A Bacon exhibition opening in Monte Carlo on Saturday 2 July reveals the close links between the artist’s obsessive gambling and his paintings. Both depended on chance. As Rebecca Daniels, a contributor to the Grimaldi Forum catalogue explains, so inextricably linked were gaming and art that Bacon regarded his losses on the roulette table as “an expense related to painting”. He once used this as an argument for his dealer to advance more money.
Francis Bacon loved the French Riviera, but what made Monaco particularly attractive was its gambling opportunities. He moved to the independent principality in 1946 and spent most of the next five years there, returning often up until his death in 1992.
Bacon’s haunt was the Casino. He recalled: “I spent whole days there... you could go in at ten o’clock and needn’t come out until about four o’clock the following morning”. Bacon would quickly dispense any winnings on champagne and the finest food for friends. It was his symbol of living in the present.
Among the paintings in the Grimaldi Forum show is Study for a Figure (1950), which includes a vaguely outlined circular object. This picture was assumed to have been lost, but in 2006 it was rediscovered on the reverse of a canvas. Lucian Freud then recalled having seen it in 1950, describing the circular object as a roulette wheel.
Bacon even owned his own roulette wheel, with which he would play with friends back in England. This relic of the artist’s tortured life has recently gone to Monaco, when it was purchased by Majid Boustany for his Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.
Taking risks Daniels believes that Bacon approached gambling and art with the same spirit, displaying a determination to take risks and allow chance to intervene. Bacon wrote that “the vice of gambling... is for me intimately linked with painting”. Clive Barker, a sculptor and a friend, recalled that Bacon would talk endlessly about how “chance” affected his paintings, with success or failure being likened to “the spin of a roulette wheel”.
Bacon would persevere with a painting until it either became a masterpiece or a complete failure. When the gamble went wrong, he would simply destroy the work. The Grimaldi Forum exhibition presents 62 of Bacon’s paintings that relate to his visits to Monaco and France, showing his deep interest in French culture. These essentially represent the successes, but the artist also destroyed hundreds of pictures where his gamble had failed.
A failure of a different kind in Bacon’s early career was the idea to sell his work to the Casino. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland: “I always feel with a little clever manipulation the Casino would buy our pictures”. They never did, and instead its magnificent Belle Epoque rooms are decorated with paintings of languorous females, who still today sooth the disappointments of the unlucky as they lose their chips.
Just for this summer, Bacon’s work has returned to Monaco, at the Grimaldi Forum, a modern conference and exhibition centre a few minutes’ walk from the Casino. For anyone going to see the show, do go on to the Casino for its magnificent interiors and to imbibe the theatrical atmosphere of the gaming. To see Bacon’s roulette wheel, take a guided tour of the Francis Bacon MB Foundation with its artworks and memorabilia (advance booking required).
• Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2 July-4 September.