WHEN MOSCOW SERVED UP BACON

Profile Books £17.99

Avoracious reader, Francis Bacon would have appreciated the vast number of books that have been written about him since the artist’s death in 1992. Last year alone saw several new volumes, including an 880-page biography. While the painter was as colourful a character as the art world has produced, one wonders what more can be said.

In Bacon In Moscow, gallerist James Birch takes an unusual tack, using the artist as the step from which to trip into a ribald tale of geopolitics and shady deals. This account of staging a Bacon exhibition in the shadow of the Kremlin, just as the Cold War began to thaw in 1988, is an amusing romp that could act as a cautionary tale.

Birch was introduced to Bacon as a boy through his parents. It proved a valuable contact when, years later, he opened an avant-garde gallery on the King’s Road, where his roster of artists included several nudists and a young transvestite potter named Grayson Perry. A Bacon show in Moscow was Birch’s shot at the big time.

Taking Bacon’s visions of twisted torsos and howling faces (Study After Velázquez’s Portrait Of Pope Innocent X, 1953, above right) to Moscow was always going to be an exercise in optimism. Birch is rarely ruffled: ‘From my window seat I observed low grey clouds, military vehicles and a missile launcher armed with two green rockets angled at the sky,’ he recalls.

Birch’s counterpart in Russia is Sergei Klokov, a secret service fixer-cumcultural attaché with a mid-Atlantic drawl that makes him ‘sound like a bad

British DJ’. Moscow delivers exotic and dreary aspects to which Birch brings a Woosterish eye: ‘People hurrying by had ashen complexions and wore badly cut Terylene flared trousers and skirts.’ More attractive is Elena Khudiakova, a vampiric Russian fashion designer.

Bacon was more than just a talented artist, he was a raconteur and a bore, a drinker and a drunk, a generous friend and a shocking liability. And while

Birch hints at these conflicts, he maintains a charitable view of the man.

This book is at its best when illuminating the cultural divides – food, hotels, personal freedoms – and occasional similarities. And the intersection of the dark poetic Russian psyche and the struggle to survive the Soviet system is perfectly embodied in Klokov, a mercurial figure who might have been conjured up by John le Carré.

Whether Moscow needed the show is debatable. ‘We want bacon, not Francis Bacon,’ notes one hungry visitor.