An old friend of Francis Bacon has hit out at the Tate after he says it reneged on the terms of a 2004 donation. Barry Joule gave 1,200 sketches, photographs and documents from the studio of the British painter on the understanding, he says, that the archive would exhibited.
In 2008 Tate held a retrospective of Bacon, but none of the items from Joule’s donation were featured.
While Tate claims they have fulfilled the deal, having shown some items in display cases in the museum’s archival exhibition space, in a series of emails seen by the Observer, Joule says this is far from what he was promised at the time of the donation and that he plans to start legal action to have the gift, worth an estimated £20 million, returned.
Joule also says that he is cancelling plans to make a further donation to the Tate of a Bacon self-portrait from 1936 and nine other Bacon paintings.
Joule wrote in one email to Tate director Maria Balshaw: ‘When Tate curators … saw my Bacon archive long before my Tate donation was completed, they all suggested an exhibition at the Tate … [Then] director Sir Nicolas Serota in 2003 assured me a month before the contract was signed this would be the case and within three years of my donation. Yet, as time passed, I was continually met with silence, ignored or just fobbed off …’
Tate told the the paper that they are in contact with Joule.
