bacon and chips paintings

Francis Bacon was a lucky man , a painter who hit pay dirt but not the great painter or genius they say he is, he was interesting but far better artists have achieved not even a fraction  of what Francis achieved , some of his stuff is downrighit amateurish if you have ever seen an exhibition , the best is worth seeing though but its not what they say it is so why do uber-rich Russian tycoons, American hedge-fund managers, Qatar royalty and British football club owners eagerly pay up to $86 million to hang the terrible beauty of a Francis Bacon painting on their wall? Do they identify with Bacon’s lonely, angst-ridden screaming popes and the vulnerability of his solitary, contorted figures?

Why has Damien Hirst, Britain’s richest living artist, spent fortunes reaped from his own diamond-encrusted skulls and sharks in formaldehyde to buy five Bacons for his private collection?

Why does the dowager Lady Jane Willoughby, a train-bearer at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, cherish her magnificent Bacons – especially a work showing two entangled, naked, male figures, known colloquially as “The Buggers”?

From mess to masterpiece … Bacon in his “chaotic” London studio in 1967. Photo: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos/Snapper Media

Australians will finally get the chance to experience the alluring Baconian power for themselves when a major exhibition of this confronting, conflicted British artist’s work comes, at last, to Australia. It will span the five main decades of Bacon’s painting life, from the 1940s until his death in 1992 at the age of 82.

It has taken the exhibition’s curator, Tony Bond, five years to organise, liaising with the Bacon estate and persuading wealthy international private owners, such as Hirst, and major museums to lend 53 treasured Bacons, including five large triptychs.

Bacon is renowned for painting the most raw, disturbing and gruesome aspects of the human experience – be it sadomasochism or the tragic spectacle of his drunken lover dying on a Paris toilet seat – “in the most sublimely beautiful manner”, explains Bond.
Hirst lavishes praise on his uncompromising hero: “He’s up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. Bacon has the guts to f… in hell. They give you the shivers, his best paintings.” His best images, adds Hirst, remind him of “spaces I imagined in nightmares”.

While many regard Bacon as the greatest figurative painter of the second half of the 20th century, those who aren’t seduced by the artist’s fluent, painterly hand and lush colourist skills label him “a monster of depravity” and “the black night of the 20th-century soul”. Margaret Thatcher, while in office, famously called Bacon: “That dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures.”

Bacon lover … George Dyer died from an alcohol overdose in his and Bacon's Paris hotel room in 1971. Photo: John Deakin (circa 1964)/Courtesy The Estate of Francis Bacon

Looking at Bacon’s distorted human figures, grappling couples, screaming popes, hysterical businessmen in suits and grotesque mythical beasts, you might imagine him to be a morose, pessimistic character. But those who knew him describe him as a fascinating firecracker of creativity and a mass of contradictions.

Like Picasso (his first mentor), Bacon’s work is a visual diary of his life. Whereas Picasso, rampantly heterosexual, painted series of his six
female lovers, Bacon, rampantly homosexual, painted series of his six male lovers. (Bacon, like Picasso, was also dangerous to love: two of his broken-hearted lovers would perish by their own hand, as did two of Picasso’s.)

British art historian Martin Harrison has spent the past 13 years working on publications for the Bacon estate, enjoying privileged access to Bacon’s intimates, most of whom have now passed away. Harrison is still poring over diaries, private letters and photographs, and has almost completed a catalogue raisonné of all Bacon’s surviving 600 paintings. “Bacon destroyed probably another 6000, being a ruthless editor of his own work,” he explains. “The standard Bacon set himself was the National Gallery or the dustbin, so failures were slashed to pieces.”

"A sweet-natured, good-hearted young man, who worshipped Bacon" … John Edwards in 1983. Photo: Francis Bacon/© The Estate of Francis Bacon

It’s not possible to understand Bacon, the person and the art, unless you also understand that he was homosexual, says Harrison. “It informs a lot of his imagery and psychology, and also makes interesting his works which have nothing to do with gay men,” he says. “Bacon did magnificent paintings of his women friends – he liked women who were strong-minded, daring and independent.”

The artist’s childhood is illuminating. “Bacon knew he was homosexual from an early age and made no attempt to hide it,” Harrison continues, “though he always regarded it as an affliction, something he had to bear. He was quite posh in his manner, despite his notorious love of a louche lifestyle. Even when drunk, he maintained the demeanour of an Edwardian gentleman, and was at ease mingling with both high life and low.”

Bacon was born in Dublin to privileged English parents. His father, retired army captain Eddy Bacon, trained racehorses; his socialite mother, Christina, hailed from a wealthy family of Sheffield cutlery manufacturers.

Young Francis, an asthmatic, was allergic to horses and his father responded to this perceived weakness by having him regularly whipped by stable hands to toughen him up. Francis’ retaliation was an unexpected one: to initiate his first sexual encounters with said stable hands.

Dark matter … Bacon depicted Dyer’s death in works including "Triptych, August 1972".

When he was 16, Francis was discovered by his father dressing in his mother’s underwear and was banished from home. Handsome and alone, he drifted around London, working in gentlemen’s clubs and having affairs with “men in suits”. He liked wearing make-up and developed a penchant for wearing women’s stockings or fishnet tights under his trousers.

In 1927, when he was 18, Bacon, at his father’s insistence, left for Berlin with a family friend, whose job it was to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Instead, the older man seduced him and the pair revelled freely in the decadent atmosphere that prevailed in Berlin at this time. Soon after, Bacon moved to Paris, where he saw a Picasso exhibition, which changed his life. He decided to become a painter. It would take him until 1944 to perfect his distinctive style, and he would destroy nearly all his early work in the process.

At 20, Bacon began the first of several protracted affairs. “His first two relationships were with older men, father figures, mentors and generous patrons,” says Harrison.

A master’s makeover … Bacon’s Paris neighbours, art historians Reinhard Hassert (left) and Eddy Batache, with the double portrait Bacon painted of them in 1979. Photo: Antoine Doyen

Untrained in art, Bacon began work as a furniture designer in London where, in 1930, he met Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who guided Bacon in painting technique and art history. A deeply religious man, de Maistre was painting crucifixions. Bacon, who was defiantly atheist, painted a ghostly crucifix, Crucifixion, 1933. In a coup initiation, it appeared in Herbert Read’s book, Art Now, opposite a painting by Picasso. (This seminal work, now part of Hirst’s Murdermeprivate collection, is in the AGNSW exhibition.)

A few years on, nascent author Patrick White arrived in London, and became de Maistre’s lover. White commissioned a writing desk from Bacon, later describing him in Flaws In The Glass as having a “beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it”.
Bacon took up with Oxford graduate Eric Hall, a wealthy businessman who left his wife and children to become Bacon’s benefactor. The pair travelled together, enjoying gambling holidays in Monte Carlo, with Bacon painting sporadically.

In 1944, when he was 32, amid the senseless destruction of World War II, Bacon painted a highly original work that shocked the art world – Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. The startling orange triptych depicted three vile, snarling, freakish figures inspired by the Furies, Greek mythical agents of vengeance and justice. Bacon explained the work had no religious significance, but symbolised mankind’s bestial capacity for cruelty and evil. Bacon’s work was now drawing attention, but his challenging images were proving hard to sell.

During the 1950s, Bacon embarked on a series of affairs with younger lovers. Says Harrison: “Francis was sadomasochistic; he often took a fancy to rough trade, and got a sexual thrill submitting to beatings and pain. He began an obsessive love affair with ex-RAF fighter pilot Peter Lacy, who also enjoyed sadomasochism. But their alcohol-fuelled arguments became so violent that the two almost killed each other. Lacy eventually moved to Tangier, becoming a piano player in a bar.” Bacon regularly visited his despondent lover there but, by 1962, Lacy had drunk himself to death.

The next year, the most celebrated and productive era of Bacon’s career began. In 1963, aged 54, he moved into a modest two-storey London mews house, 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. This would be his main residence and studio for the remainder of his life.

Here he lived in “gilded squalor”, as one of his posthumous biographers, Dan Farson, puts it inThe Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. He took a new lover, George Dyer, a handsome, strongly built petty thief 25 years his junior, who he’d paint more frequently, more ominously, than anyone else.

“Bacon was attracted to underworld characters,” explains Harrison, “who, like the dark side of himself, enjoyed hanging out in sleazy clubs, drinking, gambling and being promiscuous. Bacon loved taking risks, in art and life. Dyer was poorly educated, clueless about art, but worshipped Francis and did his bidding like a pet puppy – to his ultimate peril.”

Bacon kept a disciplined routine. Most days, he worked alone, in silence, in his studio from 6am till 2pm, trusting that creative spontaneity would spring from his unconscious to enable a kind of alchemy on canvas. Work over, he’d don a bespoke Savile Row suit to wear to lunch in an expensive restaurant, where he’d typically order oysters and champagne. Then, several afternoons a week, he’d adjourn to the Soho drinking club, the Colony Room, a haunt of artists, writers, bohemians and fringe-dwellers. Here, he’d hold court, surrounded by a growing crowd of sycophants and genuine admirers, displaying his wit and conversational skills and also, at times, his vicious temper and belittling tongue.

Bacon had the classic genius-artist, sacred-monster personality. Ferociously talented, he allowed nothing or no one to get in the way of his work and was often furtive, selfish, demanding and extremely cruel. He could also be utterly charming and seductive in his generosity. “Bacon would hand out pocketfuls of money to spongers bludging off him, and perversely enjoy this,” says Harrison. “His kindness was as legendary as his scorn and treachery.”

Bacon’s lovers were never permitted to move in and live with him full-time: he purchased Dyer and subsequent lovers apartments nearby and they came to him when summonsed. Bacon never wanted a domestic arrangement. “He hated what he called ‘the billing and cooing’ side of relationships,” says Harrison, “and only liked the sex. Essentially, he was a loner.”

Even as his cachet as an artist grew and he became a multimillionaire, Bacon continued to live in his monkish mews house, climbing the steep staircase with the help of a greasy rope instead of a banister. There was a tidy bed-sitting room and a clean kitchen with a bathtub. On the other side of the landing lay his inner sanctum, the studio that very few entered.

“Bacon hated people watching him work, manipulating paint with his hands and rags, distorting and reconfiguring faces and bodies,” says Harrison. “Subjects of portraits never sat for him – Bacon said he’d feel inhibited practising the injuries he did to them, in front of them. He only painted people he knew well, using photographs for reference.”

The inside of Bacon’s studio resembled a rubbish-filled squat: “Bacon maintained he needed to work amidst chaos,” says Harrison. The floor was smothered in avalanches of books, pages ripped from magazines and newspapers, photographs in their hundreds. “Many photographs were folded like origami models, giving Bacon ideas on distorting portraits,” adds Harrison. He would appropriate reproductions of old masters, in particular Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X, the inspiration for his “screaming popes” series. Paint tubes, brushes, rags, champagne bottles and boxes were banked up, the walls covered in slapped-on paint where the artist experimented with colour mixes.

As Bacon’s success and celebrity grew, he tired of Dyer and tried to buy him off. But Dyer, now drinking heavily to fill his days, was totally dependent on his revered artist.

In October 1971, Bacon was honoured with a major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Dyer accompanied Bacon’s party to Paris but, unable to cope with the melee of dignitaries and admirers that permanently surrounded Bacon there, went on an alcohol- and pill-fuelled bender. “Dyer took a Venezuelan gigolo back to the hotel room he shared with Bacon, but Bacon complained the man’s feet stank, and moved to a different bedroom,” relates Harrison. “Next morning, Dyer was found dead on the toilet.

“Bacon sailed through the opening the next night as if nothing had happened, but Dyer’s death affected him deeply for years to come. He realised that showering Dyer with money to stop his petty thieving had removed his identity and raison d’être.”

Bacon painted three posthumous triptychs of the stark death scene, one of which shows Dyer slumped on the toilet, vomiting into the basin, which Harrison describes as “haunting dark elegies; exorcisms and expiations of guilt. The fluid that flows in the 1972 Dyer triptych seems to represent the life leaking out of him.”

Although Bacon’s carousing at the Colony Club was legendary, the artist had another group of friends who satisfied his hunger for intellectual discourse and appreciation of art. He was especially close to British critic David Sylvester and French critic Michel Leiris.
“Yet even with them, Bacon would avoid discussing any meanings to his work,” says Harrison. “He maintained his only intention was to create a visual shock to the viewer’s nervous system. He didn’t want narrative story to get in the way of the paint. People find this hard to accept, as Bacon’s work seems to invite interpretation.”

Nor would Bacon answer questions on the meaning of life. He believed in living for the moment: “I’m profoundly optimistic – about nothing,” he told British interviewer Melvyn Bragg in 1986. “I just like to drift … from bar to bar, and see what comes up.”

For more than three decades, Bacon had an intense friendship with fellow artist Lucian Freud – until it soured. The senior British art critic, William Feaver, now completing a biography of Freud’s life, says the friendship began in London during World War II, when Freud was 21 and Bacon was 34.

“Bacon’s work was more startling, unrestricted, wildly amazing than that of any other contemporary painter, and Lucian was a huge admirer,” explains Feaver. “Lucian also admired Bacon’s attitude of not giving a damn about high society or respectability, and his courage in taking risks with the law; homosexuality was illegal until 1967.

“Both men were extremely intelligent, well-read, appreciated serious conversation, but also liked being funny and provocative. Both enjoyed consorting with dukes and duchesses on one hand, then carousing with roadworkers until dawn.

“Lucian [the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud] understood Bacon’s complicated psycho-sexual, masochistic side. To the younger Lucian, he was a dramatic, recklessly romantic person to tag along with. But as time went on, things changed a great deal.”

 By the 1970s, Freud was an acclaimed painter. Unlike Bacon, he worked all day and late into the night, his method slow. It would take him two to three years to complete a portrait, always wanting his sitter to be present.

“There was a complete separation of sympathies between the two artists,” says Feaver. “Bacon started to say waspish things about Lucian, and Lucian could no longer praise Bacon’s new work.”

Freud was renowned for his love affairs with beautiful English socialites, yet at the foot of his bed, he always kept a wall-high Francis Bacon painting of two entangled naked men, Two Figures, 1953, known among friends as “The Buggers”. “Lucien said the painting inspired him so much, he wouldn’t let it out of his sight,” says Feaver, “and he wouldn’t lend it for exhibitions.”

Heiress Lady Jane Willoughby became friends with Freud in her 20s. There was talk that she would become his third wife, which didn’t eventuate, but the pair remained dear lifelong friends. Slowly, over the years, she pieced together a major art collection that included works by both artists. Freud died last year, and Two Figures, 1953 now hangs in her bedroom.

Five years after Dyer’s death, Bacon began a new relationship with a 40-years-younger, good-looking, illiterate bar worker from London’s East End, John Edwards. Once again, Bacon showered money on his new lover and bought him an apartment nearby, plus a country cottage. Edwards was devoted to his benefactor, but he differed from Dyer in one key respect.

“Edwards was a sweet-natured, good-hearted young man, who worshipped Bacon,” explains Harrison, “but he wouldn’t stand any nonsense. When Bacon started throwing tantrums or unleashing his acid tongue, Edwards would just say, ‘I’m off now, Francis’ and leave.”
Like Dyer, he had no understanding of art, nor of Bacon’s many portraits of him. Brian Clarke, director of the Bacon estate, says, “The only question John consistently asked Bacon was: ‘Why the f… do you always paint me looking like a monkey?’”

Bacon was now older and calmer and his relationship with Edwards became more fatherly. Besides, Edwards was embroiled in his own long-term relationship with a younger man, Philip Mordue. The arrangement obviously suited them both: Bacon made Edwards his sole heir.

By 1975, 66-year-old Bacon had begun spending more and more time in Paris, where he had a big following. He bought a studio apartment in the Marais district, where he met his neighbours, Australian art historians Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert. “We had some new Brett Whiteley drawings which Bacon wanted to see,” explains Batache. “Whiteley had visited him in London and he liked Brett’s work.”

Born in Lebanon and Germany, Batache and Hassert migrated to Australia in 1964 and divided every year between Sydney and Paris. The sensitive, worldly wise, discreet couple in their 30s were trusted friends of Bacon’s for the last 17 years of his life. Now in their 70s, the very private couple leaf through photography albums in their Paris apartment where Bacon often visited, and speak fondly of their legendary artist friend who died 20 years ago.

Bacon (in his eighties, the world-famous painter, at right) snapped with Sicilian decorator Giulio Ontarini (middle) and with Bacon's final boyfriend (the bearded one) a Spanish banker named Jose Capello on holiday on the Isole Eolie near Sicily. When Bacon died of heart failure in 1992 he was in Madrid against the advice of doctors who thought he was not well enough to travel.  “Francis would arrive from London and show us photographs of his latest work,” Hassert begins. “We’d go around galleries together, looking at paintings and sculptures; he loved ancient Egyptian art in the Louvre. We’d discuss poetry and books – Yeats, Eliot, Rimbaud, Balzac and Proust – over long dinners.”

Bacon and the crucial boyfriend, George Dyer (with sunglasses) in the 1950s. Those were the good times, on the Orient Express. John Maybury made a seriously interesting film about the Dyer/Bacon relationship, called Love is the Devil. With Derek Jacobi (Bacon) and Daniel Craig (Dyer). Bacon's strongest paintings were responses to Dyer's suicide.They’d rescue him from clubs and casinos when he’d drunk too much and begun handing out cash from the wads of it that he always carried in his pockets. “I used to worry someone might murder him for that money,” Hassert says.

The trio would get in a car and drive off for one, two, three weeks at a time – across France to Italy, Venice, Monte Carlo, Germany, Amsterdam, “sometimes to see special exhibitions, or just a single painting,” reminisces Batache. “We’d stay in Relais & Châteaux hotels, drink Cristal champagne, have wonderful meals and talk, argue, laugh, even cry together.”

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, and Tilda Swinton.

A biography of painter Francis Bacon (Jacobi), it concentrates on his strained relationship with George Dyer (Craig), a small time thief. The film draws heavily on the authorised biography of Bacon, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Baconby Daniel Farson, and is dedicated to him.Most importantly, and rare for Bacon in his friendships, the ageing artist opened up about his personal thoughts and feelings, “sometimes to an embarrassing degree,” admits Hassert, “but clearly he needed to.”

Batache and Hassert also experienced Bacon’s explosive temper from time to time. “You knew when Francis was in a bad mood,” says Hassert, “and it was usually when his painting wasn’t going well. He’d drink too much, begin goading arguments, and build to a furious row – again, as if he needed to.”

Batache had written a book on oriental esotericism and spirituality, “and Francis hated that sort of thing,” he says, “and would start screaming ‘That’s your mystic side, Eddy’ and provoke a white-hot fight. Next morning at 7am, he’d be ringing our doorbell, wanting to apologise, pleading he couldn’t remember what he’d said, but it must have been awful.”

Hassert adds: “In one drunken argument, Francis just went over the limit, and I wrote and told him so. He wrote us back a very sad letter, saying, ‘You may not know it, but I am a very lonely person, and I need your friendship.’

“It’s true. Even though Francis appeared to have many friends, there was always a deep loneliness about him. There was also a vulnerability and shyness – and yet he could cut you to pieces with a few words.”

All his life, Francis was searching for his ideal partner,” Batache adds. “He’d say, ‘My ideal is a man built like a footballer, and with the mind of Nietzsche.’ He wanted someone stronger than himself, physically and mentally, who could totally subjugate and master him.”
But Bacon never found his Nietzsche-loving centre-forward. “Francis only wanted a homosexual relationship where he was physically submissive,” continues Batache, “yet he always dominated his partner psychologically. He’d complain his lovers were so weak intellectually.

“He believed there was no such thing as real love, only sexual desire. He couldn’t accept that two people could have a lasting, loving relationship, sharing their lives every day, willingly making sacrifices for each other, out of pure love.”

Nearly all Bacon’s friends – gay and straight – were single, invariably with a trail of broken relationships. “Francis tried to break up our relationship out of possessiveness,” recalls Hassert, “as he also tried to break up the long partnership of his oldest friends in England, Denis Wirth-Miller and Dickie Chopping – out of possessiveness. But he failed. He’d say in exasperation, ‘I cannot understand you two!’”

In pride of place on their wall is the double portrait Bacon painted of the couple in 1979. “We’d known Francis for four years, then one day he suddenly announced: ‘Now I’m ready to paint your portraits,’” remembers Batache. “I had a beard at the time and Francis said: ‘Eddy, you must shave your beard because it’s a mask; I cannot get through to your face’. Reluctantly, I shaved it off. Then Francis said: ‘Oh no, you looked much better with a beard; grow it again.’ So I did, and he painted our portraits in his Paris studio. It took him three weeks, and we weren’t allowed in to see till it was finished. Sometimes Francis would say, ‘Oh, today I’ve destroyed you, Reinhard.’ After he gave it to us, he wanted it back, to distort my right eye more – but I said no!”

Unlike his chaotic Reece Mews London studio, Bacon’s small Paris atelier was immaculate. “Francis slept and painted in the same room, so he had to keep it spotless because of his asthma,” explains Hassert. “Sometimes he’d invite us in for breakfast, and cook scrambled eggs.”

In all their discussions about art, Bacon was often highly critical of his own and other artists’ work, but rarely supplied clues as to the meanings of his paintings. “Francis would say, ‘A painting needs to unlock the valves of sensation inside us’ – both the artist and the viewer,” says Batache. “He’d say, ‘The purpose of painting is not to illustrate or decorate, but to thicken – i.e. enrich – the quality of life.’ Not to lead you on a spiritual meditation – he was furiously against that idea. Often he’d get a grin on his face and quote Macbeth: ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ”

In the last four years of his life, Bacon became infatuated with a handsome young Spanish man, José Capello. “Francis still had tremendous appetite for life, but he was slowing down,” says Hassert. “He’d undergone several operations and often struggled with asthma. He said to me: ‘Sometimes one feels that one has been around for long enough’.” Bacon maintained everything ends when we die, that there is no afterlife. “For quite a time, he contemplated the idea of being buried instead of cremated, saying he liked the image of a skull being left behind,” says Hassert.

In December 1991, Bacon visited Paris for a Giacometti exhibition. “He was bloated with cortisone for his asthma and unwell, but we enjoyed a few days together, and it was the last time we saw him,” explains Hassert. “In April, Francis rang me from his hospital bed in Madrid. He’d gone to Spain to visit Capello, against doctor’s orders, and been taken to hospital with pneumonia. He was worried about cancelling his planned visit to Paris to see us, and I said he mustn’t worry; we’re always here for him. Three days later, I heard on TV he’d died from a heart attack.”    

Bacon hadn’t wanted any memorials, famously instructing the barman at the Colony Room: “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter.” But Edwards, his major heir, was keen to honour Bacon’s legacy, and donated the contents of the Reece Mews studio to Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. Some 7000 items were excavated and reassembled with archaeological precision, along with the paint-splattered walls and floor.

The Bacon estate was established using some 20 paintings that had been stored in the Reece Mews garage and the framers before Edwards died of lung cancer, aged 53, in 2003.

 “Francis never cared about money,” remembers Batache. “He’d say the prices of his works could all collapse the moment he died, and it could all be worth nothing. He just painted for himself, and if others liked his work, that’s luck.”

Bacon’s prices hit US$1 million before his death and, in the decade following, soared to US$10 million. They peaked at US$86 million in 2008 for Triptych 1976, which was bought by Russian tycoon and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.

Other buyers reportedly include Sheikha Al Mayassa, daughter of the Emir of Qatar, who paid US$53 million for Study From Innocent X (1962); British currency trader and Tottenham Hotspurs owner Joseph Lewis, and US hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, who paid an undisclosed sum for a “screaming pope” series portrait.

The Bacon estate’s main dealer, Gerard Faggionato, says he regularly receives requests from vastly wealthy buyers – these days in Russia, Korea, South America, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US and Europe – wanting a specific Francis Bacon work.

“The trouble is these days, most of the 600 Bacon paintings are owned by major collectors and museums, who refuse to part with them. If they’d release them, many would sell today for US$120 million.”

Bacon’s ghost must be shrieking louder than one of his screaming popes at his posthumous fate. How strange that his eerily dignified triptych of his handsome, petty-thief lover, George Dyer, dead on a Paris toilet seat, could now fetch more than $100 million and be hung in the world’s finest art collections. That’s wall power.

As the late Robert Hughes wrote in 2008: “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyrical artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world.”  But to put this idea to rights just check out Otto Dix if you want best 20th century painter of dread .