CRAIG BROWN: The Colony - or Muriel s, as it was also known - was a cramped, seedy place, untouched by sunshine or fresh air, but it served its purpose as an afternoon drinking club.
Francis Bacon in his studio, 1967
Credit: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos
It was dark outside but, in the lamplit tobacco clouds of the Colony Room Club in Soho, the proprietor Ian Board, his great swollen nose flushed with anger, had hopped down from his barstool perch by the door and was shouting at Francis Bacon with cries like a dog’s bark, his voice rough as a cheese-grater.
Grabbing an umbrella from the back of the stool, he began to belabour the world’s foremost artist about the shoulders as he edged out of the door into the steep, black well of the stairs down to the street. “You can’t f paint!” yelled Board at Bacon descending the twisting steps, as lobbed ballpoint pens (kept for signing in guests) bounced off his jacket.
Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon: a novelist takes on the painter’s final days Porter’s tribute to Bacon is a short work, dense with allusions, somewhere between a prose-poem and a play script. Francis Bacon was very particular about the way his works were displayed. He chose theatrical gold frames and decreed that the paintings themselves – the brushwork that “slips, slurps, smears, flares, blurs, fades, evaporates, abruptly dematerialises”, as the art critic Tom Lubbock put it – should be seen behind glass. The glass was there to protect the canvases (usually in a sorry state once Bacon had had his way with them) as well as to bring some unity to the chaotic whole. But the reflective surfaces have another effect: anyone who steps closer, hoping to decipher those slurps and smears, soon comes face to face with their own mirror image. This was the experience of the author, Max Porter, a teenage Bacon superfan, when he went with his mum to see a Bacon exhibi