"Freud's small painting of Francis Bacon, painted on copper, is a wonderful seizing of another's personality. Bacon's love of sheer style, his fondness for posing, are both evident in this painting - the lusciously long eyelashes, the dropping curl, that very slight upward turn of the lip - it is a masterpiece of human characterisation..."
Michael Glover, Freud: The Art
The Independent, May 30, 2002
In 1952 Lucian Freud painted this famous portrait of Bacon in oil on copper, a small portrait of extaordinary power measuring only 17.8 x 12.8 cm, of Francis full-face looking downwards. Acquired by the Tate Gallery, it was stolen while on loan in Berlin in 1988 and never seen again, despite the reward offered by the Director of the Tate, Nicholas Seerota. Francis Bacon told Daniel Farson he was convinced it was stolen specifically because it was an outstanding portrait of himself: "The thieves knew exactly what they were doing."
Freud first met fellow-painter Francis Bacon in 1945, when both went to stay for the weekend with another painter, Graham Sutherland. Freud said of Bacon 'Once I met him I saw him a lot'; he became the person Freud turned to for stimulus and provocation. Bacon painted a portrait of Freud in 1951, working not in front of his subject but using a photo of the writer Franz Kafka, whose work Freud admires. In the following year, Freud painted Bacon's portrait in oils on a small copper plate, sitting so close to his subject that their knees touched and drew a study of Bacon in conté pencil on paper [Francis Bacon 1952 54.7 x 42 cm
Collection of R B Kitaj--> one evening at his home in Clifton Hill, St John's Wood. The two painters remained friends until the late 1970s.
UNTIL now, Lucian Freud's only acknowledgement of the theft of his portrait of Francis Bacon has been in the way he has allowed photographs of the work to be used.
"Partly because there was no decent colour reproduction, partly as a kind of mourning, I've only allowed it to be reproduced in monochrome," he told The Telegraph yesterday, the first time he has spoken about the theft. "In fact the painting is quite near monochrome - so it comes out quite well, and I thought it was a rather jokey equivalent to a black arm band. You know - there it isn't!"
The theft was very unusual. Most art thefts are committed by criminal gangs who use them as negotiable assets in underworld deals. Generally, sooner or later, feelers are put out for a ransom deal. But in this case, the little picture has disappeared into a void. Nothing, not a whisper, not a rumour, has been heard of its whereabouts.
Freud speculates that it might have been taken by a Francis Bacon fan, since Bacon is highly regarded in Germany. "I wonder whether it was taken by a student because it was stolen when the gallery was full of students. Also, for a student to take a small picture is not that odd, is it?"
The Colony Room 1 (1962) by Michael Andrews
He remembers painting the portrait, nearly half a century ago. "I saw a lot of him at that time and we were very friendly, so it was natural for me to paint him." Freud and Bacon are to be seen in close conversation, for example, in Michael Andrews's group portrait at the famous Soho drinking club The Colony Room, painted in 1962 (which will be included in the Michael Andrews exhibition at the Tate, opening next month). "But of course," he adds, "I was pleased that he agreed to sit."
Freud's working methods are notoriously slow, often involving sittings for many months. At that time, he was employing a painstaking, almost miniaturist technique. "In those days I worked with the painting on my knees rather than standing at an easel, as I do now. I always take a long time to paint a picture, but I don't remember the Bacon portrait taking particularly long.
"Bacon complained a lot about sitting - which he always did about everything - but not to me at all. I heard about it, you know, from people in the pub. Really, he was very good about it."
In any case, the result was a remarkable study in suppressed tension. The art critic Robert Hughes has compared Bacon's face to a grenade a fraction of a second before it explodes. Freud, less extravagantly, notes that "I was pleased with it, and he seemed to like it as well". Bacon also painted Freud, but his portraits, less demandingly, were almost all done from photographs.
The idea for the poster comes from Freud himself. "I did a rough sketch. The idea is to have a monochrome reproduction of the painting, with the word 'Wanted' in red, and the reward in red. Then simply the telephone number, to make it absolutely plain, like those posters in Westerns which I've always liked very much."
By a minor historical irony, Freud, a painter now so much associated with London, spent the first 10 years of his life in Berlin. The Freud family (his father Ernst, an architect, was the son of Sigmund) lived near the Tiergarten until they fled to England in 1933. Many of his early memories concern the very area of Berlin from which his picture later disappeared.
He recalls swapping cigarette cards with dealers around the Potsdamer Platz - "certain cards were rare, you could swap three Marlene Dietrichs for one Johnny Weissmuller, that kind of thing" - and falling through the ice while skating in the Tiergarten ("it was very exciting"). He also remembers how he loved the pavement pillars on which advertisements were posted (100 large Wanted posters will be placed on their modern-day equivalents).
So, all that remains to be seen is whether the picture will turn up. Freud would very much like to see it included in the big show at Tate Britain scheduled for his 80th birthday year next year. Some auguries are good. Under German law, prosecutions can no longer be brought after 12 years - so the thief has little to fear.
The reward is generous. And, if all else fails, Freud suggests that a highly unusual proposal might be made to the robber. Would, he wondered, the thief be prepared at least to lend the picture to the Tate exhibition? In an art world that has seen practically everything, that would almost certainly be a first.
In his painting (above), Michael Andrews incorparated eight portraits of his acquintances drinking in Muriel Belcher's Soho club, "The Colony Room." Belcher, the owner of the club, is seen reigning over the assembly in the picture and exchanging the ritual kiss of welcome. From left to right there are portraits of Jeffrey Bernard, at the mirror on the left, facing out of the picture; next to him, looking inward in profile perdu is John Deakin, the photographer of many in the group. Advancing towards him through the group, confronting us with characteristic momentum, is Henrietta Moraes. Behind her, Bruce Bernard, with his glass, looks towards Muriel and the bar, while behind him Lucian Freud's straight dark gaze is the pivot on which the group turns. In front of Muriel, the robust profil perdu of Francis Bacon echoes his friend's; behind him reinforcing his part in the design, Muriel's friend Carmel, meets her glance. Between them the barman, Ian Board, Belcher's successor from 1979 to 1995, oversees and serves the group.
A campaign is being launched in the German capital, Berlin to recover a celebrated painting by the British artist, Lucian Freud, which was stolen from a gallery in the city 13 years ago.
The painting is a portrait of Mr Freud's friend and fellow artist, Francis Bacon, and is considered by critics to be one of the most significant pieces of twentieth-century British art.
A reward of more than $150,000 is being offered for its return.
Thousands of posters will be put up across Berlin to publicise the reward.
Under German law theft is no longer subject to criminal proceedings after a period of 12 years, and campaigners are hoping that this will also encourage the portrait to be returned.
On 27 May l988, Lucian Freud's Portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, where it was on show in an exhibition of Lucian Freud's work. The exhibition had been organised by the British Council, and had previously been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Hayward Gallery, London.
In June 2002, Tate Britain will present a major retrospective of Lucian Freud, which will subsequently tour to Spain and the USA. The lost portrait of Francis Bacon, which has disappeared without trace, is one of the key works of Freud's early career and would be be a signal omission from this important exhibition covering the entire span of Freud's career. The British Council is leading a compaign aimed at its recovery, in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and Tate, which owns the stolen portrait.
The campaign consists of advertising the lost portrait throughout Berlin on a poster devised by Lucian Freud and offering a reward of up to £100,000 for information leading to its recovery. The Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, will hold a Press Conference at midday on Friday 22 June to announce the start of the poster campaign. Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, and Peter-Klaus Schuster, Director of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, will address the Press Conference.
Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in December 1922, the son of the architect Ernst Freud, the youngest son of the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud. Immediately before the family left Berlin in l933, following Hitler's rise to power, they lived in an apartment in Matthäikirchplatz in the Tiergarten district, close to the site now occupied by the Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968. Sigmund Freud emigrated to London from Vienna in l938. Lucian Freud became a naturalised British subject in l939.
Bacon and Freud became friends in the l940s, and Bacon painted a portrait of Freud in l951 - his first portrait of an identified person - using a snapshot of Franz Kafka as his point of departure. Freud's portrait of Bacon was painted soon after, and bought for the nation in l952 by the Tate Gallery. Robert Hughes, in the catalogue of the exhibition from which the portrait was stolen, writes of the portrait:
'A small picture, about the size of a shorthand note-pad, and one whose extreme compression makes it even more compact in memory; one remembers it as a miniature. The thought of 'miniature', with its gothic overtones, was affirmed by the surface: tight, exact, meticulous ... there seemed to be something Flemish about the even light, the pallor of the flesh, and the uniform cast of the artist's attention. One did not need to know it was the head of a living artist to sense that Freud had caught a kind of visual truth, at once sharply focused and evasively inward, that rarely showed itself in painting before the 20th century ... Here the fluent continuity of Ingres' form-world seems to have been refracted through the detailed spikiness of northern Renaissance art, but in no antiquarian way: Bacon's pear-shaped face has the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off.'
Lucian Freud comments: 'Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition at the Tate next June?'
Included in the press pack are:
• Black & white photograph of Freud's Portrait of Francis Bacon, l952
• Daniel Farson's photograph of Freud & Bacon in Bacon's studio, 1953
• 'WANTED' poster to be distributed in Berlin from 22 June 2001
For further details please contact:
Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts
The British Council
11 Portland Place, London W1B 1EJ
Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 3055
email: andrea.rose@britishcouncil.org
