Bacon's 'Tangier Landscape' Leads Christie's Sale in London

Which artist, dead or alive, would you invite to your dream dinner party?

For the notorious London art dealer Ivor Braka, whose art collection operates from his Chelsea townhouse, and more recently spilled into the pair of Norfolk pubs he owns, the answer is easy: Francis Bacon.

'He has tremendous charm and charisma, and he was witty, cruel, and devastatingly intelligent,' Braka told The Art Newspaper.

Bacon's Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), whose present owner acquired it from Braka in 2000, will lead Christie's 20th/21st Century Evening Sale in London on Thursday, 7 March 2024 with an estimate of £15 to 20 million (U.S. $18.8 to 25 million).

Braka was an early advocate of Bacon. He stood behind the artist's work before prices began their mountainous climb when the 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie's New York in 2013 for a record U.S. $142.4 million.

To put it in perspective, in Braka's recent 2023 interview with the Italian journalist Alain Elkann, he recalls being shocked when at just 24 years old, in the early 1980s, he was able to buy a Bacon for £26,000.

So when Bacon's Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963) came up for auction at Sotheby's New York in 1985 hammering for U.S. $517,000—an auction record for the artist at the time—it came as little surprise when its new home was the West London townhouse.

The 1963 painting is a powerful memorial to his lover Peter Lacy, with whom he had a tumultuous affair after they met in 1952 at the Colony Room (The famous Soho watering hole frequented by Bacon). Mark Stevens, author of Francis Bacon: Revelations published in 2021, has said of their relationship that 'it was the most important relationship in each man's life'.

Bacon's paintings often adhere to similar contextual frameworks—his South Kensington flat, or a bullfighting ring in Southern France—yet it's the subjects that reside in each work and how he tackles them that becomes the meat of each painting. In Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, one dark anthropomorphic form lurks menacingly in the centre of the composition above a smaller vulnerable figure, connected by red and green curved strokes that imply shadow and movement. This frenetic activity is set amidst swathes of grass-like painterly marks and specks of paint akin to desert sand.

Painted from memory, the work flickers with images from his own bank of source material. The lower figure is procured from a photograph Bacon owned of an owl wrestling a snake, an illustrative quality that no doubt fed into the imagination of the children's author Roald Dahl, who bought the painting from Marlborough Fine Art in 1963 and sold it at auction to Braka 20 years later.

'All I can tell you about the work of Francis Bacon is that it stirs and excites me emotionally. This is surely how the work of any painter should be judged,' Dahl said.

'I know that there are some people who are not moved by them at all and to those unfortunates I would simply say, "Jolly back luck. I can't help you."'

Landscape near Malabata,Tangier (1963) was one of seven paintings by Bacon in Dahl's collection, a number of which were funded by the triumphant success of his books James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).

Many were sold through his lifetime, including a small portrait of Lucian Freud for £11 million at Christie's London in 2014.

When in his hands, and after, the 1963 painting was included in nearly all Bacon's major retrospectives across the world, including his career-defining retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris (1971), and more recently at London's Royal Academy's Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, in 2022.

A year before the author's death, Dahl wrote to Bacon to ask what he would choose for his last meal. 'Two lightly boiled very fresh eggs and some bread and butter,' was the response.

Seems like a dream dinner party to me!