He has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest British painters of the
20th century. Now he’s also the priciest. This May, Roman Abramovich bought
Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, at Sotheby’s in New York for
$86.3 million (£44 million). It’s a record for a contemporary work sold at
auction.
Behind the rocketing prices lurks a character of extreme passions and
appetites, as well as intense dedication, who lived amid a colourfully
bohemian coterie. Born in Dublin in 1909, from the 1930s until his death in
1992 Bacon lived and worked in South Kensington and drank regularly (and
often copiously) at the Colony Rooms, a Soho members’ club, with his friends
John Deakin, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, Henrietta Moraes and countless
hangers-on.
As Tate Britain unveils a retrospective of Bacon’s work, opening on September
11, we spoke to some of the friends and artists whose lives were touched by
this witty, irascible, charming giant of the art world.
DAMIEN HIRST
Artist
“When I was in that show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, the one with my fly
piece [ One Thousand Years], I got a call from someone at the gallery
who said that Francis Bacon had been in and that he’d spent an hour standing
in front of my fly piece. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, he must have been in and
spent a couple of minutes looking at it.’ But then just recently someone
sent me a copy of the letter Bacon had written to [the painter] Louis le
Brocquy about the fly piece. Then I thought, ‘Well yes, maybe he really did
like my work.’ At the time I just couldn’t take it on board that he might
have looked at it for an hour. He hated everybody, didn’t he? Everybody
except the dead guys.
“I used to see him around a lot in Soho and at the Colony Rooms . . . but I
never met him. I was totally in awe of him. Bacon’s work is all about
belief. He would just go for it and think ‘F*** off’, and just do what the
hell came into his head. I went to his studio one night after he’d died. It
was so strange being inside that weird space, much smaller than I’d
expected, and so intensely crammed with stuff. He used every thing available
to him to make his paintings. He was a real master of invention.”
MAGGI HAMBLING
Artist
“I remember once being described as the female Francis Bacon in The
Art Newspaper. I met him several times but I didn’t know him well. He
was always very charming. We had several hilarious meetings in Suffolk at
the home of Cedric Holmes in a town called Hadleigh. I remember once Denis
Wirth-Miller, the painter, and his friend Dickie Chopping, brought Bacon for
tea on a Sunday with Bacon’s young male friend of the moment. Cedric was
being frightfully grand, entertaining Marjorie, Lady Rowley to tea. She was
the local squiress of Hadleigh. Cedric introduced Bacon and Denis and Dickie
to Lady Rowley, but then didn’t quite know how to introduce the young man.
Bacon turned to Lady Rowley and announced: ‘This is Tony. He is the largest
fireman in Ipswich.’
I also discovered the other day that Bacon was banned from the Wivenhoe Arts
Club. It beggars belief how anything calling itself an arts club could ban
the greatest painter Britain has produced since Constable.”
JOHN MINAHAN
Photographer
“I was a young Irish photographer working in London in the early Seventies and
I remember seeing an article about an Irish painter up on drugs charges at
Marlborough Magistrates’ Court. I was curious about this painter and looked
him up. It was Bacon. Some time later I began to see him in the Colony Rooms
and in the Chelsea Arts Club and eventually he allowed me into his life. He
was a mesmerising man but he could be really cruel to people he didn’t like,
and he didn’t like fakes. He could also be very cruel to Ian Board [barman]
at the Colony, but that was just a pair of nancies tearing into each other.
“I remember one gorgeous sunny summer morning in 1985, I went round to his
place. ‘John, would you like a drink?’ he said as I walked in, and he
offered me champagne, wine, vodka and all that, but I said, ‘No, I’d like a
beer.’ He sat me down and he went out specially to the Europa round the
corner, and came back with a four-pack of Carlsberg.
“I was sitting in his kitchen and I wanted a picture of him there, with the
Vim under the sink and all that. He knew he was somebody special. He loved
having his picture taken by someone he liked.
He’d hated his sitting with Bill Brandt, by the way, because Brandt had
demanded he turn up at dawn. But he seemed to like having his picture taken
by me. He’d preened himself for years in photo booths and in mirrors.”
ANNE MADDEN
Painter and wife of Louis le Brocquy
“We used to see each other frequently when I was working in Paris. We used to
have these gargantuan lunches, always seafood. He liked a lot of meat in his
paintings but never on his plate. We used to go to a restaurant called Le
Duc in Rue de Raspail, and the shells and bottles used to mount up to the
ceiling, and he had the waiters swarming around him like sharks. It was only
later that I discovered that he used to flap 50 franc notes behind his back
to see which waiter would get there first.
“He used to offer champagne as if it was the first time it had ever been
offered to anybody. After one lunch when we’d already drunk a great deal, he
said, ‘Now Anne. What about a glass of champagne?’ We ended up in a
nightclub at 4am. He was marvellous company. Trenchant, provocative,
intelligent about other painters. But there was no point in arguing with
him. He just wanted to put across his opinion. He used to put down Rothko a
lot. I think the demons of self-doubt were at him all the time. He knew it
was there in him but he struggled with trying to deliver it.“I was once
silly enough to ask him about what he was painting at the time, and he said
‘I’m trying to paint a wave, Anne, but it’s turned into a jet d’eau in a
bathroom of the mind.’
“I loved him. He was great company. His manners were impeccable, almost
mandarin, but quite the opposite of course when he was drunk. He used to go
to the Colony Rooms after lunch and continue drinking. Once he confronted a
Scotsman in a kilt who’d wandered in there not knowing where he was, with
the immortal line ‘We’re all queer in here, dear.’ He drank and drank and he
rather liked the hangover. He would say, ‘It strips your mind bare. The pain
empties your mind of any boring details; it leaves no room for anything
else.’ He could get bored very quickly and he wouldn’t mind showing it.
Sometimes he would just leave, saying he had an asthma attack coming on. He
always needed to know that he could escape. He once said he would always be
able to escape, even from Hell.”
MICHAEL PEPPIATT
Author of Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma
“I had started a history of art course at Cambridge and was working for a
magazine called Cambridge Opinion. Someone suggested I should talk to
Francis Bacon. I went down to the French House pub where I hung around and
met [photographer] John Deakin. He told me that Francis wouldn’t want to
meet a student, whereupon Francis turned round and said loudly, ‘Don’t
listen to that old fool! Now, what are you going to have to drink?’
“Our friendship lasted for 30 years. He could talk late into the night about
anything at all. He was a man who was stretched between extremes, a man of
enormous generosity and spectacular meanness and bitchiness, a man of
terrific fellowship with other people and a man who would just suddenly
disappear.
“He had the constitution – physical, nervous and intellectual – to be able to
take all these extremes from within him and to produce these tortured
paintings which were fabulously done. He was a master of paint and of
imagery, of disguise and confrontation and revelation. He pushed himself to
the edge all the time.
“You knew he was consorting with dangerous people. He could live in the gutter
or in the Ritz, but not easily in between. He would go very easily from the
Ritz off to an Arab bar in Paris full of distinctly bad company. I remember
having dinner with him once in Paris when he had been so badly beaten up he
could barely move. But he wasn’t ashamed. He accepted himself and all his
contradictions.”
FRANK BOWLING
Painter
“I first met Francis Bacon when I was at the Royal College of Art in the mid
1950s. I was younger than him and he was encouraging and supportive. We used
to see each other often in the Colony Rooms and in the French House pub, and
he was always surrounded by admirers. He would often buy the drinks all
night, and then we’d go on to a Turkish Cypriot restaurant round the corner
to eat peasant food and soak up some of the alcohol. He would often pay for
everyone.
“Our friendship began to tail off when I began to show some good work. Our
first confrontation was at the Finches pub in Fulham Road. I was there with
a good-looking young man, Joe, the stepson of a friend of mine. I’d been
asked to give him some advice about moving to New York. Francis showed up
and tried to advance upon this young fellow. He’d obviously been drinking
already and he was in his leather jacket and make-up and he frightened Joe,
who stood behind me.
“Francis started attacking me, behaving in a very aggressive way. I think it
was because comparisons were being made between Francis’s work and mine by
David Sylvester [the art critic], and he didn’t like that. He did turn
against several younger artists.
“There is no question about how much I admired his work though. I knew I
couldn’t ever get past Francis Bacon however good I got.”
Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (www.tate.org.uk
020-7887 8888), Sep 11-Jan 4 2008
Mad,bad & dangerous to know! Totally unique,gave his all,heart & soul,warts n all! To absent friends,never forgotten x
Paddy, preston, england
I can't wait to see the retrospective. Bacon was the first artist I was exposed to, with an exhibition in London in the 50s. Nothing nice about his work - it's all pain, suffering, distortion, but wonderfully delineated and totally unforgettable.
Allan, Skipton,
A genius. A one-off. Francis Bacon is the most profound artist I've ever come across. There really as never been anyone like him.
David Harkins, Carlisle,