RCEWA – A Painted Screen by Francis Bacon

Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the screen meets Waverley criteria on, two and three.

Further Information

The ‘Applicant’s statement’ and the ‘Note of Case History’ are available on the Arts Council Website: www.artscouncil.org.uk/reviewing-committee-case-hearings

Please note that images and appendices referenced are not reproduced.

Francis Bacon, Painted Screen, Case 28 (2018-19)

1. Brief Description of item(s)

Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Painted Screen, c.1930 Oil on plywood with metal hinges, each panel 183 x 61 x 2.8cm; overall: 183 x 183 x 2.8cm

Francis Bacon is probably the most important British art of the twentieth century, and arguably of any century.1 He is known above all for his triptychs. Bacon acknowledged that these were his most important works. This is his first work in the triptych format, and indeed his earliest surviving large-scale work, and his earliest surviving figure .

Bacon spent two months in Berlin in 1927 and then moved to Paris. He stayed there two years. He was attracted to Art Deco (the great Art Deco exhibition of 1925 was still fresh in the memory) and Bauhaus design and furniture and for a few years made a living as a designer of furniture and rugs. His work was much influenced by Jean Lurçat and Léger. An exhibition of drawings by Picasso impressed him deeply. This three-part screen, made soon after his return to , dates from this period. It has often been dated to 1929 but the recent catalogue raisonné suggests 1930. If so, it would probably have been made in the studio he took in 1930, a converted garage at 17 Queensbury Mews West in South Kensington, which also acted as a kind of showroom.

2. Context

The first owner of the Screen was Eric Allden. Bacon and Allden met on the channel crossing bringing Bacon back to from France in summer 1929. A retired diplomat, he shared the accommodation in Queensbury Mews West and became Bacon’s first patron. He bought a number of works from Bacon, including this screen, which he must have acquired immediately it was finished. By 1930, and still in his early twenties, Bacon was becoming well known. In August 1930 The Studio published an effusive review of his work. He also began painting at this point, under the influence of Australian artist Roy de Maistre. De Maistre acquired the screen from Allden in November 1930. He sold it to Francis Elek in 1968. Elek had come to England from his native Czechoslovakia in 1939 as part of a swimming team and stayed in England when war broke out. Elek bought a number of Bacon’s early works from Allden in the 1940s, and in 1968 managed to acquire this work from de Maistre.

The collection, and this screen, remained little known. Although Ronald Alley published it in his Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, 1964, it was not seen in public until 1994, when it was included in a Bacon exhibition in Lugano. It was exhibited in Milan in 2008 and then the following year was part of a display of early works by Bacon, mainly lent by Elek’s family, at Britain. It remained on loan to Tate, with other works from the Elek collection, until 2018, when it was sold at Christie’s in their Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 4th October.

Provenance

1 Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents; his father worked in horse racing. This was at a time, when Ireland was part of the UK. Bacon went to boarding school in England and always spoke of himself as British rather than Irish. He could have claimed British or Irish citizenship. Eric Allden, London: acquired from the artist early 1930 Roy de Maistre, London: acquired from the above in November 1930 Francis Elek, London: acquired from the above in 1968 Thence by descent to the present owner (on long-term loan to Tate Britain since 2009)

Literature J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, London 1964, p. 26, no. 3 (illustrated, p. 159). H.M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years 1928-1958, New York 1978, pp. v, 11,12, pl. 8 (illustrated, p. 228). H. Johnson, Roy De Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, 1995, pl. 3 (installation view illustrated, p. 21). Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Paris, Centre National d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1996 (illustrated, p. 286). Bacon Picasso: The Life of Images, exh. cat., Paris, Musée Picasso, 2005, p. 235, no. 51 (illustrated, p. 75). M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of An Enigma, London 2008, p. 64. J. Norton, 'Bacon's Beginnings', in The Burlington Magazine, January 2016, no. 25 (detail illustrated, p. 20). M. Harrison and R. Daniels (eds.), Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné Volume II 1929-57, London 2016, p. 112, no. 30-01 (illustrated in colour, p. 113).

(the above details are taken directly from the Christie’s sale catalogue, 4 October 2018)

Exhibited Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 136, no. 3 (illustrated in colour, p. 19; illustrated, p. 136). Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, p. 229, no. 3 (illustrated in colour, p. 85). London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon: Early Works, 2009-2010.

3 Waverley Criteria

1. Is it so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune?

Bacon is one of a very small number of British artists with undisputed, world-wide reputations. He ranks alongside Constable and Turner in importance, and probably above Hockney and Freud. Many authorities would put Bacon in the top three British artists of all time. He is also popular: Bacon shows attract huge audiences. And he was such a magnetic, extraordinary figure, that a group of acolytes emerged around him – the School of London – which itself occupies a major position in British art.

He is known first and foremost as an artist who probed the human condition, in the Godless, postwar, post-Auschwitz world. Arguably his greatest works are his triptychs. He explained his love of this format: ‘I find the triptych is a more balanced unit’. The triptych was a common form in northern Renaissance altarpieces, in particular, and one can see the link between Bacon and Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Rubens’s Descent from the Cross. The tripartite form allowed him a grand format – in cinematic parlance, 35mm as opposed to 8mm. It was also practical: the individual sections of each of his large-format triptychs from the 1960s onwards were the maximum size he could get upstairs into his Reece Mews studio. He only ever saw the finished triptychs when the three sections were hung together at his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art.

Bacon was famously dismissive of his early work: ‘It was awfully influenced by French design of that time. I don’t think anything was very original.’2 Accordingly he destroyed much of his early work, and had a controlling effect on exhibitions, always beginning shows with the works of the 1940s. The early works are therefore very rare.

Given that Bacon is one of the greatest British artists of all time; and given that the triptych was his grandest means of expression, his first triptych is bound to fall into the category of works which would meet at least one of the criteria in the Waverley Rules, and it is my view that it meets Category 2 and 3, without any question whatsoever, and that Category 1 follows, because category 2 and 3 are met.

2. Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance?

It is certainly of outstanding aesthetic importance. The recent five-volume catalogue raisonné by Martin Harrison (no.30-01: vol.2, p.112) rightly describes it as ‘Bacon’s earliest surviving large-scale work and [it] contains the first of his large figures. In both respects, and in being conceived as a ‘triptych’, it anticipates prominent characteristics of his mature oeuvre.’

This is the first triptych by Bacon. Martin Harrison records that Bacon painted 31 large and 45 small triptychs (he does not count Screen among them). 3 He told David Sylvester that ‘So far as my work has any quality, I often feel that it is perhaps the triptychs that have the best quality.’4 The exceptional thing here is that it prefigures his later work. It is in the triptych format, and just as, later, Bacon often showed the same figure from different angles in the three adjacent frames, here he shows a tall standing figure from different angles. There is even the sense of them sliding off the bottom or the picture, as we find in his mature work. It is a little stiff, but for an artist who was scarcely twenty years old and had no formal training as an artist, it is extraordinarily accomplished and daring.

As Christie’s stated, when they offered the work for sale, it is ‘Shot through with the influence of Picasso, Léger and de Chirico, it contains Bacon’s first large figures, anticipating the three biomorphic ‘Furies’ that would inhabit his first canvas triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. Compositionally, its geometric forms anticipate Bacon’s later embrace of architectural framing devices as a means of spotlighting his subjects.’ The catalogue raisonné lists only two other earlier works, both small and minor watercolours with gouache on paper.

3. Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning or history?

ArtUK lists 46 by Bacon in UK public collections. The earliest is Figures in a Garden 1936 which went to the Tate via the AIL system, and the next is the famous medium-size triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, also Tate, of 1944. Apart from

2 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p.68. 3 Catalogue raisonné, vol.1, p.22. 4 David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, p.232. this there are just two of the large triptychs in the UK, both in the Tate and dating from 1972 and 1988.

For all the reasons stated above – Bacon’s undisputed stranding as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, indeed one of the great minds of the twentieth century – this is obviously a landmark piece. In terms of art history, it is slide no.1 for a lecture on Bacon, illustration no.1 in a book on his painting, and catalogue no.1 in an exhibition of his work. It is not a typical Francis Bacon: it is very much rarer than that. It should not be dismissed as ‘furniture’. It shows a British artist at the start of a great career, finding the motif and format that would propel him to global fame.