The last time Barry Joule saw his friend Francis Bacon, it was 10 days before the celebrated painter’s death.
No one in the art world disputes that.
For over a decade before that spring day in 1992, Joule, a Canadian handyman with a rock-star mane, had been one of Bacon’s helpers, doing odd jobs around the artist’s London home and driving him to exhibitions. In Joule’s telling, the two became friends, and even went on the occasional “drunken bender” together.
No one disputes that, either.
What some do contest — fiercely — is a trove of papers and artworks that Joule says the artist gave him at that final meeting.
According to Joule, Bacon, then 82, handed over some bundles that included hundreds of newspaper and magazine cuttings, some of them with added brush strokes and paint splotches. Joule says Bacon also gave him an album of sketches, with drawings that look like the artist’s famous “screaming pope” paintings, and some canvases in the style of artists like Picasso or Dalí.
All those works, Joule insisted in hours of interviews, were by Bacon’s hand and are important historical documents. “It’s my rock-solid belief,” he said.
Some in the art world appear to agree with Joule, like staff from the Tate museum group in London who accepted his donation of the trove in 2004 and then, almost two decades later, quietly gave everything back. Now, the Pompidou Center in Paris is considering taking them — though Bacon’s own estate has urged it not to.
Is Joule a keeper of Bacon’s secrets? Or is he, at best, misguided — or, at worst, a fantasist and a trickster?
The art world can’t seem to decide.
Unlikely Friends
Art historians have long viewed Bacon, who was born in Dublin in 1909, as one of the 20th century’s great artists. With a louche private life that also made him a tabloid celebrity, Bacon first came to prominence in the late 1940s, when his bleak and anguished paintings captured Europe’s postwar mood.
By the 1960s, curators so revered Bacon that the Tate Gallery granted him a rare midcareer retrospective. The Times of London called that show “the most stunning exhibition by a living British painter there has been since the war.”
The French were also in awe. In 1977, over 8,000 people flocked to the opening of show in Paris, and the police had to close the street.
Since his death, Bacon’s paintings have become among the most expensive ever auctioned. In 2013, a Bacon triptych sold at Christie’s for $142.4 million dollars — a record for an artwork at the time.
When an artist reaches those heights, people often come forth claiming they have a lost masterpiece that they want to sell. Those cases normally end once experts weigh in. But Joule said he had never tried to sell anything from the archive, which the Times of London said was once valued at 20 million pounds. His quest to have the works recognized wasn’t a cash grab, he said. It was about honoring his friend.
I first met Joule in one of the more expensive restaurants — his choice — in Marseille, France, where he has a home. (The New York Times was paying.) Stories tumbled out of him, not just about Bacon, but also about other stars he had known, like Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer, and Freddie Mercury, of Queen.
He recalled, in great detail, his efforts to get Bacon to paint Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and his unsuccessful attempts to then get the singer — whom Joule characterized as “penny-pinching” — to buy the triptych that Bacon finally produced in 1982.
Joule was fun — who wouldn’t enjoy a dinner filled with gossipy anecdotes about the great cultural figures of the 20th century? But he also seemed worried about his image, and annoyed by the detractors who say the sketches and paintings in his hoard aren’t real.
After the meal, he outlined how the rest of our time together would pan out. The next morning, he would arrive at my hotel for breakfast. Then, he’d head off to a bank vault — alone — to pick up highlights from his archive. I would have an hour to look at them at his apartment, and then he wanted me to meet his neighbor. The last part wasn’t for the article, he said: He had told her a reporter from The Times was coming. Clearly, he wanted to show me off.
Throughout his life, Bacon gravitated toward eccentrics and people on society’s margins. He hung out with the Kray brothers, the famous cockney gangsters. The love of his life was Peter Lacy, a former air force pilot who used to beat up the artist for both men’s sexual pleasure. He also had relationships with George Dyer, a petty thief, and John Edwards, a barman who went on to inherit Bacon’s multimillion-dollar fortune.
When Joule met Bacon, he was in many ways an outsider himself. Joule, who said he is a descendant of James Prescott Joule, the physicist who gave his name to the unit of energy, was born in Montreal, but the date is unclear. As a condition of the interviews, he refused to answer questions about two topics: his age and his hair.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1966, then left for London four years later, lured by the music of the Rolling Stones and other hip bands. There, he worked odd jobs for six-month stretches, traveling in between to Vietnam, Mexico and North Africa.
Joule would likely never have gotten interested in Bacon if the artist hadn’t stuck his head out of a window one morning in 1978 and shouted “Oy!” at Joule, whose apartment was at the back of Bacon’s studio. The night before, a storm had blown through London, Joule recalled, and Bacon asked if Joule could see any damage to his roof.
Joule said he climbed a ladder, sweating and wearing a pair of shorts, and reattached a television aerial that had been blown over. Then, as a thank you, Joule said, Bacon invited him into his studio to drink champagne.
What he saw there didn’t match up with his idea of an artist’s atelier, Joule said, which he had expected to be filled with pictures of “roses and sunsets.” When he saw Bacon’s tormented, half-finished works — “men looking aggressive, twisted faces, all that stuff” — it felt weird and dangerous. It was like being “punched in the solar plexus,” he said.
“I was like a virgin with a headache,” Joule said. “I made an excuse and just shot out of there. What the hell was that?”
A few weeks later, Joule was in a bookstore when he saw Bacon’s face glaring out from a book cover. At that moment, Joule recalled, he grasped that Bacon was no ordinary painter. When he saw the artist grocery shopping soon after, Joule reintroduced himself, and the pair went to Joule’s apartment and chatted about art while drinking whiskey.
Soon, Joule said, Bacon started telephoning him for help with odd jobs and repairs. Over the next 14 years, a friendship bloomed.
‘My Moment of Glory’
On April 18, 1992, Joule arrived at Bacon’s studio to give the artist a ride to the airport. But before leaving, Joule said, Bacon handed over the bundles of paper and the canvases and told Joule to put them into his car. “You know what to do with them,” Joule recalled Bacon saying. (One of Bacon’s former neighbors said in an interview that she saw the handover.)
Marvin Gasoi, a friend of Joule’s at the time, said that two months later, he visited Joule in his London home, where he saw several trash bags filled with newspaper cuttings covered in paint.
The cuttings, he said, looked like things he had seen in photos of Bacon’s messy studio, piled up on chairs or littering the floor. “I didn’t think anything of it,” Gasoi recalled. “There wasn’t like a spectacular lost image.”
William A. Ewing, a photography curator who has known Joule since childhood, said he also saw some of what Joule had in the 1990s. He said that some of the pieces — including an altered photograph of a cyclist in motion — had felt instinctively like Bacon’s work and reminded him of specific paintings.
Critics expressed different views, however, when Joule started showing items to curators, some of whom displayed them at the Barbican Gallery in London and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Richard Dorment, reviewing the Barbican show for The Daily Telegraph, said that it was “clear” that Bacon’s witty, inventive markings were present on some of the altered newsprint, though he didn’t believe Bacon had made the preparatory sketches. “My impression is that they were created by someone who already knew the famous painted images, but who didn’t understand the anatomical or spatial complexities of the originals,” he wrote.
Joule dismissed that theory in interviews, including during one at his apartment overlooking Marseille’s waterfront. Bacon “didn’t keep other artists’s work,” Joule said. “So why would he have kept these?”
The walls of Joule’s home were covered from floor to ceiling with paintings — including several depicting Bacon — and the surfaces were cluttered with souvenirs from Joule’s travels, including African statues and Indian rugs. Dotted around were Bacon exhibition catalogs, a Bacon biography, and several photos of Joule smiling beside Bacon.
Joule had laid out paintings from the archive that he insisted Bacon painted while learning his craft as a young artist. They didn’t look anything like Bacon’s acclaimed work. To me, they looked more like thrift-store cubism.
Joule appeared downtrodden to hear that. “I’m not saying they’re any good,” he said. “I don’t think they’re very good, OK?” he added. “I’m just saying they’re Francis Bacons.”
Even with questions over its artistic quality, Joule said Bacon’s estate had tried to obtain the archive in 1998; Edwards, the artist’s heir and former lover, asked him to “become part of the Bacon family” by handing over the works. Edwards died in 2003, but a letter from the estate’s lawyers shows that a few months after that meeting, Edwards demanded that Joule hand over anything by Bacon in his possession “within 48 hours” or face legal action.
Joule said he knocked away the estate’s demand. He gave a few items from the archive to museums in France and Canada, and achieved something of a coup in 2004, when Tate accepted the majority of the items as a major donation. “That was my moment of glory,” he said, adding that he began imagining the works on display in an exhibition, with a glittering opening party and his name in the catalog.
Those never came, and though the works were listed in the museum’s database, Tate only displayed a few items from the trove, including a receipt from a lavish meal that Joule and Bacon once shared: snails, scallops, three bottles of wine. The meal, costing 801.84 British pounds (roughly $2,500 today, adjusted for inflation), was an insight into Bacon’s generosity — and his gluttony. It didn’t say anything about his art.
Two years after that small 2019 display, the Bacon estate published a collection of essays, including one that claimed Joule’s entire trove was a fraud. In it, Sophie Pretorius, the estate’s archivist, wrote that Bacon’s work was “not easy to mimic,” but that “the author of the items in the Barry Joule Archive made a stab at it.”
Many things didn’t add up, Pretorius said. Items in the archive feature markings in watercolor or gouache, but there were none of these materials in Bacon’s studio when he died, she said. And it features several images of large penises, whereas Bacon only “painted small penises with visible pubic hair.” A small newspaper clipping in the archive even dated from three years after Bacon’s death, according to Pretorius.
“The strongest counter argument” to Joule’s claim that the works are by Bacon, Pretorius said, is that Bacon’s friend Peter Beard once told her that he saw Joule painting images in a book that looked a lot like the sketch album in the archive. (Beard died in 2020, but his widow Nejma Beard said that during the couple’s stay at Joule’s home she never saw him painting.)
In 2022, Tate took the rare decision to remove the items Joule had donated from its collection, a process known in the museum world as “deacessioning.” In an emailed statement, a Tate spokesman said that Pretorius’s research had “raised credible doubts about the nature and quality” of Joule’s archive.
Joule said the idea he created any of the items himself was “bollocks” and that the estate was out to get him because he refused to hand over the archive.
The Bacon estate declined to make Pretorius, who did not speak to Joule before writing her essay, available for an interview. Several other Bacon experts declined to comment on the trove’s authenticity. Annalyn Swan, who with Mark Stevens wrote a recent biography of the artist, said only that she had seen some of the so-called early paintings, which had left her “puzzled” because they didn’t fit with Bacon’s other work from the 1930s.
One curator who once collaborated with Joule on a show agreed to speak to The Times, but only on condition of anonymity, so their name “wouldn’t be dragged into this,” they said.
The works and documents in the archive were “a mess,” the curator wrote in an email, “with perhaps a mix of ‘genuine’ material from the Francis Bacon studio and other stuff by people around Bacon, perhaps including Barry himself.”
“I’d love to know what Tate curators actually concluded about it,” the curator said, “but I suspect the fact it’s such a mess — with a messy donor attached — must have ultimately put them off.”
Missing the Point
There are other curators, however, who remain curious about Joule’s cache. Since fall 2023, the Pompidou Center — one of France’s most prestigious art museums — has been examining the material. Via WhatsApp, Joule showed me photos of Pompidou curators examining the sketches, and one of him dining with Laurent Le Bon, the Pompidou’s president. “We drank too much vino🍷🍷,” Joule wrote.
A Pompidou spokeswoman said that “a team from the museum has viewed the archive, but it’s too early to express an opinion.”
The Bacon estate has already intervened to try and shape the Pompidou’s view. Martin Harrison, the estate’s publishing director and the editor of the official catalog of Bacon’s works, said in a terse email refusing an interview request that he’d had a video call with the Pompidou “in which I stressed I would be appalled if they extended the life of this nonsense.”
Given that the estate is the ultimate arbiter of Bacon’s work, it may put the Pompidou off an acquisition — and Joule said, repeatedly, that this was his fear.
But the longer I researched this story, the more I came to feel that, by focusing on the archive, everyone involved in this dispute, including Joule himself, was missing out on the great story here: a movie-ready tale of how a chance encounter led to a 14-year-long relationship between a handyman and one of the 20th century’s great painters.
And I also realized that those sketches and old paintings might not even be the most interesting Bacon ephemera that Joule owns. He also has tapes.
Joule said that he had sometimes recorded his conversations with the artist, with Bacon’s consent. The discussions usually started with art, he said, but as the pair drank glass after glass of wine, the topics would drift.
Joule said he had recordings in which Bacon discusses his fractious relationship with the painter Lucian Freud, and another in which the artist says he wants to be considered a surrealist. In a more lewd moment that he recorded, Joule said, Bacon expressed his sexual attraction to the boxer Mike Tyson.
On my last day in Marseille, Joule called in at my hotel for a farewell chat and placed an old-fashioned portable tape player on a table in a lobby. Out of its small speaker sprang Bacon’s fragile voice, pontificating about Charles de Gaulle, the French military leader in World War II. “He did a lot of things for France, of course he did,” Bacon said, “but for some reason, he and Churchill got on very, very badly.”
Joule would only let me hear that bizarre snippet, but he insisted that he had hours more. If so, it seemed like great material for a radio documentary or a podcast. But Joule said he wasn’t interested in anything like that. Instead, he said, he planned to drip feed excerpts to friendly reporters for the rest of his life.
“There’s nothing else interesting to me, really,” Joule said, “except for the Bacon connection.”