Bacon in Moscow

Bacon in Moscow recounts the audacious quest by the young English curator James Birch to mount the ground-breaking Francis Bacon retrospective at the Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988, a sell-out show that had Muscovites queuing round the block and the first exhibition of a living Western artist in the Soviet Union for over 40 years.

Travelling between Moscow and the streets of London's Soho, James Birch recalls the extraordinary events that led to him becoming the subject of the KGB's attention amid a shady cast of officials, spies and politicians.

When the young curator decides to make his name through a landmark retrospective of his friend Francis Bacon's work, he is sidelined by the British establishment. Taking matters into his own hands, Birch uses a network of Soviet fixers and government officials to stage the event. With a cast of larger-than-life characters, from the enigmatic Soviet cultural minister, Sergei Klokov, to the bewitching fashion designer Elena Khudiakova and Francis Bacon himself, Bacon in Moscow is a unique account of Soviet and Western relations, personal and political, at a time of unparalleled cultural change.

His ambitious plan to bring previously unseen Western culture to the Soviet Union unfolds as the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, takes steps to open up the country through glasnost and perestroika. The ground-breaking Bacon exhibition is a pivotal cultural event in a wave of change, taking place just a year before the momentous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

'A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties. Fascinating and true.' Grayson Perry