A messy end

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A colloquium of literary luminaries - the critic Susan Sontag and poet John Ashbery among them - is getting up an international petition to stop the heirs of Andre Breton breaking up his £30 million legacy next month and selling bits off to the highest bidders.

Also under threat is the estate of Francis Bacon whose heir, John Edwards, has died, apparently leaving the art to an East End mate, Philip Mordue, last heard of somewhere in the bars of Thailand.

Our instinct cries out to protect the "integrity" of such inheritances by keeping them together. But is that justified? Should the state, as it does in France, have a say? Or should great art have a life of its own when its creator dies, beyond the control of its maker and his loved ones?

Breton (1896-1966) was a pivotal figure of the Surrealist movement, author of its defining Manifesto. His estate - thousands of manuscripts, paintings by modern masters, primitive art and flea-market tat - is up for auction in Paris from 7 to 17 April. The mammoth 10-day sale will test the endurance of keen collectors, and the whopping catalogue, at more than 2,000 pages, is a substantial academic achievement.

It is a stunning, overwhelming accumulation of one of the central creative figures of the 20th century. The estimated sale price of E30-40 million (£20-£27 million) hardly does it justice. There are manuscripts of some of the great literary figures, such as Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud and Louis Aragon, together with paintings by Rene Magritte, Andre Masson and Max Ernst, to mention but a few. In cultural terms it is a priceless collection, the like of which may never appear again. Thus the worthy petition urging the French government to save it for the nation and stump up a museum to house it all.

But Breton was notoriously mistrustful of museums, and left no instructions for the longevity of his collection upon his death in 1966. His family has been trying ever since to persuade the government to establish a Breton foundation. Now it can no longer afford the responsibility of maintaining such a collection. This is, in fact, probably best for the collection in the long run. The sale should go ahead - with all its documentation, annotation, public fanfare and dissenting voices - as the symbolic moment when the collection entered the public domain, if only to be broken up a moment later.

An extraordinary French law still gives the government the right to exercise a sort of droit de seigneur, to buy any works it chooses right up until the moment after the hammer has fallen, but it doesn't look as if it is going to be buying up huge chunks of Breton's estate. His legacy seems to be bound for the breaker's yard.

The estate that John Edwards inherited after Bacon's death in 1992 was valued at £11 million. Today, a very small Bacon can fetch £1 million. Over the past decade Edwards has sold off some important works quietly through galleries and private dealers in London and New York. No one knows how many paintings are left but there is certainly still a sizeable collection - somewhere - and it is too important to remain in storage. Bacon's executors are tightlipped as to the location and the beneficiaries.

If the main beneficiary, as is widely supposed, is Edwards's long-time partner, Philip Mordue, I would advise him to flog the lot. Forget finding a suitable public home, just get the stuff out into the public domain where it can shine.

If museums want to bid, then bid they must, but don't turn the collection into a Bacon museum. Bacon himself would have been horrified by the idea. Throughout his life he went out of his way to subvert any kind of archival authority attached to his work. But, in death, the controlled images of a few carefully released paintings a year have been muddied by supplementary material.

Bacon claimed not to make preparatory drawings, for example, although a hundred or so miraculously appeared after he died, and his self-criticism led him to destroy many more paintings than he allowed out of the studio. I suspect that some of the works were saved from the Stanley knife by a welltimemeaning assistant, and that they are also circulating in the commercial world.

Perhaps most horrifying for Bacon would have been the transplanting of his Kensington studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. A team of archaeologists spent 12 months taking the studio apart, documenting it item by item, to rebuild it in the museum. It has been a hugely popular attraction since opening two years ago, with almost a third of the museum's 100,000 annual visitors paying a premium for a gawp at the holy sanctum.

Yet it feels all wrong. To transpose the messy energy of the studio, lock, stock and paint splatter, turns the chaos into pastiche. I don't care how authentic it looks, it is not the real thing. And what do we gain from the exercise? The museum has been using the studio as the impetus for a centre devoted to the study of Bacon, but I learn little from the installation itself, save that Bacon kept an untidy room. Or worse, I might be tempted to interpret extraneous details as monumental truths towards the understanding of the great artist.

Andy Warhol anticipated just this kind of absurdity. He kept an archive box by his desk. Anything interesting that arrived in the post - any trivia of any kind, for that matter, candy-bar wrappers as well as junk mail - ended up in the box. When it was full it went into storage, and a fresh box was brought out. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has been slowly annotating the contents of these boxes. They are riveting capsules - like the ones they used to bury on Blue Peter, only with more glamour - but they don't mean much.

Hoarding is just what we do. And Warhol hoarded more than most. The incongruous collection of cookie jars and other ephemera that packed his New York townhouse, on the other hand, were sold off at hugely inflated prices after his death, and presumably grace other New York townhouses, masquerading as Warhol "originals".

I cannot think of any museum dedicated to the work of a single artist that has stayed fresh. The Dutch have just expanded their Van Gogh Museum to sustain interest in the 150th anniversary year by building a new wing and renovating the original building, first opened in 1973. Paris has its Picasso museum, as does Barcelona.

Both are political fabrications, each nation claiming the artist as its own, and both are strangely lopsided affairs as a result. What you witness in these places is the occasional masterpiece and a great deal of material that oddly slants the history of the artist.

Prurient curiosity makes these museums irresistible, but the life of the artist should not be cast in stone buildings. If the Bacon or Breton legacies are still to be meaningful, let them find many homes. They will be enlivened by strange environments, rather than by introspection. The legacy is not about preserving artefacts in a still life of the moment of the artist's death, but should provide new perspectives for the work before rigor mortis sets in.

 

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