One Night Only
Bacon in Moscow
IN CONVERSATION WITH HARRIET VYNER.
Overview
“I took Francis Bacon to Moscow, an unimaginable intrusion of Western culture into the heart of the Soviet system”
Curator James Birch discusses the events of his fascinating memoir, Bacon in Moscow – In 1988, Birch travelled behind the Iron Curtain to Soviet Moscow with the seemingly outrageous proposal of setting up an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings. This funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious quest by James Birch, the young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking Francis Bacon exhibition at the newly furbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988.
Somewhat sidelined by the British establishment, Birch found himself not only the subject of a honey-trap, but also the focus of the KGB and a picaresque and shady cast of officials, attachés and politicians. Birch’s exhibition brought an unseen Western culture to Russia during perestroika, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, making it part of the sea of change in the events that subsequently unfolded.
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“A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties”