Champagne with Bacon: at the bar with a giant of British art

It was dark outside but, in the lamplit tobacco clouds of the Colony Room Club in Soho, the proprietor Ian Board, his great swollen nose flushed with anger, had hopped down from his barstool perch by the door and was shouting at Francis Bacon with cries like a dog’s bark, his voice rough as a cheese-grater.

Grabbing an umbrella from the back of the stool, he began to belabour the world’s foremost artist about the shoulders as he edged out of the door into the steep, black well of the stairs down to the street. “You can’t f------ paint!” yelled Board at Bacon descending the twisting steps, as lobbed ballpoint pens (kept for signing in guests) bounced off his jacket.

I didn’t know what the row was about. It hardly needed to be about anything. In the 1980s, Ian Board, having begun the day with a vomit and a breakfast of brandy, easily slipped into frenzies of rage by sunset. As for Bacon, he liked to quote the motto: “If you can’t be rude to your friends, who can you be rude to?”

The funny thing was that I had heard Board’s childish insult before, from Bacon himself. In those days, he often came to the Colony Room Club on bank holidays, when halfway respectable people had homes to go to. He was in his 70s, but looked much younger, partly because he retained his hair, which he would sweep back with one hand. He no longer dyed it with boot polish. It was coloured more subtly. He would wear an expensive leather jacket, fastened at hip level, which concealed his paunch.

Daniel Farson, the writer and photographer, said that Bacon looked at the camera with the “slack-jowled vacancy of an idiot child”. He certainly had a funny-shaped head, like a pear with the stalk upmost, his piercing eyes set deeply in it.

As he stood talking, periodically buying more champagne for anyone within range, he played with a sunken and horribly uncomfortable barstool of tubular construction, much like the ones he used to design for Heal’s in the 1930s, although he didn’t want anyone to remember that. “You see, I can’t paint,” he declared one bank holiday afternoon. Perhaps I agreed with him too readily, for he looked at me sharply as though I was being drawn into an ambush.

Bacon was well practised in the art of cutting rebuffs, designed to repel dull interlopers. “It’s too bad that we should be bored to death by your friend and have to pay for his drinks, but now you have the nerve to come over as well, when you’re not invited,” he had said to Farson once in the ebb and flow of the nearby Gargoyle Club.

But Bacon’s joke about his painting – like other games he played to conceal the history of his artistic career – seemed to have a point. The catalogue of the exhibition Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, which will be the Royal Academy’s first show after lockdown, features the canvas called Painting (1946). It was a breakthrough, and from its sale the painter went off with his nanny and a man to Monte Carlo. In front of an opened carcass of meat, a figure grimaces under an umbrella (behind some tubular furniture). The dead beast derives from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, but the central image began as an attempt to paint a bird alighting in a field.

There is also a dissonance between the flayed bodies, screams and horror of Bacon’s paintings and the man’s cheery public demeanour, which made his arrival at a Soho drinking club welcome. “I’m constitutionally high spirited,” he once declared. He often deployed his exaggerated Mayfair cockney accent to comic effect. Once, when picked up by the police very drunk in Old Compton Street, he expostulated: “I’ll have you know I’m a very fime-ous pine-ter.” My old friend Marsh Dunbar, who had known him since the late 1940s, when she ran away from home in her teens, thought Bacon funny and, more surprisingly, kind.

Perhaps Bacon was right to sunder his biography from his paintings. He ruthlessly destroyed evidence of his art before 1944. Certainly to learn that the soft Tory politician R A Butler bought one of the inoffensively abstract rugs by this “English decorator”, featured in The Studio magazine in 1930, undermines the image of unrelenting horror with which he confronted the 20th century.

In fact, Bacon’s art could teeter on the absurd. Someone who pushed it over the edge was John Deakin, the photographer. Some of his photographs of Bacon’s friends, such as Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes, were the basis for the painter’s finest portraits. But Deakin also took a ridiculously camp photograph of Bacon in 1952, naked from the waist up, holding on to two halves of a butchered carcass, a favourite accompaniment on canvas to a screaming pope. I’d foolishly assumed that these were sides of beef, but of course they are too small. They are a dead pig, bacon for Bacon.

Deakin borrowed them, I suppose, from one of the excellent Soho butchers that abounded in the 1950s, such as Hammetts, in the ornate tiled interior of which Jeffrey Bernard (no mean photographer) had, for his book Soho Night and Day (1966), caught the butcher cleaving down through a suspended pig’s carcass, splitting it in two. “If I go into a butcher’s shop,” Bacon said, “I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”

Bacon once told the novelist David Plante that human beings are “nothing but meat”. That may be true in the trivial sense of a painter only being able to represent bodies (or photographs of bodies), but Bacon’s endlessly allusive paintings projected animal screams on to a Velázquez pope and turned Muriel Belcher, the proprietrix of the Colony Room Club, into the Sphinx.

Bacon even talked to me about Aeschylus in the Colony Room Club. “The reek of human blood smiles out at me,” was a favourite quotation. I began to suspect Bacon had something of the genius of Bob Dylan in picking up telling details – in his case from Eisenstein, or from a coloured Atlas-Manuel des Maladies de la Bouche, from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of animals in motion, or from the screaming mother in Nicolas Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents.

Bacon was the one great painter for whom the very human society of Soho was essential. If he had been nothing but meat, he would not have had such trouble in love. The art critic, and friend of Bacon’s, Michael Peppiatt, whose ideas are behind the Academy exhibition, stresses in his persuasive catalogue essay the importance of Bacon’s constant visits to Soho “where complete strangers, loosened by drink and loneliness, broke down as they poured out their deepest feelings and revealed their true desires”. In that state, he suggests, they resembled disinhibited animals.

But were Bacon’s sexual urges his “true desires”? Where does that leave his better self, kindly paying the hospital bills of his beloved Muriel Belcher? By inclination, he was a masochistic homosexual. Sometimes this got him into scrapes that could be recounted afterwards as amusing escapades, as when, on ship to South Africa, his travelling companion Robert Heber-Percy, known as the Mad Boy, pushed all Bacon’s clothes out of the porthole after a row.

The last canvas in the Academy exhibition is of a bull entering the ring. Bacon died when visiting Spain in pursuit of a man he had fallen for. That was in 1992. But the corrida had long formed part of his artistic lexicon. In Study for Bullfight No 1 (1969) a sector of the claustrophobic ring reveals a crowd under a version of the Parteiadler emblem of the Nazis. “Bullfighting is like boxing – a marvellous aperitif to sex,” Bacon had joked.

Yet fantasy had a way of spilling over into “real” life. In 1952, Bacon had fallen in love with the sadistic Peter Lacy, whom he met at the Colony. Their sexual congress was characterised by Bacon as “extreme”. (In Two Figures, from 1953, they look about as happy going at it as the chimpanzee painted in 1957, chained to a baulk of wood.) Lacy would destroy Bacon’s paintings after an argument. As his first retrospective opened at the Tate in 1962, news came that Lacy had died in Tangier. Bacon took it as a deliberate suicide timed to coincide with his success.

In a ghastly repeat, in 1968, Bacon’s low-life lover George Dyer destroyed paintings and set Bacon’s studio on fire while he was away. On the eve of Bacon’s retrospective in 1971 at the Grand Palais, Paris, Dyer was found dead of an overdose on the lavatory at their hotel. The death was hushed up for two days while, with astonishing fortitude, Bacon went through the formal celebrations of his exhibition. Such stoicism, while pursued by the Furies from Aeschylus that populated his canvases, was not at all like the behaviour of an animal, let alone a lump of meat.

In bohemian Soho, it was not, in general, accounted a virtue to be “nice”. In the 1980s, I found it a tragicomedy. The comedy grew darker. Once, Ian Board, successor to Muriel at the Colony, went on an unaccustomed trip out of town. On his return, the police were awaiting him as the train drew in, to ask some questions. There had been a mother with a baby in his carriage, and the baby was crying. Board grew infuriated. “Shut it up,” he yelled. “Chuck the f------ thing out of the window.”

That qualified as a funny story. So might an incident recounted by Michael Peppiatt when he introduced Bacon over dinner to the woman he was to marry. “And what do you like in modern art?” Bacon asked her, with dangerous intentness. She explained that she had specialised in German expressionism. “Well, I simply detest German expressionism,” he replied. “I can’t think of anything I loathe more than German expressionism.”

By the mid-1980s, according to a friend of 40 years, Bruce Bernard, Bacon’s “marvellous good humour” had diminished. He “kept on asking me (and certainly others) what I thought of Lucian Freud’s latest pictures – and didn’t I think that Frank Auerbach had lost his way a very long time ago. It was sad.”

When Peppiatt told Bacon that he was to become a father, Bacon said: “I just hope that if it’s a monster or something, or even if the thing doesn’t have what’s called its five fingers and all its five toes, you’ll just do it in and get rid of it.” He grew agitated and tugged at his shirt collar, as he did when excited, and feeling the effects of his chronic asthma. “Do you see? Do you see what I mean? Just do it in and get rid of it altogether.”

Francis Bacon: Man and Beast will open at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, (royalacademy.org.uk) in the spring. Christopher Howse’s Soho in the Eighties is published by Bloomsbury Continuum at £20