by editor Christian Zervos: Picasso à Dinard, Été 1928. (Likely to have been bought either from Zwemmers bookshop, on the Charing Cross Road, or in Paris.) The 1927 show at Rosenberg's in Paris had been of Neo-classical drawings, and it was the 1928 Les Baigneuses and Le Baiser in Cahiers d'Art, that gave Bacon his direction as a painter.

Bacon was befriended by Geoffrey Gilbey, then the racing correspondent for the Daily Express, and for a time worked as his racing secretary. Gilbey had a house in Ormonde Gate, Chelsea.

Bacon advertised himself as a "gentleman's companion" in The Times, on the front page (then reserved for personal messages and insertions).[4] Among the many answers carefully vetted by Nanny Lightfoot was one from an elderly cousin of Douglas Cooper, at that time owner of one of the finest collection of modern art in England. The gentleman, having paid Bacon for his services, found him part-time work as a telephone operator in a London club and further sought Cooper's help in promoting Bacon's developing skill as a designer of furniture and interiors. Cooper also commissioned a desk from Bacon in battleship grey around this time.

In 1929 he met Eric Hall at the Bath Club, Dover Street, London, where Bacon was working at the telephone exchange. Hall (who was general manager of Peter Jones) was to be both patron and lover to Bacon, in an often torturous relationship.

'The 1930 Look in British Decoration'

The first show in the winter of 1929, at Queensberry Mews, was of Bacon's rugs and furniture (a rug was purchased by Hall), but may have included Painted screen (c.1929 - 1930) and Watercolour (1929), both bought by Eric Alden. Watercolour (1929) his earliest surviving painting, seems to have evolved from his rug designs, in turn influenced by the paintings and tapestries of Jean Lurçat.

Sydney Butler (daughter of Samuel Courtauld and wife of Rab Butler) commissioned a glass and steel table and a set of stools for the dining room of her Smith Square house.

Bacon's Queensberry Mews studio was featured in the August 1930 issue of The Studio magazine, in a double page article entitled The 1930 Look in British Decoration. The piece showed work including a large round mirror, some rugs and tubular steel and glass furniture largely influenced by the International Style, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier / Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray.

Bacon returned to Germany in 1930. A dramatic studio portrait taken of Bacon by Helmar Lerski, a Swiss photographer and cinematographer, probably dates from this visit. Bacon was later to tell Stephen Spender that he had been very impressed by the work of a photographer who had produced striking effects using mirrors and natural light filtered through screens, but that he could not remember the artist's name.

Later that year Francis Bacon met Roy de Maistre, an Australian painter who was to become a close friend and mentor. De Maistre's circle included Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Douglas Cooper.

A second exhibit was held between November 4th & 22nd at 17 Queensberry Mews West. Alongside de Maistre and Jean Sheppeard, Bacon showed four paintings and one print. Gouache (1929) may be the piece titled as A Brick Wall in the hand-list. Painting (1929 - 1930) (probably the work listed as Tree by the Sea) is Bacon's earliest surviving oil painting. Both were bought by Alden. The two other paintings (Self-portrait and Two Brothers) and print (Dark Child in an edition of three) are now lost.

Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in 1931, and was not to have a settled space for some years. Bacon probably shared a studio with Roy de Maistre, about 1931/1932, at Carlyle Studios, (just off the Kings Road), in Chelsea.

Portrait (1932) and Portrait (c.1931 - 1932) (the latter bought by Diana Watson) both show a round-faced youth with diseased skin (painted after Bacon saw Ibsen's Ghosts), and date from a brief stay in a studio on the Fulham Road.

In 1932, Bacon was commissioned by Gladys MacDermot, an Irish woman who had lived in Australia, to redesign much of the decoration and furniture of her flat at 98 Ridgmount Gardens in Bloomsbury. Bacon recalled that she was 'always filling me up with food'.

In April 1933, Bacon moved to 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea (just across Pimlico Road from Ebury Street, where de Maistre had his temporary studio). The studio there was in a converted garage (like the Queensberry Mews West studio), a friend, the interior designer (and property developer) Arundell Clarke, had had his showroom there before moving on to Mayfair.

Crucifixion (1933)

Douglas Cooper, then curator (and part owner/co-director with Fred Mayor) of the Mayor Gallery, in Cork Street, arranged for one of Bacon's paintings, Women in the Sunlight (destroyed without trace), to be included a group show in April 1933.

It was also thanks to Cooper that Bacon's Crucifixion (1933) was reproduced in Herbert Read's book Art Now (opposite a 1929 Baigneuse by Picasso - plates 60/61). The publication was accompanied by an exhibition of the works, in October, at the Mayor Gallery, where Crucifixion (1933) was shown as Composition. 1933.

Crucifixion (1933) (oil on canvas) was subsequently purchased by Sir Michael Sadler (who, other than friends or relations, was the first to buy a painting), and who also commissioned a second version, Crucifixion (1933) (chalk, gouache and pencil), and sent Bacon an x-ray photograph of his own skull, with a request that he paint a portrait from it. Bacon duly incorporated the x-ray directly into The Crucifixion (1933).

Wound for a Crucifixion

At the start of 1934, with the help of Arundell Clarke, who had just taken over the building, Bacon set up a gallery space in the cellar of Sunderland House, Curzon Street, Mayfair, with plans to deal in his own work and organize his own shows.

In February 1934, Bacon had his first solo show, Paintings by Francis Bacon, of seven of his oil paintings and five or six gouaches, at the new Transition gallery. This was to be the only show at the Transition gallery.

All but two gouaches of figures in flight (Composition (Figure) (1933) (gouache, pastel and pen and ink on paper) and Composition (Figures) (1933) (gouache, pastel and pen and ink on paper)) purchased by his cousin Diana Watson were afterwards destroyed by Bacon.

Among these was the 'very beautiful' Wound for a Crucifixion, destroyed despite having a prospective purchaser in Eric Alden, and one of a very few that Bacon was to express regret at its loss.

Two studio interiors survive from 1934: Studio Interior (1934) and Corner of the Studio (1934) (purchased by Gladys MacDermot). Interior of a Room survives from circa 1935 (c.1933 in Alley/Rothenstein).

Bacon visited Paris in 1935, purchasing there a second-hand book on diseases of the mouth containing high quality hand-coloured plates of both open mouths and oral interiors, which both haunted and obsessed him for the remainder of his life. (Bacon had sinus problems since childhood and had an undergone an operation on the roof of his mouth at some stage in the mid-1930s.) He also saw, for the first of many times, Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin in 1935[5], the scene of the nurse screaming on the Odessa steps later becoming a major theme in his paintings, with the angularity of Eisenstein's image often combined with the thick red pallet of his recently purchased medical tome.

In the Winter of 1935-6, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, making a first selection for the International Surrealist Exhibition (which was to be held in London from 11 June to 4 July 1936), visited his studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, saw "three or four large canvases including one with a grandfather clock," but found his work "insufficiently surreal to be included in the show." Bacon claimed that Penrose had said to him "Mr. Bacon don't you realize a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?"

In 1937 (or late in 1936), Bacon moved from 71 Royal Hospital Road to the top floor of 1 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which Eric Hall had rented (and kept until 1943).

Patrick White had moved to London, into a small flat in Ebury Street, in 1936, and, on meeting de Maistre in his ground-floor studio there, quickly fell in love with him. The following year, White moved to the top two floors of the building where de Maistre now had his studio, on Eccleston Street, and commissioned from Bacon, who was by now a friend, a writing desk (with wide drawers and a red linoleum top). White also bought the glass and steel dining table from Rab and Sydney Butler.

Abstraction, Abstraction from the Human Form

In January 1937, at Thomas Agnew and Sons, 43 Old Bond Street, London, Bacon was in a group show, Young British Painters, with Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Victor Pasmore, Ivon Hitchens, Roy de Maistre, Ceri Richards, and Julian Trevelyan. Eric Hall, who was also a friend of Jerry Agnew, organized the show; Agnew's was then known for shows of Old Master paintings.

Four works by Bacon were shown: Figures in a Garden (1936), purchased by Diana Watson; Abstraction, and Abstraction from the Human Form, known from magazine photographs (they prefigure Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) in variously having a tripod structure (Abstraction), bared teeth (Abstraction from the Human Form), and both being biomorphic in form); Seated Figure is lost entirely.

Figures in a Garden alone remains of paintings from 1936, however, a small sketch in black ink on lined paper, Biomorphic Drawing, in the collection of the Estate, at the Hugh Lane gallery, which resembles Abstraction (1936), may be a survivor from this year.

A small self-portrait, putatively dated to 1930 and identified with the self-portrait in the hand-list to the Queensberry Mews show, was exhibited at the Fine Arts and Antiques Fair, Olympia, London in 1998; however, it has been claimed on technical grounds that it dates from 1937 onwards (the canvas board on which it was painted was not available until then, although this has been disputed). Stylistically, the work fits best around the mid 1930s. The work has an unusual provenance (it was kept by Bacon until 1982 and then given away), but the attribution to Bacon is sound (although a detailed technical analysis remains to be done).

On 1 June 1940 Bacon's father died. Bacon was named sole Trustee and Executor of his father's will, which requested that the funeral be as 'private and simple as possible'.

Figure Getting Out of a Car (c. 1939 - 1940)

Bacon, unfit for active service, volunteered for Civil Defence and worked full-time in the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) rescue service. But the fine dust of bombed London worsened his asthma and he was discharged. So, at the height of The Blitz, Eric Hall rented a cottage for Bacon and himself at Bedales Lodge, Steep, near Petersfield, Hampshire.

Figure Getting Out of a Car (c. 1939 - 1940) was painted here but is known only from an early 1946 photograph taken by Peter Rose Pulham (taken shortly before it was painted over by Bacon and retitled Landscape with Car). An ancestor to the biomorphic form of the central panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the composition was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the Nuremberg rallies, (Bacon claims to have "copied the car and not much else.")

Man in a Cap, and Seated Man (recto) / Man Standing (verso) (now separated), both on composition board and from about 1943, are abandoned works. The composition of Man in a Cap derives from a picture of Joseph Goebbels that appeared in Picture Post. A photograph of Hitler from the same issue was the basis for Seated Man, and the more roughly painted Man Standing.

The Millais House studio, 7 Cromwell Place: 1943 – 1951

Returning from Hampshire at the latter part of 1943, Bacon and Hall took the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais' old house and studio. High vaulted and north lit, it had had its roof recently bombed - Bacon was able to adopt a large old billiard room at the back of the house as his own studio. Nanny Lightfoot, lacking an alternative location, slept on the kitchen table. Illicit roulette parties were held there, organized by Bacon with assistance by Hall, to the financial benefit of both.

Now home to the National Art Collections Fund, the Millais house is just a short walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum, holder of a National collection of paintings by John Constable, whose oil sketches were much admired by Bacon. It was also at the V&A that Bacon would first discover and study the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.

The April 1945 show Recent Paintings by Francis Bacon, Frances Hodgkins, Matthew Smith, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland at the Lefevre gallery (then on New Bond Street, London) had two paintings by Bacon - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Figure in a landscape (1945).

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is a key precursor to Bacon's later themes: the triptych format, the placement behind glass in heavily gilded frames, the open mouth, and the use of painterly distortion; the Eumenides, or Furies, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the theme of the Crucifixion (Figures at the Foot of the Cross was the first attempt at the title).

Done in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board within the space of two weeks, Bacon considered Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) to be the true start to his oeuvre - his masterpiece in the original sense.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was presented to the Tate Gallery by Eric Hall in 1953.

Untitled (1944) a variant of the right-hand panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was shown at Francis Bacon: The Human Body, curated by David Sylvester, at the Hayward Gallery in 1998. A version of the left-hand panel: Study for a Figure (c.1944) was among the abandoned pictures in the 1964 catalogue raisonné.

Figure in a landscape (1945)

A photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park was the basis of the other painting in the Lefevre show, Figure in a landscape (1945) which was bought by Diana Watson and, in 1950, by the Tate Gallery (with the support of Graham Sutherland, then a trustee (1948 – 1954)).

Figure Study (1945) was destroyed; Figure Study I and Figure Study II are from 1945 or 1946.

Study for Man with Microphones (1946), was shown at the Lefevre gallery, (British Painters Past and Present July - August 1946), and at the Anglo-French Art Centre, (Seventh Exhibition November - December 1946). Bacon was clearly unhappy with this picture: it was listed as an abandoned work in the 1964 catalogue raisonné, and was passed on to the Estate in 1992 as a slashed canvas.

At some point in 1947 - 1948, Bacon returned to make a second version, Study for Man with Microphones (1947-48) (shown February to March 1948, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Contemporary Painters (last (monochrome) plate in the catalogue by James Thrall Soby) as Study for Man with Microphones (1946); and from October to November 1962 in Francis Bacon at the Galleria d'Arte Galatea, Milan as Gorilla with Microphones (1945-46)).

Crucifixion (1933) (oil on canvas) was shown at the Summer Exhibition (July - September 1946) at the Redfern Gallery, 19/20 Cork Street, London, and bought by Sir Colin Anderson.

Painting (1946)

If Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is Bacon's masterpiece, then Painting (1946) has a good claim to be his Magnum opus. Originally to be a painting of a chimpanzee in long grass (parts of which may be still visible), he then attempted to portray a bird of prey landing in a field. Bacon described it as his most unconscious[6] work - the marks suddenly suggesting this image - at once magnificent and appalling.
FB:"Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, which was the thing that's in the Museum of Modern Art…"
DS:"The butcher-shop picture."
FB:"Yes. It came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the line that I had drawn suggested something totally different and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another."
- Excerpt from the October 1962 interview with David Sylvester for the BBC.

Graham Sutherland saw Painting (1946) in the Cromwell Place studio, and urged his dealer, Erica Brausen, then of the Redfern Gallery, to go to see the painting and to buy it. Brausen wrote to Bacon several times, and visited his studio in early autumn 1946 and promptly bought the work for £200. (Painting (1946) was shown in several group shows including in the British section of Exposition internationale d'arte moderne (18 November - 28 December 1946) at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which Bacon travelled to Paris.)

Within a fortnight of the sale of Painting (1946) to the Hanover Gallery, with the proceeds, Bacon had decamped from London to Monte Carlo. After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré, Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the town. Eric Hall and Nanny Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of the next few years in Monte Carlo, short visits to London apart. From Monte Carlo, Bacon wrote to Graham Sutherland and Erica Brausen. His letters to Erica Brausen show that he did paint there, but no paintings are known to survive.

In 1948, Painting (1946) finally sold to Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York for £240. Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on Painting (1946) before it was shipped to New York. Painting (1946) is now too fragile to be moved from MoMA for exhibition elsewhere.

Head I, Head II - Head VI

Bacon returned to London and Cromwell Place to paint, late in 1948. Head I was shown at the Summer Exhibition at the Redfern gallery from July to September 1948.

By the end of 1948 Erica Brausen, who had advanced Bacon money for works, left the Redfern Gallery. Brausen had found private capital to start her own gallery in Mayfair. In the spring, a Bacon painting, presumably Head I, was shown at Erica Brausen's new Hanover Gallery (and was noted by Wyndham Lewis in an exhibition review of 12 May 1949).

Held between November 8th and December 10th 1949 at the Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings; Robert Ironside: Coloured Drawings, was in effect, his first professional one-man show (Robert Ironside's watercolours were on an upper floor). A series of six paintings Head I to Head VI, with Study from the Human Body (1949) and Study for Portrait (1949) formed the core of the show with four other paintings by Bacon.

Bacon's paintings attracted the support of Wyndham Lewis writing in The Spectator.

Head I differs from Head II - Head VI in one important respect: while the first is painted on hardboard and dates from 1948 (or 1947-8), the rest of the series date from 1949 and are painted on the reverse of a (commercially) primed canvas.
"well, I was living once down in Monte Carlo and I had lost all my money, and, I had no canvases left and so, the few I had I just turned them, and I found that the, that the, what is called the wrong side, the unprimed side of the canvas worked for me very much better. So I've always used them. So it was just by chance that I had no money to buy canvases with."

- Excerpt from an interview with Melvyn Bragg in Francis Bacon (1985), for the South Bank Show for London Weekend Television.

Head II is, for Bacon, very thickly painted, this was one of very few instances when he had been able to 'rescue' a painting after it had become overworked and the weave of the canvas clogged[7] (as happened with two abandoned works on canvas from the Head series, from 1949, also in the 1949 Hanover show). The arrow, or pointer, motif in Head II is taken from the book Positioning in Radiography by Kathleen Clara Clark, 1939.

Head VI was Bacon's first surviving engagement with Velázquez's great Portrait of Pope Innocent X (three 'popes' were painted in Monte Carlo in 1946 but were destroyed). The Cobalt Violet mozzetta, crimson in Velázquez's painting, may reflect Bacon's use of printed reproductions of the painting. Bacon later said that, although he admired "the magnificent colour" of the Velázquez, Velázquez "wanted to make it as much like a Titian as possible but, in a curious way he cooled Titian".

An article by Robert Melville titled Francis Bacon appeared in the December 1949 – January 1950 issue of Horizon magazine (edited by Cyril Connolly). Melville placed Bacon in the context of European painting and film, comparing and contrasting his work with that of Picasso, Duchamp, Eisenstein and, in particular, Salvador Dalí and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. The piece, along with Reproductions of Paintings by Francis Bacon, was printed between a short story by James Lord and an essay on the Marquis de Sade by Maurice Blanchot).

The Colony Room

The Colony Room, a private drinking club, at 41 Dean Street, Soho, also known as Muriel's after Muriel Belcher, the formidable proprietor. Belcher, who had run a club called the Music-box in Leicester Square during the war, had secured a 3pm - 11pm drinking licence for the Colony Room bar as a private-members club (public houses had to close at 2:30pm). Bacon was a founding member, walking in the day after the opening in 1948. He was 'adopted' by Belcher as a 'daughter' and was allowed free drinks and £10 a week to bring in friends and rich patrons. It was here that Bacon became friends with Lady Rose McLaren.

Bacon met the painter and illustrator John Minton in 1948. Minton was soon to become a regular at 'Muriel's, as were the painters Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Timothy Behrens, Michael Andrews, the two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBride, and above all the sometime Vogue photographer, John Deakin.

In 1950 Bacon met the art critic David Sylvester, then known for his writing on Henry Moore and praise for Alberto Giacometti's work. Sylvester had admired and written about his work (first writing about Bacon for a French periodical, L'Age nouveau, in 1948) but had erroneously perceived it to be a form of Expressionism. Head I, in particular, at the 1949 Hanover Gallery show, was, for Sylvester, proof of Bacon's importance as a painter.

In September 1950 John Minton left for the West Indies for a few months. Aware that Bacon was in need of money, Minton asked him to take over his post as a tutor at the school of painting at the Royal College of Art. On condition that he did no formal teaching, Bacon agreed. So for three months, he was on hand to talk to the students for two days a week.

Painting (1950) and Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) were among the works shown at Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings; Hilly: Paintings, at the Hanover gallery, 14 September - 21 October 1950. Also Study for Figure (1950) (destroyed) and Man at a Curtain (1949) - an abandoned work.

Study after Velázquez

This series of three paintings after Velázquez were painted for the September 1950 Hanover gallery exhibition. The exhibition was advertised as Francis Bacon: Three Studies from the Painting of Innocent X by Velázquez but the series was withdrawn before the start of the show by Bacon.

In November 1950, after Bacon had gone off to South Africa, the Hanover gallery offered on his behalf Study after Velázquez (1950) to the Arts Council, for the Festival of Britain show Sixty Paintings for '51. On his return in May, Bacon again withdrew the painting before it was shown, although it is in the catalogue to the exhibition. Study after Velázquez (1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were sent to his art supplier for the frames and stretchers to be reused. Bacon apparently believed them destroyed.

Study after Velázquez (1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were rediscovered carefully rolled-up at Bacon's art supplier in September 1998 (and shown at the Tony Shafrazi gallery). Study after Velázquez II (1950) (also known as Untitled (Pope) (1950)) is an abandoned work. Study after Velázquez III (1950) is destroyed (but was photographed).

January 1951 Bacon was featured in World Review in The Iconoclasm of Francis Bacon by Robert Melville (describing Study after Velázquez (1950) seen at the studio and on the destruction of the three paintings in the series of studies after Velázquez; Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) and Man at a Curtain (1949) are shown in monochrome).

Study for Nude Figures (1950) (also known as Untitled (Crouching Figure) (1950)), and Figure in Frame (1950) (also known as Untitled (figure) (1950-1)), were among the abandoned paintings found in storage after the painter's death. Figure in Frame (1950), in particular, is a compellingly beautiful wreck, with thin dry-brushed paint on raw linen over a spectral smear and scrapes of oil paint.

By 1950 Bacon's affair with Eric Hall had come to an end - he no longer appears on the electoral register with Bacon and Jessie Lightfoot at 7 Cromwell Place - but he was to remain a loyal patron, friend and supporter.

November 1950 Bacon visited his mother in South Africa. This suited his asthma better than spending winter in London. Bacon was impressed by the African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger National Park. On his return journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica Brausen of his intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then go via Alexandria to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his belief in the supremacy of Egyptian art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in the Spring of 1951.

30 April 1951 Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon's old nurse died at Cromwell Place. Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learnt of her death. Nanny Lightfoot, 'Nan', Bacon's closest companion, had joined him in London, on his return from Paris and had lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West, and with him and Eric Hall at the cottage near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo and at Cromwell Place. Stricken Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment.

After 7 Cromwell Place 1951 – 1953

Bacon took a place in Carlyle Studios Chelsea near the King's Road and, for a time, Bacon worked at the Royal College of Art, in a studio lent by Rodrigo Moynihan.

Head (1951), Figure with Monkey (1951), Study for Nude (1951), Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951), and a series of three popes Pope I (1951), Pope II (1951) and Pope III (1951) were shown at Francis Bacon at the Hanover gallery December 1951 - February 1952.

Study for Nude (1951), which relates in form to Study for Nude Figures (1950), is one of very few paintings by Bacon for which a sketch for the composition survives (in Chinese ink over a photograph in a 1920s Naturist book Man and Sunlight by Hans Surén).

Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951) is based on a photograph of Kafka printed as the frontispiece to Max Brod's Franz Kafka: eine Biographie Prague: 1937.

Pope II (1951) was actually painted first in the 1951 series of three popes (P. II, P. I, P. III) based not so much on Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, but on a photograph of Pope Pius XII being carried on a sedia gestatoria through a fan vaulted room in the Vatican. (The series was hung as a triptych at the 1962 Tate retrospective.)

The January 1952 Magazine of Art article by Sam Hunter: Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror, places Bacon in a British context, of Sutherland, Wyndham Lewis and Sickert (and even, in passing, Aubrey Beardsley). The article also reproduced two photographs Hunter had taken, in the Summer of 1950, of Bacon's photographic source material; Hunter had found the tables of the 7 Cromwell Place studio littered with newspaper clippings, magazine illustrations and reproductions torn from art books, he had arranged them to put the most images in frame and photographed them in situ.

Study for Crouching Nude

Painted in the Spring of 1952, Study for Crouching Nude, the perched figure of which may derive in form from Muybridge (Man Performing a Standing Jump), was first shown at Recent Trends in Realist Painting (organized by Robert Melville and David Sylvester) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from July to August 1952, in place of Study for Portrait (1949).

By the Spring or Summer of 1952, Bacon had met Peter Lacy, a former RAF fighter pilot, at the Colony Room in Soho. Bacon embarked on an affair with Lacy, his first sustained relationship with a younger man. Peter Lacy, a man with independent means, a slight stammer, a ready wit and a violent temper, had no regard for Bacon's paintings. He was, however, a sexual sadist. On being in love with Lacy, Bacon was to say: "Being in love in that extreme way - being totally, physically obsessed by someone - is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy."

Lacy rented a house called Long Cottage, in the village of Hurst, Berkshire near Henley-on-Thames. Bacon was invited to come to stay.

House in Barbados (1952), painted at The Royal College of Art, was, on Lacey's direction, closely copied from a photograph of a house he owned there. This was an unusual commission for Bacon, and he asked his friend, Denis Wirth-Miller, for help with it.

Dog (1952) (also known as Study of a Dog (1952)) (based on one photograph in a series by Muybridge of a walking mastiff and postcards of Monte Carlo) and Landscape (1952) (based on photographs of Kruger National Park) were painted a few weeks before his second visit to South Africa. Landscape (1952) (also known as Landscape after Van Gogh (1952) also has 'a few brush-strokes' added by Denis Wirth-Miller.

Bacon spent some months of 1952 in South Africa visiting his mother, who had remarried and settled there. Again owing a considerable sum to Erica Brausen of the Hanover gallery, Bacon returned to London to paint.

Dog (1952)

Two further studies from the Muybridge photograph: Dog (1952) (de-accessioned in 2003 from MoMA to Gerard Faggionato, presumably to help fund the acquisition of Triptych (1991) from Tony Shafrazi in 2004) and Dog (1952) (in a private collection) were painted shortly after his return from South Africa.

Elephant Fording a River (1952), Rhinoceros (1952) (destroyed?) and a series of crouching figures in long grass: Landscape (1952), Study for Figure in a Landscape (1952), Man Kneeling in Grass (1952) were also painted for the Hanover gallery show: Francis Bacon December 1952 - January 1953.

Landscape, South of France (1952) (also known as Elephant in Jungle Grass (1952) (a complete misnomer - there is no elephant, nor is this an 'African' painting)) was also painted at this date.

Figure in a Landscape (c. 1952) - an oil sketch on paper in the Tate collection (the earliest of four given to Stephen Spender in the early '60s) - relates in form to Study for Figure in a Landscape (1952).

Crouching Nude on Rail (1952) (also known as Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail) (1952)), one of the overworked and clogged canvases abandoned by Bacon and recovered by the Estate in 1998, the thickly painted pale cerulean strokes provide an unusual sustained delicacy of hue.

At some latter part of 1952, Bacon moved to 6 Beaufort Gardens, in Chelsea. Study for Head (1952) (also known as Study for Portrait (Man Screaming) (1952)) and Man Eating a Leg of Chicken (1952), were painted in the autumn of that year, shortly followed by Man in a Chair (1952). All have been cut down from larger canvases and have an 'encrusted' texture from Bacon's experiments with mixing sand with the paint.

These three were sold privately in December 1952 to Helen Lessore of the Beaux-Arts gallery, London, for ready cash, with David Sylvester acting as Bacon's agent (with a 20% commission). The Hanover's advances were too modest for Bacon's needs, so these unofficial sales (negotiated by Sylvester) to friends or to rival galleries such as the Mayor, Beaux-Arts or the Redfern, were quite frequent between 1953 and 1955.

Eric Hall bought Dog (1952), (the first of the three) from the Hanover on New Year's Eve 1952 with instructions for it to be delivered to the Tate gallery. The second in the series was bought for MoMA in 1953.

Study of a Nude (1952–1953)

Study for a Portrait (1952), was shown in January at the New Year Exhibition 1953 at the Leicester galleries, London along with Study of a Head (1952) (also known as Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope (1952)), which was shown as Study for a Pope.

There were two other pictures in this series of (four) head and shoulder studies: Study of a Head (1952), and Study for a Portrait (1952) (also known as Study for a Portrait of a Man in Blue (1952)). The first three of the series are 'Papal' portraits with zucchetto, open mouth and pince-nez deriving from a film still of the nurse in the Odessa Steps sequence of The Battleship Potemkin. The last may have been painted prior to his second visit to Africa, and may be of Peter Lacey.

Study of a Nude (1952–1953) (also known as Study from the Human Body) was started in December 1952 and completed in January 1953. The figure derives from one of a Muybridge series of a man preparing for a standing high jump. Uniquely among the paintings the figure is painted one-eighth life-size, rather than the almost unvarying range of between two-thirds and three-quarters.

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Completed, and delivered to the Beaux-Arts gallery in February 1953, of Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Bacon said "I wanted to paint a head as if folded in on itself, like the folds of a curtain"[8]. The Titian Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (c.1551-1562) is often cited as an ancestor to this device.

Bacon was 'painting hard' in the Spring of 1953, according to David Sylvester, but practically all work executed in this period was destroyed; only Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and Study for a Portrait (1953) survive.

Man with Dog (1953) was painted in June 1953 according to the Hanover gallery records. The composition derives from the same Muybridge photograph of a walking mastiff as the Dog (1952) series. The Futurist painter Giacomo Balla's Leash in Motion (1912) (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash)), which was shown at the Tate gallery in the summer 1952, was also a source for the painting. 'Bacon - the elephant' is inscribed (possibly in another hand) on the stretcher. It was reported in the 1964 catalogue raisonné, that Bacon had confirmed that the picture has nothing to do with an elephant.

Study for Portrait I - VIII (1953)

In 1953, Bacon moved from 6 Beaufort Gardens to 9 Apollo Place, also in Chelsea. David Sylvester, living at the same address at the time, had four sittings for a portrait that on the final sitting metamorphosed into a pope - Study for Portrait I (1953). This was to be the first of a series of eight (the longest of his career) papal portraits painted that summer, with the remaining seven studies painted quickly within the space of two weeks.

Later life

In 1964, Bacon began a relationship with 39-year-old Eastender George Dyer, whom he met, he claimed, while the latter was burgling his apartment. A petty criminal with a history of borstal and prison, Dyer was a somewhat tortured individual, insecure, alcoholic, appearance obsessed and never really fitting in within the bohemian set surrounding Francis. The relationship was stormy and in 1971, on the eve of Bacon's major retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide in the hotel room they were sharing, overdosing on barbiturates. The event was recorded in Bacon's 1973 masterpiece Triptych, May - June, 1973.

In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards, a young, handsome Eastender with whom he formed one of his most enduring friendships, eventually bequeathing his £11m fortune to Edwards after his death.

Bacon died April 28, 1992, in Madrid.

The Estate

Bacon bequeathed his entire estate (then valued at £11 million) to John Edwards after his death. Edwards, in turn, donated the contents of Francis Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. Bacon's studio contents were moved and the studio carefully reconstructed in the gallery. Additionally draft materials, perhaps intended for destruction, were according to Canadian Barry Joule bequeathed to Joule who later forwarded most of the materials to create the Barry Joule Archive in Dublin with other parts of the collection given later to the Tate museum.

Bacon was disdainful of his early works and destroyed the majority of it. He also destroyed an unknown number of works throughout his lifetime, and fragments of canvases were found in his studio after his death. About the studio, Bacon remarked: "for me, chaos suggests images."

Bacon's legacy

The best-known pictures of Bacon were taken by photographer John Minihan, who photographed him between 1963 and 1991 and developed such a good relationship with the writer that he became, in effect, his official photographer.

Motion picture

Bacon's Soho life was portrayed by John Maybury, with Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as George Dyer (and with Tilda Swinton as Muriel Belcher), in the film Love is the Devil (1998), based on Daniel Farson's 1993 biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Bacon is also cited in interviews with contemporary British artist Damien Hirst as being one of the latter's principal influences.

Study of a Dog 1954 Francis Bacon

Study for Portrait X 1957 Francis Bacon

Portrait of a Man 1953 Francis Bacon

Figures in a Landscape 1956-1957 Francis Bacon

Walking Figure 1960 Francis Bacon

Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (From Muybridge) 1961 Francis Bacon

The Night of March 20th, 1957

David Allan Mellor

Study of a Drawing by Van Gogh 1959 Francis Bacon

Van Gogh by Bacon

Arles, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, 2002

For his contemporaries, in 1957, the very appearance of the Van Gogh paintings seemed to betoken crisis. This was partly on account of their being manufactured at very short notice as oil painting merchandise arriving wet and late for display at The Hanover Gallery for his one-man show. It was certainly the opinion of John Russell, when he came to narrate the Van Gogh series for his monograph on Bacon in 1971. In this he opened a paragraph preceding his treatment of the series with the words, “Bacon has a certain lifelong relish for catastrophe”. A token of this catastrophic contingency and its indexical communication can perhaps be discovered in the drastic corporeal (apocryphal) image of the still-wet paintings being smeared and transferred, as if by monotype, onto the clothes and bodies of spectators at the squashed private view of the exhibition, which was, according to Daniel Farson; “...so crowded with friends and hangers-on that numerous people might have emerged with Bacon’s on their backs …”

Study of Portrait of Van Gogh III 1957 Francis Bacon

This panic but comic communication of an extreme image is typical of accounts of the opening night of Francis Bacon’s exhibition of Studies for Portraits of Van Gogh, at The Hanover Gallery, in George St. London, on March 20th, 1957, as a kind of private view maudit. John Rothenstein, for instance, described the night as a vision of social and cultural mix and mayhem: “The small rooms were densely crowded with artists, collectors, students, and the teddy boys with exotic haircuts and leather jackets (many of them very drunk), who mysteriously arrive as a matter of course, and in considerable numbers, at any quasi-public function of which Francis is the occasion. Above the noise a cry of pain was suddenly though faintly to be heard. Before anybody else had even seen what caused it, Francis had appeared, instantly, from the far side of the turbulent room and was staunching a wound. Some object from the balcony had fallen on a man below and laid open his scalp… (in the) presence of numbers of drunk toughs”. Here is a narrative text itemising transgressive sub-cultures, violence and blood as a framework for the paintings. There were collisions: it was undoubtedly a fateful occasion. This was the moment of Pegeen Guggenheim’s meeting with the wunderkind English abstract painter, Ralph Rumney. Her mother, Peggy Guggenheim then purchased Bacon’s Chimpanzee, which was on display alongside the Van Gogh’s, on Rumney’s advice.

Study of a Portrait of Van Gogh II 1957 Francis Bacon

The Formal Traces of Van Gogh

Offset, allegedly smeared on the proper persons of his beholders, Van Gogh’s bodily presence seems elusive. This essay argues, among other things, that Bacon’s Van Gogh exists as a catastrophic trace: as a ghost and a media trace, so that the cinematic phantom of Vincente Minelli and the mannikin burned in the Gotterdamerung of Bacon’s prototype, the lost Van Gogh painting, destroyed in the last year of the Second World War, hardly appear, can hardly become fully manifest. The solid, but flat, trace of the phantasmal body in the Sainsbury version, is physically cut-out, collaged, part of a carved out relief space of an (historically resonant) ashy figure, left higher, like a human plateau, by Bacon. The formal aspects of the series - its spaces and the rendering of spaces - are neglected in accounts of Bacon’s Van Gogh. But for younger artists at the time, the ones, say, finishing their studies at the Royal College of Art in 1957, the ones engaged in opening up the wave of American and continental abstract painting, it was the formal aspects of Bacon’s paintings which counted. Dick Smith, who would graduate from the RCA that summer, recollected the Van Gogh series in the Hanover exhibition solely in formal terms - as a play of flat but also, paradoxically, volumetric space in the road. Considered in this light, the play of flat but illusionistic angled depth then looks forward to Smith’s own art, after 1960. Bacon’s variety of styles also lent the series a sense of breaking with notions of decorums of unified treatment and unified style. The thick impasto of Bacon’s variants IV and VI in the series, are wholly different to the smooth creamy surfaces of V, with its Diebenkorn-ian pastoral.

Van Gogh vu par Bacon

In the early part of 1957 Francis Bacon made eight paintings based on Van Gogh's autobiographical self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon. Bacon knew the picture only as a colour reproduction in a Phaidon book on the artist. The original, painted in Arles in 1888, had been destroyed during the second world war. Bacon preferred early Van Gogh but he had a special fondness for the picture "the one that was burnt in Germany". In 1957 a solo exhibition of Bacon's work at the Hanover Gallery was looming and "as nothing else had gone right I thought I'd try to do something with it". The Tarascon paintings arrived barely dry and the crush at the private view was so great that Van Gogh was further translated, onto the clothes of an assorted crowd of students, friends, dealers, Teddy Boys and hangers on. The show was not well received and subsequently the critic John Russell, in the first full-length study of Bacon's work, dismissed the Tarascon series as "perhaps the weakest of his groups of paintings".

Van Gogh vu par Bacon reunites seven of them at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh at Arles, together with a couple of later Van Gogh-inspired paintings that have considerably less bite. Both the 1960 variant on Van Gogh's Self Portrait with a Pipe and Homage A Van Gogh of 1985 are recognisably by Bacon. But the 1957 Tarascon pictures are startlingly different - both from the rest of his oeuvre and from each other. Indeed, each can be read as a separate, remarkable essay on the practice of painting.

As Andrew Brighton has pointed out in his recent monograph on Bacon, the scholarship surrounding this late, great artist is still embryonic. No catalogue raisonne exists and the authenticity of a whole body of work - the Barry Joule collection of drawings - is uncertain. Meanwhile the existing literature seems stagily old fashioned - a mixture of plushly written formal analysis and mythologising of the gilded gutter variety. And Bacon poses problems for the younger art historian who will be less easy with Bacon's reinstatement of the Grand Manner, with the idea of Genius, high Bohemia and, even, with the last gasp of Expressionist painting.

This unease characterises David Alan Mellor's valiant catalogue essay for Van Gogh vu par Bacon. Mellor's special gift is for a kind of social history of art in which unexpected connections are made and overlooked figures are reinstated. Mellor therefore tries to normalise Bacon by, for instance, including him in a generalised flight south to the Mediterranean by artists after the war. He discusses Vincent Minelli's blockbuster film about Van Gogh, Lust for Life, which Bacon saw in 1956, his possible reading of Georges Bataille's essay on Van Gogh as Prometheus, the impact of Suez and of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and the conceivable influence of the sculpture of Eduardo Paolozzi. None of this seems entirely convincing, except perhaps the mix of high and low influences the Minelli/Bataille nexus. For instance, Bacon may have been part of an exodus south after the war, but he chose to live in Monte Carlo. One imagines him firmly indoors amongst the velvet banquettes and chandeliers of the gaming house. Certainly his mediterraneisme did not translate very obviously into art. The utopia pastoral of the Midi went unrecorded.

Bacon's Tarascon series has little to do with Mellor's careful cultural mapping. We know, however, that Bacon greatly admired Van Gogh's letters, reread them constantly and kept a copy of them by his bed. It seems that in 1957 Bacon worked from two overt sources - the reproduction of The Painter on the Road to Tarascon and the letters Van Gogh was writing to his brother Theo from Aries, the letters of un suicide. Bacon's description of the destroyed painting as depicting a "haunted figure on the road like a phantom of the road" capture the cadence of Van Gogh's own letters of 1888. But the letters also provide a more practical programme - with descriptions of the summer heat in Provence creating "orange shades like storm flashes, vivid as red-hot iron", with ambitious dreams of night paintings in which he would express "the terrible passion of humanity by means of red and green" and talk of using colour to suggest the emotions of an ardent temperament.

Bacon's tributes to The Painter on the Road to Tarascon are his only plein air paintings, except of course they are not plein air at all, but dictated by a reproduction and some letters. In the background was an all-encompassing knowledge of other painting, aside from the obvious homage to Van Gogh. Mostly this erudition was something that Bacon did not flaunt. Film, documentary photography and modern design are more trackable sources for his art. But the high colour, thick impasto and allusive experiments with mark-making are unique to this series and alone worth the trip to Arles. Thus of the two versions from the Smithsonian, one quotes Daumier and Barnett Newman and the other Asger Jorn. The variants from Siegen and the Pompidou Centre take on Cezanne. The wonderful picture from the Sainsbury Centre honours Van Gogh by tackling the problem of night painting.

Working from a copy of a lost original sounds like a typically post-modern exercise in appropriation. Certainly in his early work Bacon tackled the myth of originality head on by reusing and reshaping a huge range of existing visual material. But he has ended up seeming the quintessential Magus artist, the man John Russell described as "one of the most memorable men ever to hold a brush".

This magnificent small show at Aries suggests new ways of looking at Bacon and should not be missed. For students of the mythology there is a large, glamorous accompanying exhibition of photographs of Bacon at every stage of his life.

In 1957, Francis Bacon rapidly painted a series of five numbered paintings after van Gogh's Self-Portrait on the Road to Tarason, to fill an exhibition. They are exceptional in his work, both as to subject and in the way they are painted. A painter who regularly took reproduced images as his sources, he chose in this unique case the self-portrait of another artist, and used – also uniquely – methods evidently akin to those of ‘action painting’ so selfhood and the practice of painting come into unusual conjunction in these works. Paul Ricoeur's attempt, in Oneself as Another, to overcome the perennial self-other opposition, and his account of a constitutionally unstable self, lacking a ‘core’, are suggestive for discussion of the relationship between viewer and painting, specifically with reference to portraiture.

He presents an alternative to the antinomial theories of the self which have long dominated criticism of visual art, theories according to which visual images mirror, and so crucially help to construct, an ego enclosed against the other; such a model is presumed in Ernst van Alphen's Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. Admittedly, this series of paintings is itself bound to invoke what Ricoeur terms ‘hyperbolic’ concepts of selfhood: van Gogh, through his biographers, became the type of artist-as-genius; Minelli's biopic Lust for Life, which Bacon probably saw, came out in 1956, and in the same year Jackson Pollock, prototypical ‘action painter’ died in a way that contributed to a comparable mythology. Against that, it is important to consider what Bacon does, and to notice the kinds of action, or interaction, tended to us as viewers. In context, the link with cinema assumes a different importance.

Also crucial is Bacon's process of variation. Unlike philosophy, as Ricoeur shows, art can engage in play, freely varying all terms without a view to conclusion – art experiments with the self. Bacon takes selfhood apart, recombines its elements; he separates action from appearance, makes shadows substantial; he evaluates the centre, yet gives it bodily presence. He experiments (as had Velázquez) with the crossing of perspectives, reiterating the sense of arrest-in-passing evident in the van Gogh, as the walking figure turns to look out. In their postural address to us, these (self-) portraits engage us in reinventing versions of a painterly, slippery selfhood, other to itself.

‘Please… just make it go away!’ – New York vs. Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon: The Centenary Exhibition at the MET

Dr. Gerry Coulter, EUROART AND BEYOND, ISSUE 11/WINTER 2010

Casino Confidential

Patrick Burton, EUROART AND BEYOND, ISSUE 11/WINTER 2010

Self Portrait 1971 Francis Bacon

Was Francis Bacon serious?

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

Architecture and Design in the Bacon Era: Texture

Mark Cousins

Francis Bacon's Art of Distortion

Overcoming the Epistemological Break:

Francis Bacon and Jean Baudrillard and the Intersections of Art and Theory

Dr. Gerry Coulter, Euro Art Magazine, Issue 05, Winter 2007

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

Francis Bacon

Bacon's estate

Bacon Estate alleges artist was blackmailed by Marlborough

Court Cuts Gallery's Ties To Francis Bacon Estate

Gallery Accused of Cheating Prominent Artist

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

Hunt for 'missing' works of Francis Bacon

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

By Steve Boggan, The Independent 26 April 2001

Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on

By Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, May 16, 2001

Bacon art payments case can go to trial, judge rules

By Steve Boggan, The Independent May 16, 2001

Unseen paintings may provide evidence in Bacon court case

By Steve Boggan, The Independent May 30, 2001

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

By Steve Boggan, The Independent 28 November 2001

Battle called off between Bacon estate and gallery

By Steve Boggan, The Independent 02 February 2002

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

INSIDE TRACK LAW & BUSINESS:

Handle publicity with great care

Clarke v. Marlborough (15/5/2001)

Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s

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

Exploring the Paintings of Francis Bacon: A Series

Exploring Francis Bacon: Violence of Reality Part I

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

Abstract:

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

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

Notes

An offbeat homage to an unlikely pair

Francis Bacon embalmed

VAN GOGH VU PAR BACON

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