

An extraordinary insight into the contemporary art world just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bacon in Moscow is an endlessly entertaining personal memoir of British curator James Birch and his endeavour to exhibit the works of a western cultural icon in Russia during the time of Glasnost.
This funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious attempt by James Birch, a young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking retrospective of Francis Bacon's work at the newly refurbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988.
Side-lined by the British establishment, Birch found himself at the heart of a honey-trap and the focus for a picaresque cast of Soviet officials, attaches and politicians under the forbidding eye of the KGB as he attempted to bring an unseen western cultural icon to Russia during the time of 'Glasnost', just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bacon in Moscow is the story of the evolution of an exhibition that was at the artistic and political heart of a sea of change that culminated with the fall of the USSR.
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781788169745
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 760 g
Dimensions: 244 x 186 x 26 mm
Edition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties. James Birch pulls off an artistic coup necessitating endless champagne nights in Soho with Francis Bacon and marathon Moscow vodka sessions with the mysterious Sergei Klokov. Fascinating and true. What a liver!' - Grayson Perry
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