James Birch: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

This is the story of one curator’s audacious project to stage a retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings in Soviet-era Moscow. It’s also a picture of Soviet and Western relations just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it’s a close encounter with a cast of eccentric characters including the enigmatic Soviet culture minister and Francis Bacon himself. The project’s bold instigator was James Birch, who joins us to share his fascinating true story of Bacon in Moscow.