An unsparing observer of the human condition, Francis Bacon was as unsentimental about death as he was about life. “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter,” the old hellraiser told the proprietor of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den which was Bacon’s second home, if not his first. In his lifetime, the artist reportedly declined honours, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit. “They’re so ageing,” he complained. His friend Daniel Farson once asked if he was pleased that he had secured his place in the history of art. “Oh don’t talk such rubbish!” was the reply.
Bacon had little use for the arts establishment. Despite the lack of an art college education, or perhaps because of it, he emerged self-made. “No one could imitate Bacon without looking stupid,” wrote the critic Robert Hughes. “But to ignore him is equally absurd, for no other painter has set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that surround all efforts to see, let alone paint, the human figure in the age of photography.” Finding little to praise in the ranks of his fellow artists – or the critics – Bacon got on with his singular calling of confining screaming popes and anguished lovers to grid-like boxes, as rudimentary and lethal as gin traps. But posterity has refused to repay Bacon’s snub in kind. Since his death in 1992, the fashionable end of the art market has clasped him to its bosom. Three years ago, his triptych of fellow artist and one-time friend, Lucian Freud, set a record price for a work at auction. Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) went for £89m. And now every last shrieking pontiff and writhing lover has been hunted down and captured between the pages of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, a handsomely bound and presented five-volume box set the size and weight of a fully laden builder’s hod. Bacon is the one in a box now.
A cat res, in the art world shorthand, is an authoritative record of an artist’s oeuvre, to be consulted by scholars, gallerists, dealers and collectors. Bacon’s includes scores of previously unseen and little known works, and seems certain to challenge the established art history on him. It’s highly collectible in its own right: at 1,538 pages with 800 illustrations, it will set you back £1,000. It’s finished in a louring Baconian grey, the colour of a hospital gurney. Although its object couldn’t have cared less it has been produced with great gravity by the estate of Francis Bacon, which administers the artist’s staggeringly successful posthumous career. And it’s the estate, with its geologically deep pockets, that has supported years of painstaking research to make the catalogue possible. “Although the cost is not being disclosed, it probably amounted to several million pounds,” according to the respected Art Newspaper.
Such an inventory would be the work of a moment in the case of a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst. All you’d have to do is access the codes to the artist’s digital cloud and download a fully comprehensive record of every work, including the date, title and perhaps even the names of the men and women who actually made it. But such a neat and tidy solution wasn’t an option with Bacon. He lived a rackety version of the artistic life, gambling, picking up rough trade and shoplifting with his old nanny, like Soho’s answer to Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte. His art, too, involved a surrender to chance, accident and disorder. In BBC footage from the 70s, we encounter the painter at his home in Reece Mews, South Kensington. At first sight, it looks like an early pilot for one of those programmes where hoarders are talked out from behind their stockades of junk. Bacon blinks at the heaps of paint-soaked rags that clutter the place like grape skins in a winery. He says, “I feel at home here in this chaos. Also chaos suggests images to me. In any case, if I go into a new room, in a week’s time, the place is in chaos.”
“Can you imagine Francis Bacon keeping a record of a painting?” asks Martin Harrison incredulously. The editor of the catalogue raisonné, Harrison spent a decade tracking down all 584 surviving Bacons – the ones the artist didn’t destroy. For the first time since Bacon’s scandalising forms left his studio, they have been reunited on Harrison’s pages. At the gallery where we meet – where else but Soho? – he has the exhausted but quietly satisfied air of a priest who has performed an exorcism, and has just heard that a well deserved medal is on its way from the Vatican.
Harrison says the artist left him little to go on. “There are one or two diaries with a couple of lines in them. He’d get them from places like Charlie Chester’s Casino, where they handed out little leather-bound diaries. And like lots of us, by 4 January he’d given up.”
Before Harrison, the definitive guide to Bacon was a 1964 catalogue raisonné, published when the artist still had three active decades ahead of him. By then, Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair had begun to represent him, and the gallery’s administrator Valerie Beston proved to be “an assiduous recorder”, as Harrison puts it. But her ledgers only took him so far. “One was usually searching for paintings which one knew existed. You just didn’t know where they were. Either they hadn’t been exhibited for a very long time, or they had never been exhibited at all. If their owners were middle-aged or older at the time they acquired the paintings, they were almost certainly no longer alive, so the pictures had changed hands. But there were also paintings that turned up and came to my authentication committee that hadn’t previously been recorded at all.”
Harrison discovered that the painter of bracingly uninhibited homosexual encounters had actually produced more female nudes (18) than gay sex scenes (11). And his finds include what may have been Bacon’s “best pope”, which the artist wrongly believed he had scrapped. Bacon was obsessed with Velázquez’s famous study of Pope Innocent X and made variations of it until 1965. He told the critic David Sylvester that he regretted destroying what he regarded as his finest attempt after Velázquez. But perhaps he didn’t destroy it, and perhaps Harrison has found it: a figure in papal purple, legs crossed in a chair or throne, pinioned within a thicket of orange bars and roaring his head off. This pope, painted in 1950, is on the walls of the gallery, one of half a dozen unseen Bacons exhibited to promote Harrison’s text. He says, “Is this his best pope? We can’t tell. All we can say for certain is that this one was lost and has now re-emerged.” It belonged to a group of works that ended up in storage at an art lock-up in Chelsea. “There’s nothing recorded about this but I think Bacon simply forgot about them. After he died, a room was found there with a lot of paintings that he had abandoned.”
Compiling the catalogue demanded the skills of a gumshoe as much as an art historian. “You get on the phone and start ringing people up,” Harrison says. “You’re looking for someone and it turns out there are seven people in Welshpool who have the same name. Or someone would say of a painting, ‘Oh, there was someone in Turin who had it.’ So there was a lot of hopping on planes.” The editor’s labours recall the travails of Norman Sherry, the indefatigable biographer of Graham Greene. For the sake of his triple-decker life, Sherry went everywhere the globe-trotting novelist had been, exposing himself to every blowpipe and mosquito-loud interior. Sherry caught the same illnesses as Greene, and even parted with a length of his intestine. Happily, Harrison can still talk with relish of coming face to extraordinary face with the Bacons he found. “The excitement of getting up close to them is in the ravishing texture, power and energy of the paint, which truly does still turn me on. It’s spine-tingling.”
Though the catalogue raisonné has a steep price tag, it will be made available to deserving institutions free of charge through the largesse of the estate, says Harrison. It is also expected to appear online. “I know someone who ordered three already,” he says. “She owns about eight Bacons. Anyone who owns eight Bacons can afford three of these.” He has uncovered fascinating curios that future biographers will thank him for, including a photograph of Bacon in the unlikely guise of an air-raid warden during the blitz. Harrison’s research has led him to the “unfashionable” conclusion that there are psychological motivations for a lot of the artist’s imagery. “They’re not abstracts, and he’s so devoted to the figure, the human body. I believe things that came out of his own life and experience were crucial to that.”
But mysteries remain about Bacon’s subject matter and motives. Harrison hopes to tease out more about them with an exhibition he’s curating in Monaco next month, which looks at the time Bacon spent in Paris and the Riviera, and some of the artists who inspired him, including Léger and Toulouse Lautrec.
The French capital was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Bacon’s life. In 1971, his lover George Dyer killed himself a few hours before the opening of a Bacon exhibition. Among the painter’s threadbare jottings, Harrison found a reference to the suicide. “George died a year ago today,” he wrote. A new book claims that he tried to hush up the death for the sake of his career, but that’s not how the tragedy is recalled by friends who were with him at the time.
Dr Paul Brass, Bacon’s former GP, told me, “I remember thinking that Francis wouldn’t come to dinner the night of the opening. But he did. I think he just had a feeling that he couldn’t let everyone down, and he had to go through with it.”
On more than one occasion, Brass was roused from his bed in the early hours of the morning to patch up the worse-for-wear artist. “I once found him in a bad way at his studio, and I said you’re going to have to see a plastic surgeon. He said ‘Absolutely not – you can stitch me up now.’ So we lay him on the table in his studio. I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused. He was so drunk I don’t think he felt anything.”
Brass once gave evidence for Bacon in court after Dyer, in a jealous rage, planted cannabis in the kitchen at Reece Mews and called the police. “Francis was a chronic asthmatic, and I was able to show that smoking cannabis would have made him very ill.” Shortly after Bacon was cleared, he left a brown paper parcel at Brass’s surgery. It was a thank you present, a self portrait, which the doctor and his wife sold after Bacon’s death for £350,000. It paid for the home they retired to on the south coast. A Bacon of similar size and quality recently went for £5m.
Brass said, “When Francis was very ill, he would say, ‘You know Paul, when I’m dead my paintings won’t be worth anything.’”
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