Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 27 Nov 2022
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch with Michael Hodges
James Birch’s Bacon in Moscow is the story of how the paintings of the great artist of existential horror, Francis Bacon, came to be exhibited in Moscow in 1988, at the height of Gorbachev’s doomed reforms of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), just a few years before the collapse of communism and the break-up of the old Soviet bloc.
I bought it in a moment of weakness at the start of the year, mainly because I can’t resist books about Francis Bacon, but I came to think it was probably little more than a gossipy account of the yuppie art market at the height of Thatcherism and I kept picking it up and putting it aside without ever starting to read it properly. This week I finally gave it a go.
In all honesty, it is to some degree that gossipy account of wealth and self-entitlement that I feared. But if I left it there it would be to do both it and James Birch a huge disservice because it is also much better and more thoughtful than that.
It is nonetheless a slightly misleading book, however. While it may be about the historic 1988 exhibition, in fact Bacon didn’t attend and Birch was to a large degree sidelined by the wealthier, more powerful and more respectable players — Marlborough Fine Arts (Bacon’s gallery), British Council officials and various Whitehall mandarins, the Soviet cultural and party apparatus and its apparatchiks, and Sotheby’s experts (the auction house’s first sale in Russia coincided with the exhibition).
If the book were only about the Bacon exhibition then this might be to its detriment, but fortunately it is about much more than this. As well as the inner workings of the art world and international cultural politics we also get a glimpse of Soviet life on the brink of its collapse. We see behind the masks of the Communist Party fixers and cultural commissars whose jobs — and perhaps even lives — are held in a precarious balance between Party interests and cultural prestige. Despite their designer suits and Party privileges they are brutal and damaged individuals, some by KGB training, some by military service in Afghanistan, some by both. We see Birch naively falling for an ambitious and talented Slavic beauty, the model-artist-designer Elena Khudiakova. She is almost certainly part of a Soviet ‘honeytrap’ operation — perhaps against her wishes, perhaps not, it is never entirely clear — and while Birch doesn’t marry her as he initially suggests he does ‘sponsor’ her passage to the UK where they live together for a while and Elena enjoys a meteoric rise in the London fashion design and art world, dying at just 58 in 2015.
But most interesting of all, we see Bacon himself from an extraordinarily intimate perspective, because he was also a long-time family friend of the Birches. Indeed, on several occasions Birch refers to Bacon and his two oldest friends Richard Chopping (who drew the iconic James Bond covers for Jonathan Cape) and Denis Wirth-Miller as surrogate ‘uncles’, so close and trusted were they in Birch family circles.
Birch says that in writing the book he drew on extensive diaries and journals that he kept at the time. Given the extent of drinking and socialising that was required to make the exhibition happen — especially in Russia but also in Soho with Bacon and his cronies — it is just as well that Birch had these written accounts to fall back on. He could never have engaged in Bacon’s habitual gargantuan drinking sessions while also retaining lucid and detailed recall.
Along the way, insights into Birch’s own background are sparingly — reluctantly? — given. We find out that Birch’s parents were artists, and that his father at one time served as a High Sheriff of Greater London. One has the impression of a well-off and somewhat bohemian family. I would normally find this whiff of privilege off-putting; in this case I didn’t because the book is so interesting and so well done.
My only complaint is about the physical aspects of the book. It seems to have been made with more of an eye to design than legibility. It is a rather awkward size — almost as wide (7.5 inches) as it is tall (9.5 inches) — and the text blocks are slightly too large and the font size slightly too small. You may be completely unconcerned by these things but if you think they may bother you then wait for the paperback which comes out in April 2023.
Alun Severn
November 2022
Art and artists elsewhere on Letterpress:
The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists by Michael Peppiatt
Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters by Martin Gayford
Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist by Geordie Greig
Quentin Blake: A Year of Drawings edited by Claudia Zeff
Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford
Classic Covers: Denis Piper’s artwork for George Orwell’s novels