The Book Club: Bacon in Moscow

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🗓️ 19 January 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the gallerist James Birch - whose new book Bacon In Moscow describes how he achieved the seemingly impossible: taking an exhibition of Francis Bacon's work to Moscow in the late 1980s. James tells me how he negotiated between the volatile artist and the implacable Soviet bureaucracy with the help of a suave but menacing KGB middleman; and how, along the way, he nearly acquired an original Francis Bacon painting and nearly acquired a Russian wife.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.
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0:24.0	Hello and welcome to Spectators Books Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of the
0:28.5	Spectator and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by the gallerist James Birch, whose new book,
0:34.2	Bacon in Moscow, describes his extraordinary attempt to take the works of Francis Bacon in the late 1980s behind the Iron Curtain,
0:42.4	the first major exhibition of any Western artist to have happened there since, I guess, about 1917.
0:48.3	James, welcome.
0:49.7	Thank you. Well, nice to meet you too.
0:52.7	To start with, your book's all about Francis Beacon going to Moscow, but he wasn't even the first choice, was he?
1:00.0	I mean, it's a sort of a circuitous way in which it ended up being Bacon who went.
1:04.0	Well, the extraordinary event was that I went to a party in about 1985, and I don't know very many people that's part.
1:11.6	I bumped to this friend of mine and he said, what are you up to?
1:14.6	And I had this gallery and I had sort of 10 young artists that I really wanted to promote.
1:19.6	And I said to him, I'm taking them to New York.
1:22.6	And he said, why take them to New York? Why don't you take them to Moscow?
1:24.6	And I said, how do you do that? And he told me, what you have to do is go to the Soviet section of UNESCO and look out for this man called
1:31.9	Sergei Klochoff, which is exactly what I did. And so I took Sergei Klochoff out for lunch and some other
1:39.2	people. And I showed him in those days, you had slides and sort of odd photographs, and so not like with a computer nowadays. And I showed him this sort of portfolio. In those days, you had slides and sort of odd photographs.
1:44.6	It was very, not like with a computer nowadays.
1:47.6	And I showed him the work and he said, okay, that's good.
1:50.2	And he told me who to write to because lots of people tried to have exhibitions in Moscow
	...

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