Bacon in Monaco

As he indicated in an interview with David Sylvester in 1984, Francis Bacon seems to have visited the Principality of Monaco for the first time in 1935. A few years later, a letter dated 3 June 1940, informing him of his father’s death, was addressed to him in Monaco by his cousin, Diana Watson.

In 1946, Erica Brausen, who was then working at the Redfern Gallery, met Bacon through a mutual friend, the painter Graham Sutherland, and purchased Painting 1946 from the artist for £200. With the proceeds from the sale, he immediately left London to set up home in Monaco.

The Principality was to be Bacon’s main residence and country of choice from July 1946 until the early 1950s. At first, he stayed at the Hôtel Ré with his lover and patron Eric Hall and his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. Graham and Kathleen Sutherland were among the friends he saw regularly during his early years in Monaco.

Bacon was charmed by the atmosphere and lifestyle of Monte Carlo; he appreciated the Mediterranean landscapes and the invigorating sea air, which was beneficial for his asthma. The Belle Époque casino, with its sophisticated ambience, appealed to the artist, who was a seasoned gambler. In one of his interviews with David Sylvester, he said, ‘I remember when I lived once for a long time in Monte Carlo and I became very obsessed by the Casino and I spent whole days there.’ He found the highs and lows of gambling and the alternating sensations of exhilaration and despair produced by painting similarly compulsive.

Despite the many distractions on offer, Bacon managed to work in the Principality, describing it as ‘very good for pictures falling ready-made into the mind.’ The Monaco years saw the emergence of some of his most important ideas and played a decisive part in the gestation of his future compositions. While he was living in Monaco, he began depicting the human figure, a crucial stage in his work that set him on the path to becoming one of the leading figurative post-war artists, embarked on his figures of popes and ‘Heads’ series, and developed new working practices.

His letters to Graham Sutherland and to Duncan MacDonald, the director of the Lefevre Gallery, from Monaco confirm that it was there that he began working on his first images of popes. On 19 October 1946, Bacon wrote to Sutherland from the Hôtel Re: ‘I am working on 3 studies of the Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent II [sic]. I have practically finished one.’

As of the summer of 1946, when he was living in Monaco, Bacon developed a new way of working. His usual supplier was on holiday and he found he was running out of stretched canvases, so he hung his canvas on the wall, remarking: ‘It seems quite pleasant to not to have the tyranny of the stretcher and be able to alter the dimensions as one wants.’ This practice anticipated the visual framing devices he later used to focus attention on the figure or a detail of the canvas and the way he would unhesitatingly resize the canvas, cutting it down to retain only the section he was interested in.

In a letter to the art dealer and collector Arthur Jeffress, sent from the Villa Souka-Hati, Bacon mentioned that he was working on ‘some heads which I like better than any I have done before.’ The monochrome impasto of several coats of paint, comparable to rhinoceros or elephant hide in texture, also seems to have been a technique he developed in his ‘Heads’ series while he was in Monaco.

Head II (1949) is one of the first works the artist painted on the reverse, unprimed side of the canvas, a pictorial practice also begun in the Principality. Bacon explained to David Sylvester that the idea of using an unprimed canvas came to him in Monaco towards the end of the 1940s, after losing all his money at the casino. He then decided to paint on the back of his used canvases, which he found easier to work on. He continued to use unprimed canvases throughout his life.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Bacon frequently went to Monaco with his successive lovers, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, and his circle of friends, which included Denis Wirth-Miller, Richard Chopping, Daniel Farson, Michael Wishart and Muriel Belcher. From the 1970s until the end of his life, he was often to be seen there with friends such as Reinhard Hassert and Eddy Batache, Michael and Geraldine Leventis and John and Zoe Pelling, his sister Ianthe Knott and his companion and model, John Edwards. His favourite bars and restaurants included the Café de Paris, the Chatham Bar, Pulcinella and Le Pinocchio.

From 1983 to 1990, the Hôtel Balmoral was Bacon’s main pied-à-terre for long stays in Monaco with John Edwards. He would usually reserve rooms 681 and 682, on the top floor of the hotel. In June 1986, he and Edwards considered finding a place to live there and visited a series of flats, but seem not to have pursued the idea.

On 12 April 1992, Bacon telephoned John Pelling to tell him he was planning to come to Monaco after a trip to Spain. He never reached Monaco: sixteen days later, on 28 April, he died of a heart attack in Madrid.

Bacon himself often brought up his years in Monaco in correspondence and interviews throughout his life.