YOU almost expect to see Philip Bacon toss spilled salt over his shoulder or touch wood, so superstitious he declares himself about basking in the praise that has come his way this year.
The Brisbane art dealer calls this his “year of public accolades”, a situation about which he feels “very uncomfortable”.
Bacon received the leadership award at the Australia Business Arts Foundation’s annual prize-giving, and was also named a Queensland Great, one of a small group of people whose work and community contribution is honoured each year by the state government.
Earlier this year, Queensland Art Gallery put his name on one of its galleries, for his participation in QAG’s fund-raising foundation.
Sitting in his office at the front of his elegant gallery on the well-to-do New Farm edge of Brisbane’s scruffy Fortitude Valley, Bacon says the accolades varied from “unbelievably unexpected and generous” to “sweet and really nice but a bit strange and embarrassing”.
“There are so many people who do more than I do, who are below the radar, and it seems to me unfair that it’s a bit like a bandwagon. Once you’re on it, and people are clapping and cheering, you become part of the caravan that rolls through, attracting more things.”
Then he adds, “And I’m still waiting for the three bad things to happen. I’m sure they’ll drum me out of the Brownies, rip the epaulettes off my jacket, to the slow muffled sound of a drum.”
There are certainly at least three bad things that have happened in the dealer and philanthropist’s past, including a bout of cancer, moments when his highly valued privacy has been breached and a long-running simmering feud with the previous director of the biggest art institution in the state.
If there were less of what Bacon calls residual Catholic guilt in his make-up, he would count recent events as blessings well and truly due.
A very private person, but also a man whose whole life is his business, Bacon says he is introverted, self-examining, prone to self-doubt. That does not intrude on his professional ability: long-term success and the continuing trust of both artists and clients leave him in no doubt about that. When a
client phoned recently to ask him if he should buy a work priced in the hundreds of thousands, Bacon was emphatic. The collector already had a (better and cheaper) work from the same series by that artist and Bacon’s assessment was that the man only wanted the painting because he was feeling a bit down. “Go out and buy a hat,” he told him.
On the other hand, he was surprised to hear a teenager doing work experience at the gallery had been terrified of him. Bacon was shocked to see himself reflected thus in the eyes of this young woman, and “disappointed in myself”, he says, “because she’s smart and if she felt that, it must be so. It’s not a persona I want to project particularly, with staff or friends and colleagues.”
This is a man whose openness to the constant stream of petitioners beating a path to the heavy glass door of his gallery is evidence of his kindness; and yet, there is something in his demeanour that might well frighten a perceptive young person. Watchfulness, combined with a sternness of expression, can give Bacon the look of a demanding headmaster.
He has a sense of humour so lively it borders on the outrageous, but there is nothing unbuttoned about Bacon; discreet, certainly, and that is why he has on his books such highly fancied artists as Jeffrey Smart, Margaret Olley and William Robinson.
“Shrewd,” he says, “is not an adjective I’d care to hear myself described by. I’m successful in my business, but” – he turns that admonishing headmaster’s eye towards me – “I’d have to look shrewd up, because I think it has negative connotations.
“I suppose a better term would be strategic.”
Bacon was studying law when, at the urging of a group of artists including Lawrence Daws and Charles Blackman, he opened Philip Bacon Galleries. He had been working part-time in the Grand Central Gallery run by Keith Moore, but it was the closing of the influential Brian Johnstone Gallery in 1972 that opened the opportunity for the young man to set up shop.
The art business, he says, was more collegiate then, because there were fewer artists, but at the same time it was, and still is, a “fiercely competitive” world. What has made him successful over 35 years is a combination of intuition and acumen, held in symbiotic harmony by a conservative distaste for boat rocking.
“I began by showing artists I felt a connection with personally and with their painting and that has continued through the decades,” Bacon says. “I still show young painters – and I don’t want to offend anyone – but none of them would be described as cutting-edge. There are other places for those sorts of people to show.
“They don’t want to be here, and I don’t want them either.”
Bacon is constantly approached by artists who think all they have to do is get a showing at his gallery and their reputation will be assured. “It doesn’t work like that,” he tells them. “The art business is not a sprint, it’s a long-distance marathon.”
Unapologetically, he points out he only deals with artists “halfway through the race, who have proven endurance”. Davida Allen’s exuberant paint-lashed canvases are about as indecorous as it gets on the Bacon Galleries walls. Mostly, it is sigh-inducing loveliness that welcomes a visitor to the upstairs-downstairs spaces.
Recent newcomers to the Bacon stable include Tasmanian Philip Wolfhagen and Melbourne-based John Young, both of whom have had shows there this year. Regular sorties into the stockroom result in shows featuring works by Ian Fairweather, Tim Storrier, Olley, Smart, Sam Fullbrook, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and Garry Shead.
Commercial, but taking the responsibility of public access very seriously, Bacon’s premises are affectionately called among his colleagues “the regional gallery of New Farm”. Visitors sometimes ask Michelle on the front desk for directions to their coffee shop. Gaggles of schoolchildren regularly wander through, and a Bacon opening is always jolly.
When he says of artists that “they are like children, you have to let them go, have adventures, successes and failures elsewhere”, you wonder what kinds of stories are behind the professional relationship between dealer and artist, although the public bust-up and acrimonious walk-out simply is not his style. The bond Bacon has with Olley, even a casual observer can see, is remarkable, a friendship based on caring trust that is enviable.
Unlike certain other high-profile dealers, there is little gossip around the man and his business. When his private papers eventually go to a collecting institution, there will be few revelations.
“Most of my life is via my business,” he says, “so those letters are personal only because it’s a very personal business. I love my business.”
Bacon lives alone in a house he built 20 years ago so that he could surround himself with paintings he loves. He calls himself very selfish and very lucky, pleased to be able to run his life without having to take a partner’s needs and desires into account. “I’ve never felt the lack of a partner,” he says, “but probably, deep down, the energy I’ve put into the business is probably sublimating that.”
When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, Bacon became “even more introspective”, but then found, to his joy, that many of his clients were “fantastically supportive” friends. The experience has made him more open, “because cancer is a sort of stigma, not spoken about or in hushed tones”, he says.
Solicitous calls from friends such as Barry Humphries, who was touring the US at the time, were crucial to his state of mind.
“I don’t think he was aware he was even doing it, but it was very precious to me, and I think about that a lot,” he says. “Other people, who you are closer to, didn’t want to know about it at all. I don’t think any less of them, it’s just the way people handled it.”
Earlier this month, Bacon received the “five-year tick” on the all-clear diagnosis.
Bacon has been on the board of Opera Australia for the past 15 years, and is also a trustee of the Gordon Darling Foundation, and the QAG and National Gallery of Australia foundations. He is on the board of the Brisbane Festival and the Brisbane Institute. Acknowledging OA’s “very difficult times”, he has nevertheless found the business of opera fascinating. “It’s so complicated and so many things can go wrong,” he says, “and there’s such anger and angst and pain and joy – and that’s before the curtain opens. It’s a terrifically run company, despite what some people say, and I’ve been very privileged to be involved.”
About the feud with Doug Hall, who was director of QAG for 20 years until 2007 and is currently the Australia Council’s commissioner for the Venice Biennale, Bacon says he often thought about going public with his anger at the way QAG treated his artists during Hall’s tenure, but decided against it to avoid “collateral damage to the institution”.
Now, he is willing to say that “the gallery and my artists and everyone was scared of him”. His admiration for QAG’s Asia-Pacific Triennial (“much more grunt than the poor old Sydney Biennale”) is tempered by a concern that the rush for the new can lead to a storehouse full of previously fashionable rubbish.
Bacon says, in art as in his friends, he is content with what he knows.
“It’s probably my age, but I don’t particularly want a lot of new friends, I’ve got enough. I have a personal collection at home, which I love, and I certainly don’t want to throw everything out and start with a new genre of paintings or objects or something.
“In all facets of my life, I don’t like change. It runs through everything. I know I have to be bold, but I do like continuity.”
