'Greedy and tricky': tapes show depth of Bacon's loathing for his art dealers

As one of Britain's foremost painters it is perhaps unsurprising that Francis Bacon could display an artistic temperament.

- Dalya Alberge

But the depth of his loathing for his own art dealers at the Marlborough Gallery in London has been revealed through previously unheard tape recordings.

In a conversation with a friend in 1982, the artist can be heard dismissing them as "greedy" and "tricky", as well as lacking "a certain politeness" towards him.

Bacon, one of the country's most celebrated artists, once confided to another friend: "When I die, my paintings won't be worth anything, I'll be forgotten." He could not have been more wrong. His 1969 portrait, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, sold in 2013 for a record £89m.

Yet he did not feel appreciated by his dealers, the tapes reveal. When his friend suggests that the Marlborough wants him just "slaving away, producing paintings for them nonstop and... keeping you prisoner in a quiet, shut-off place", Bacon exclaims: "Yes." Such was his anger that he planned to hold back one of his paintings from them: "They will never see that."

In discussing his latest exhibition at the Marlborough, which had marked all his paintings as sold, Bacon says: "You can never trust them. They say they have sold things they have not. They buy them themselves, you see - you never know with them." The friend to whom he was confiding his frustration was Barry Joule, who lived near Bacon's London studio in South Kensington. In 1978, they had struck up a friendship that continued until the artist's death in 1992.