I found a photograph with Garech Browne and Francis Bacon. I've pointed out before, the fact that Tara Browne hung out with art dealer Robert Fraser and befriended artists such as Salvadore Dali. There's a story of Tara Browne, Salvadore Dali, Amanda Lear, and Brian Jones meeting in Paris. We also know
Sir Paul McCartney's interest in art--an avid collector (i.e. Magritte) and his paintings seem to be influenced by styles from French surrealists to English avant garde artists of the sixties.
Gloria MacGowran, Francis Bacon and the Hon. Garech Browne www.alexalienart.com/bacongallery.htmFRANCIS Bacon painting which once hung in the drawing room of Luggala in Co Wicklow is to go for auction at Christie's in London tomorrow and is expected to fetch €7 million to €10 million.
The Portrait of Henrietta Moraes was bought by Guinness heir Garech Browne for his home at Luggala in 1970 and at one stage was the only Bacon painting in Ireland, even though the artist was born in Dublin.
Browne (69), the founder of Claddagh Records and a long-time patron of the arts, was friends with both Bacon and Moraes.
He met Bacon through the artist Lucian Freud. Freud was married to Mr Browne's cousin Caroline Blackwood. Their friendship was strengthened through membership of London's infamous bohemian Colony Club, which is shortly to close down.
Moraes was a famous 1960s model and socialite who was one of Bacon's favourite subjects and the painting, to be sold on Sunday, is one of his first portraits of her.
She was also regularly painted by Freud. Moraes was an alcoholic and addict, and was jailed at one time. She sobered up in later years and lived for several years as the caretaker of Roundwood House, Co Wicklow.
The painting is signed on the back by Moraes, who writes: "For the first time A vision of me by my friend Francis Bacon with Gareth at Luggala 30-6-767 I love y 2 good heavens Henrietta Moraes."
Mr Browne helped secure the Francis Bacon studio for the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin through his friendship with Bacon's former lover John Edwards, who inherited the Bacon estate.
Mr Browne also lent the painting to the gallery. "It was the Edwards family who promised me, with the support of the Bacon Foundation, to donate something to Ireland. This was the most extraordinary gift that this State has received recently," he said.
Mr Browne said the painting is too valuable to insure and keep at his estate, but he is hopeful that a buyer will lend it to an Irish institution to go on exhibition.
"To my mind, Francis Bacon is, along with Lucian Freud, the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century.
"Contrary to what people think, Bacon did not hate Ireland. This painting means so much to me and to other people and I would like to see it kept in Ireland in some form," he said.
The painting was admired by many of the hundreds of artists who have visited Luggala.
The film director John Boorman said: "For more than 30 years Henrietta Moraes has looked down from her Bacon portrait on the walls of Luggala and witnessed the parade of poets (including after her death, her former husband Dom Moraes), scoundrels and musicians that have enjoyed Garech Browne's favour. We will miss her."
The poet Seamus Heaney said: "Garech a Brún has played host to generations of writers, artists and musicians in his home at Luggala, and it was in that magical setting, half way between bohemia and Parnassus, that I met the distinguished Indian poet, Dom Moraes, one of the first contemporary poets I had read."
Interest in Bacon's work has never been greater among the art-collectors.
A record price for a Bacon of $55.465 million (€41.2 million) was paid by Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich in May for the Triptych 1976.
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This is an article which mentions Sir Paul McCartney his wife Linda, and here brother John Eastman. Appearantly they all wrote their names on Bacon's studio walls...Hunt for 'missing' works of Francis Bacon
TheIndependentUKThe discovery of more paintings hidden in the artist's cluttered studio has prompted a legal puzzle
By Cal McCrystal
Sunday, 12 March 2000
The death of Francis Bacon, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th-century artist, is proving as controversial as his life. As art experts struggle to sort out and catalogue the cluttered contents of his London studio, lawyers are investigating the whereabouts of Bacon paintings claimed by his estate and willed in their entirety to John Edwards, Bacon's loyal friend for the 16 years preceding the artist's death in 1992.
The death of Francis Bacon, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th-century artist, is proving as controversial as his life. As art experts struggle to sort out and catalogue the cluttered contents of his London studio, lawyers are investigating the whereabouts of Bacon paintings claimed by his estate and willed in their entirety to John Edwards, Bacon's loyal friend for the 16 years preceding the artist's death in 1992.
The first effort has involved a team of archaeologists and conservators painstakingly excavating the jumble of the small, spartan South Kensington flat where Bacon lived and worked.
The contents, along with the paint-streaked internal walls, have been shipped off to the artist's native Dublin where they have been meticulously reassembled for exhibition in November at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - a donation from Mr Edwards. (Some of this material can be seen exclusively in our Culture section.)
But the legal spur to discovery is equally intriguing. It concerns the London gallery which had handled the artistic management of the painter for virtually his whole career - an association which the High Court terminated more than a year ago. Mr Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled that all the executors of Bacon's multi-million-pound estate should be removed and replaced by Brian Clarke, the well-known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards.
Since then the effort to ensure that Mr Edwards, now 50 and living in south-east Asia, receives his inheritance has become a legal wrangle of immeasurable proportions, involving the gallery which represented Bacon for most of his working life: Marlborough Fine Art in London, and a Marlborough company in Lichtenstein. Marlborough also has galleries in New York, Spain, Zurich and Tokyo. One of the deposed executors was Valerie Beston, also a director of MFA.
Just as the jumbled contents of Bacon's studio were colourfully spattered with daubs of paint, so the conflict and the background to it are liberally spangled with the names of celebrities, some of them deceased. Among them are Sir Paul McCartney, his late wife Linda and her brother, the New York arts lawyer John Eastman. (His clients have included Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell.) Mr Clarke is a friend of Sir Paul's. Mr Eastman is Mr Clarke's American lawyer. Mr Clarke has asked Mr Eastman to take up the case.Within the canvas, too, are the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko who died in puzzling circumstances almost exactly 30 years ago; the 11th Duke of Beaufort, currently chairman of Marlborough; and some of the biggest names in the international art scene, including the former Marlborough boss - an unsavoury Viennese dealer who changed his name from Franz Kurt Levai to Francis Kenneth Lloyd and who died in 1998 with his reputation in shreds. The Queen herself is not left out of what is a confused and disturbing, picture.
Even the prestigious The Art Newspaper has difficulty interpreting it. Brian Clarke told that journal: "I knew Francis since the late 1970s - we were friends - but my long-term and great friendship has been with John Edwards. At John's request I have been given his power of attorney for a considerable time and then I agreed to help out with the estate."
As the estate's personal representative, appointed by the High Court, Mr Clarke has the necessary authority to administer and tie up the estate, and see that Mr Edwards - a chronic dyslexic who lived with Bacon but was not his lover - gets what is due to him. "I was assuming that it was a simple matter of resolving a number of outstanding issues and then the estate would be wound up," said Mr Clarke, "but before very much time had passed it was clear that it was a much more complicated affair than I had first realised." He found that the estate "is more extensive in terms of its holdings of paintings than has generally been assumed.
"Even though everybody thought that they had been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 1950s," continued Mr Clarke. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred times, but I missed them, and John Edwards missed them. It was such chaos in there and one was very frightened of moving too much for fear of disturbing things."
It was then that an approach was made to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin's Parnell Square. With Mr Clarke's approval, Mr Edwards donated the entire studio and contents to Bacon's native Dublin. "[The Hugh Lane gallery] came to disassemble it archaeologically," Mr Clarke said. "But when they dismantled this extraordinary thing, we found these paintings.
It also turned out that there were one or two works in other places - paintings that the Marlborough Gallery never saw that came out of that studio that we didn't know existed; John Edwards didn't know they were there. It is undeniable that the body of work that is in the estate constitutes the greatest collection of Bacons in the world, and it contains some unequivocal masterpieces."
By the time the Dublin studio is open to the public in November, more may have surfaced from the second effort at finding the complete oeuvre. That investigation will almost certainly examine the role of Frank Lloyd who ran Marlborough Fine Art and its international network of galleries since the end of the Second World War.
The son of Austrian antique dealers, he fled the Nazis and went to Paris, and thence to England where he and a fellow Austrian refugee opened the Marlborough Gallery in London. By 1950, Lloyd had gained (as he put it himself) "some class, some atmosphere" by appointing as a director David Somerset, later to become Duke of Beaufort.
Royalty and gossip columnists attended Lloyd by the score. The Queen came to one of his gallery benefit nights. Venture capital poured into Marlborough from rich jet-setters, among them Fiat's Gianni Agnelli, shipping magnates Ragnan Moltzau (Norway) and Onassis and Goulandris (Greece), the Brazilian publisher Assis Chateaubriand and the Rothschilds.
Lloyd told his salesmen: "If it sells, it's art." He later declared: "I collect money, not art." He offered artists advances, staggered payouts and shielded them from the tiresome facts of business. He signed up such giants as Mark Rothko, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and, of course, Francis Bacon.
The Rothko affair was to inflict enormous damage on Marlborough's reputation. A 1974 book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, about the American artist's suicide four years earlier and the epic legal battle over his effects describes what occurred.
According to a New York court petition by a daughter, Kate Rothko, her father's executors gave Marlborough "virtually absolute control of the market" for Rothko's paintings and "drastically limited the supply of money available" to the estate, "prevented" Rothko's children, committed themselves to paying "unconscionably excessive" commissions, and "compounded the fraud" upon the estate.
Further, the court petition said, the executors and Marlborough "wilfully and deliberately concealed from all other persons interested in the estate" the details of these agreements.
During the litigation, Rothko paintings were ferried out of the jurisdiction to Canada, despite a court injunction forbidding Marlborough from squirrelling them away. It took a private detective to track them down and force their return.
In 1975, with the Rothko case still unresolved, a Francis Bacon exhibit opened in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Lloyd and his wife were there to share Bacon's limelight and approbation. A few months later, the judge handed down a decision in favour of Kate Rothko.
He removed the three executors and cancelled the estate's contracts with Marlborough, ordered the return of 658 unsold paintings and assessed damages and fines which included a $3.3m (£2.1m) fine against Frank Lloyd and Marlborough for violating a court restraining order by shipping 57 paintings out of the country. This was later increased to $3.8m after a recount showed five more paintings had been in the illegal shipment.
The Rothko story, wrote its author Lee Seldes, was "one of legal legerdemain, camouflages and cover-ups, destruction of incriminating evidence ... the laundering of records, funds, and paintings. It ruined lives and reputations, wrecked long-term friendships."
The Bacon story remains - like his legacy - to be seen. According to John Eastman, the principal lawyer for the estate, "the defining question for the estate is: what is there beyond what we already have?"
