What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?

The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what came to be called the ‘Bulldozer show’ of 15 September 1974, the Soviet secret service instructed a small militia of off-duty policemen to besiege an unofficial exhibition being staged by a group of underground artists in a field on the outskirts of Moscow. As James Birch recalls, KGB goons ‘attacked the show, using bulldozers and water cannons. Artists and onlookers were beaten up, some paintings were set on fire, other works were thrown into tipper lorries where mud was piled on top by diggers’. Surviving artworks were ‘driven off to be buried’ in an unknown location. An uncompromising response, perhaps — but then again, which artist in the West could hope to provoke such a spirited critical reaction?

By 1986, Birch, an enterprising young gallery owner with a showroom at the unfashionable end of the King’s Road, hoped that attitudes in the increasingly liberated USSR might have relaxed enough to permit an exhibition of contemporary British art there. At the time he was ambitiously promoting the work of the Neo Naturists, a group of ‘mercurial young artists’ whose manifesto outlined their commitment to ‘taking their clothes off for the sake of it’. The group, which included the transvestite ceramicist Grayson Perry, would paint primitivist designs on to their naked bodies and then roll around on blank pieces of paper, or turn up pre-decorated to other people’s parties where they would burst into song and ‘suddenly disrobe’, invariably frightening off the other guests. Their work had an undeniably stark quality, and Birch believed in it. But ‘was Moscow ready for the Neo Naturists?’

No, it wasn’t. As Birch recalls in Bacon in Moscow, a first exploratory trip to the Soviet Union revealed an artistic sensibility still disconcertingly ‘frozen in time’, the country’s leading painters apparently ‘unaware of whole areas of 20th-century modernism’, its cultural institutions unfathomable bureaucracies.