How Francis Bacon made $5m gift to the Tate to spite his dealer
FRANCIS BACON was so furious that his dealer had sold one of his triptychs to a US museum without consulting him that he cancelled the multi-million-dollar sale by donating the work to the Tate, the artist’s friend Barry Joule has revealed.
Bacon was further irritated by his dealer’s insistence that its title should bear the word crucifixion, when it was nothing of the sort.
He fell out with the late Valerie Beston, of the Marlborough gallery in London, over his Second Version of Triptych 1944, a nightmarish depiction of three howling creatures, part-man, part-beast, tormented and twisting against a deep maroon background. It was a 1988 reworking of his Forties masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion, also in the Tate.
Although the title of the earlier work includes the word crucifixion, the atheist painter told Mr Joule: “I have only ever used a crucifix as a device to hang or surround my figures on … But I have never painted a crucifixion per se. “Right now, I am having a tiff with Valerie Beston … as she insists on using the word crucifixion.”
His paintings sell today for tens of millions of pounds, and they had already reached seven-figure sums when Beston was planning her 1988 sale. Mr Joule, a friend and neighbour of Bacon in South Kensington, is now revealing the triptych’s three-year “torturous route” to the Tate.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “Beston promptly named [the triptych] with ‘crucifixion’ in the title and informed Francis they had a major museum that wanted to buy it.”
The painting would have sold for around $5 million, he said.
“That’s when the longstanding, fairly even relationship between Beston and Bacon broke down. She had mostly governed [him] like a Nazi stormtrooper.” He said Bacon had “let the bombshell casually drop that he possibly would donate the picture to the Tate”.
Mr Joule was at the artist’s studio at 7 Reece Mews when Beston turned up in a chauffeured car, banging loudly on the door. Mr Joule opened the firstfloor ‘hay door’ and looked down on a “furious” Beston: “She yelled up at me, ‘Get Francis here immediately’…
“The grumbling painter eventually appeared. Very agitated, Francis wasn’t about to budge an inch. His round face reddening up, he was furious that Beston had sold the picture.
“In a final twist of the knife,” Mr Joule said, she “furiously screamed the words ‘Remember Zurich’.” That was taken as a threat, a reference to the tax affairs of Bacon, who made regular trips to the city, enjoying the food and visiting friends.
“It was also possibly a place where the proceeds of a painting recently sold could be stashed away in a secret Swiss bank account,” Mr Joule said.
Swiss friends included Gilbert de Botton, a banker and a Tate trustee, who encouraged Bacon’s donation.
Bacon, who died in 1992, recalled that, when informing Beston of his decision, “her tight face dropped like a wet sponge”. She was not invited to de Botton’s celebratory supper for four at Bibendum restaurant in Kensington. When the banker called for the bill, which exceeded £800, he was told Bacon had settled it.
In 2004, Mr Joule gave the Tate some 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio. A small selection, along with the Bibendum bill, are currently on show at Tate Britain until the end of September.