Some places define the spirit of their times. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Soho was the creative core of London life. More specifically, The Colony Room Club and the French House on Dean Street buzzed with artists, writers, idealists, thinkers, and just plain drinkers. A similar but more political and journalistic crew gathered at The Coach & Horses on nearby Greek Street.
Some patrons sipped away their inspiration, but others found their own in the eclectic company. Jazz legend George Melly was a regular in The Colony Room, and the day after the club’s opening, Francis Bacon walked in. Liking what she saw, owner Muriel Belcher offered him £10 a week and free drinks to bring in friends and patrons. No wonder he always drank champagne. Scandals brewed, but so, too, did truly groundbreaking, game-changing art. For more than two decades, Michael Hoppen, founder of the London photography gallery that bears his name, has been tracking down photographic and other material from the era, and he will present the trove he has assembled at Independent 20th Century this September.
Vogue photographer John Deakin haunted Soho, capturing Bacon and Lucien Freud conducting their intense, and often rivalrous friendship. There were lowlifes and highfliers. Infamous London gangsters, the identical Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, drank at The Colony; as did Henrietta Moraes and Lady Rose McLaren. Later, the beautiful Peter Beard joined the circle, becoming Bacon’s friend and muse. When Bacon died in 1992, more than 200 of Beard’s photographs were found in his studio. Hoppen himself befriended Beard, going on to represent him for nearly two decades.
John Deakin, Francis Bacon at Roland Gardens, South Kensington, 1967, vintage silver gelatin print, with paint and ink on the surface and verso, 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.5 cm), signed by Francis Bacon in blue ink on verso. © The John Deakin Archive. Bridgeman Number: JDK5317910. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
The cast of characters in Bacon’s circle are the real people behind some of the twentieth century’s greatest studies of humanity, such as Bacon’s Seated Woman (Portrait of Muriel Belcher) from 1961, now in a private collection. The artist would also commission Deakin to take photographs of Moraes, born Audrey Wendy Abbot, from which he painted her time and again. Photographs always underpin these legendary names and extraordinary artworks. “I have been obsessed with Francis Bacon’s painting,” says Hoppen, a photographer himself in the early days. He has pursued the images behind Bacon’s images with a passion he cheerfully admits borders on obsession. A key source for this material is what Hoppen describes as “Bacon’s chaotically beautiful studio floor.”
Since 2001, visitors to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery can see that London studio, reconstructed as a core part of the Museum’s collection following the artist’s death in 1992. Securing the studio for Ireland, the country of Bacon’s birth, Hugh Lane Director Dr. Barbara Dawson tasked a team of archaeologists to map the locations of 7,000 objects, so that the conditions of, and inspirations for, Bacon’s artmaking could be preserved. These objects included canvases deliberately half destroyed by the artist and works in progress, revealing his process and spanning five decades of his life.
There was also a wealth of photographs, many of which are now framed and preserved in the Hugh Lane’s collection. Many more had passed through the studio when at 7 Reece Mews, and Hoppen has been dedicated to tracking these, and more. “One of the most interesting things,” he says of his research, which one might also characterise as treasure hunting, “is how you get inside people’s heads. You drop into these amazing lives. Photographs have a way of documenting them. They are like diaries and, up until recently, of course, you could believe what you saw in a photograph.”
John Deakin, John Minton, Vogue, 1951, vintage silver gelatin print, 14 ¾ x 11 ½ inches (37.4 x 29.2 cm). © The John Deakin Archive. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
A mine of stories, and an eloquent raconteur, Hoppen recalls the precise moment his obsession with the photographs from Bacon’s marvellous milieu began. “I was interested in everything about the photograph, even before we opened the gallery [in 1992]. I had been buying at markets, and online, then one day I was sitting at a Christie’s auction and there was a picture in the catalogue, a portrait of John Minton, taken by a man called John Deakin. I had not heard of Deakin, but I was absolutely fixated by it. That is where the story starts.”
What is it that sets one image apart? “It is one of those things that stops you in your tracks,” Hoppen says. “Like a painting or a piece of music. It connects with what makes you sad, what makes you happy, what makes you jealous, or simply what makes you You. Some people might call it your soul.” That call to the soul kicked off his journey into the underbelly of Soho, where the combination of his genuine charm, and his obvious love of photographs opened doors to an era still within living memory.
Photographer and picture editor Bruce Bernard introduced him to The Colony Room, The Coach & Horses, and the French House. “Bruce took me one day to the French, and said to me, ‘Do you want the interior?’” Gaston Berlemont, the owner, had recently died and had wanted to find a safe haven for the bar’s glorious collage of photos and memorabilia. “So, I bought it. Robbie Coltrane got the cycling pictures, and I bought all the boxing ones. Maybe I am a pugilist at heart.” The sale marked the point at which Soho had fully wrapped its often questionable charms around Hoppen.
“It had something about it,” he confirms with a wry smile. “Something dangerous, but also something totally enlivening. Like Times Square, or the Pigalle in Paris. The lights and the nighttime draw you in. Soho became a stomping ground, and slowly but surely, I got seduced by what Francis Bacon was. And there is that element of obsession,” he admits. “People rarely behave like that anymore.”
Doors continued to open, and Hoppen has tirelessly pursued this extraordinary slice of the past. With it comes a storytelling aspect that goes beyond the images bounded by the frame, and the photographic works from this collection, from the pristine to the crumpled, are vibrantly alive. A few are the direct inspiration for some of the world’s most extraordinary paintings and, with their annotations, paint marks, creases and folds, they carry many stories.
“A photograph is an object. It may be thin, and it may be something you often see behind glass, but it is an object with a huge amount of imagination and creativity and information and history,” Hoppen says. “That is what makes art and photography so interesting. I have always been fascinated, not only by what is in a photograph, but by the possibility of the life that a work of art has.” This he describes as the archaeology of art, and it includes paying attention to the visible clues the paper carries: “the way people treat these photographs, from sticking them in albums to scrumping them up in their pockets, leaving them on the floor. A photograph travels, it moves, it is owned by somebody for a short while, and then it gets passed to someone else. It is that legacy I find so interesting. And with Francis, of course, photography became something completely different.”
John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, circa 1950s, vintage silver gelatin print, 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm). © The John Deakin Archive. Bridgeman Number: JDK5317426. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
Eadweard Muybridge, Plate Number 344. Striking a blow with right hand, from Animal Locomotion, 1887, collotype, image: 6 11/16 x 17 3/8 inches (17 x 44.2 cm), sheet: 18 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches (47.7 x 60.3 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887).
Bruce Bernard, Francis Bacon, Reece Mews, 1984, vintage Cibachrome print, 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm), signed and titled on the verso. © Estate of Bruce Bernard. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
Peter Beard, Francis Bacon Portraits of Peter Beard from 1975-76, Photographed at 7 Reece Mews, London S.W.7, 1977/1998, unique oversized silver gelatin print with white ink, paint, blood, C-type prints, and additional silver gelatin prints, 70 ⅞ × 50 inches (180 x 127 cm), signed, inscribed and titled in ink on recto by the artist, Peter Beard studio authentication stamp on verso. © The Estate of Peter Beard. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
This collection of gems includes Eadweard Muybridge’s Plate Number 344. Striking a blow with right hand, an 1887 collotype print from his famous Animal Locomotion series, a particular favorite of Bacon and a marker of the first time that time itself could be slowed down and movement fully studied. A John Deakin image shows Muriel Belcher at her home in 1963. The charismatic sternness to her face makes it easy to imagine her at the Colony, where, according to Christopher Hitchens, she “almost never left her perch at the corner of the bar.” She evidently left it to be photographed by Deakin, and here she stares down the camera, challenging the lens to do her justice. In The Guardian, Gordon Comstock described the “subtly dysfunctional relationship between the sitter and the lens” in Deakin’s work. In other words, he, like Bacon, had a drive to get right under the skin of his chosen subjects.
Here, Deakin has also caught a rare vulnerability. The left foot appears a little inclined; is the table behind lending support? Belcher frequently barred the alcoholic Deakin from her club, but here she has invited him into her home. Bacon has written Deakin’s name on the reverse of the photograph. Provenance and authorship mattered. In our age of digital reproduction, we may easily forget how photographs from the era would have been hand-printed. Hoppen describes finding a later copy of a Deakin image in Paris. “It was a press image, not printed by Deakin,” he remembers. “It had no life in it whatsoever, and that reinforces my belief that a photographic print is like a piece of music. There is a difference when it is played by a virtuoso.”
John Deakin, Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews, Wheeler's Restaurant, Soho, 1961, unique vintage gelatin silver print, 9 ½ x 11 ¾ inches (24 x 30 cm), annotated in pencil on the verso in an unknown hand. © The John Deakin Archive. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
Several of Deakin’s photographs, such as his portraits of Bacon, were frequently a direct inspiration for the painter’s work. In 1962, Bacon used Deakin’s portrait of Peter Lacy for Study for Three Heads, now at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, a famous triptych painted after the death of Lacy, his lover. Other Deakin images in Hoppen’s collection include writer J.P. Donleavy looking as if he has seen into the void, possibly at the bottom of a glass, at The Coach & Horses in 1960. There is a portrait of Bacon looking relaxed at Roland Gardens in South Kensington in 1976, and the glorious, and gloriously much-handled (we cannot forget whose hands these would have been), group portrait at Wheeler’s Restaurant in Soho in 1963.
Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews are sitting down to lunch in the long since closed oyster bar on Old Compton Street. A bottle of champagne occupies center stage, as does Bacon, too, presiding. Auerbach looks full of mischief, while Freud, the only one to wear a tie, looks patrician, serious. Two tables have been pushed haphazardly together. There are checked napkins, glasses, an untouched baguette. Freud and Bacon would run tabs at the restaurant, and owner Bernard Walsh once asked the artists to paint portraits of one another. Bacon painted Freud, but Freud painted Walsh (Portrait of a Man, 1955).
Peter Beard, Francis Bacon at 7 Reece Mews, London, During the “Dead Elephant Interviews”, March 1972/2005, unique oversized silver gelatin print variously inscribed with ink and with collage, 44 ½ x 36 ½ inches (113 x 92.6 cm), signed recto and verso in ink, artist’s studio wet stamp on verso. © The Estate of Peter Beard. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
Bacon first met Peter Beard, an American photographer, artist and writer in the mid-1960s, and the legacy of their friendship includes Bacon’s nine major paintings of Beard, as well as many more in which Beard’s striking profile haunts the canvas. The pair also corresponded, sending marked-up and annotated postcards to each other. One of these, from Arles, features a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh, painted over by Beard in red, as if transubstantiated in blood or wine. In extraordinary detail, Beard has picked out images of faces, animals, and limbs in Van Gogh’s background brushstrokes in ways that recall the markings by monks in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, such as the famous and otherworldly Book of Kells.
A collage by Beard, Francis Bacon at 7 Reece Mews, London, 1972/2005, gives a multi-layered insight into the pair’s friendship, Bacon’s process, and the workings of Beard’s mind, which was clearly both visual and verbal. Bacon, perhaps inadvertently in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker, is central, while around him, creating the frame, are a series of Beard’s images of African wildlife, dead and alive, ephemera from Bacon’s studio (sketchbooks, contact sheets, studies for paintings), and a handwritten text by Beard below. This forms part of the Dead Elephant Interviews, a series of conversations shared by the pair in 1972 with critic David Sylvester. As Hoppen notes, Bacon was fascinated by Beard’s “wild obsession with the fragility of nature, as seen through his lens of life and death.”
In another Beard photograph, The Last Man on Earth, Francis Bacon at 7 Reece Mews, 1974/1975, Bacon looks through his paint-marked studio door, as if surprised by a sound within. To the left stands a large canvas that no longer survives (Beard annotated some other prints with the information that it had been destroyed, presumably by Bacon). More canvasses lean at crazy angles on either side. Intimacy and immediacy exist here, and yet also an essential timelessness. Eras bleed into one another. Hoppen himself remembers seeing Bacon, out and about in London’s South Kensington—where Bacon lived and close to Hoppen’s own home—his long leather coat, purple-brown, flapping in the wind, an image held, vibrant in Hoppen’s mind, rather than as a smartphone snap.
Peter Beard, The Last Man on Earth, Francis Bacon at 7 Reece Mews, 1974/1975, vintage silver gelatin print from the floor of Francis Bacon's studio, 9 ⅝ x 14 ½ inches (24.5 x 36.8 cm), inscribed on the verso by Francis Bacon. © The Estate of Peter Beard. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.
“Our ability to disseminate, understand, reconfigure, talk about, and edit photographs is something that people do very naturally today,” Hoppen says, considering the changes brought about by technology. “The downside has been that people look too quickly. It is like looking at film, where the edits are very quick. Look at older films—these lovely long shots allow you to genuinely become involved. Pathetic perfection is the last thing I am after,” he concludes. “I am after an emotional excellence. Life, with all its rough edges, all its faults, is what makes living interesting. That is where the treasure lies.”
Based in Dublin, Gemma Tipton is a writer on contemporary art and culture. She writes for The Irish Times and other Irish and international publications. An author and editor of books on art and culture, she has also worked as an independent curator.
