Want your stolen portrait back? Bring us £100,000 cash, gangsters told artist
IT IS one of the art world’s great unsolved mysteries – the daring theft of Lucian Freud’s portrait of fellow artist Francis Bacon.
The masterpiece, Portrait Of Francis Bacon, disappeared without trace after it was removed from its wire frame and spirited out of Berlin’s National Gallery 30 years ago.
But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Bacon received a ransom demand a year later, in 1989, and was apparently poised to recover the work – only for the operation to be wrecked by a police blunder.
Barry Joule, Bacon’s close friend and neighbour in London’s South Kensington, has now revealed that the artist received a phone call in his studio from ‘a tough-sounding East End man, probably an associate of the Krays. During the 1960s, Bacon fraternised with gangsters, among them Ronnie Kray.
Joule recalls: ‘[The gangster] told him, “If you want to get yer face picture back, get £100k together and wait by the phone for a call at noon exactly.’’’
Bacon called Joule, who collected him from his studio and drove him to his flat. Even though he didn’t own the painting, Bacon panicked and stuffed £140,000 into a satchel, reappearing ‘sweating and nervous’. They argued over whether to contact police but Bacon was ‘dead set against doing that’ because he still felt aggrieved by a 1968 drugs bust involving his then-lover, George Dyer.
Instead he alerted security at the Tate gallery, which had bought the picture in 1952 from Freud and had loaned it to the German museum – from where it was stolen in 1988.
Then they went back to the studio to await the noon call, but it never came. Leaving the studio hours later the two men spotted ‘three undercover policemen’ in a Ford Fiesta.
Joule said: ‘If it wasn’t for policemen sitting in their car, Francis might have got the painting back.’
The 7in x 5in oil on copper was one of the few Freud paintings Bacon really liked, so much so he kept a photograph of it in his kitchen.
Although the Tate has never claimed the insurance money, because it has hoped to be reunited with the painting, Bacon, who died in 1992, was more pessimistic. ‘Most likely it was burnt,’ he is on record as saying.
The Tate continues to list the painting in its catalogue, simply noting ‘not on display’.
In 2004, Joule gave the Tate 1,200 Bacon sketches, worth about £20m. He kept about 120 sketches, and he is lending some to an exhibition in Italy, at the Foundation Sorrento museum, in Sorrento, which opens today and runs until October 21.