15 October 2013
Has Francis Bacon’s leather bomber jacket been found? Artist Catherine Shakespeare Lane is reviving her show The Jacket at Soho’s French House this week. This takes the form of a slide show featuring 31 of the 100 photographs she took between 1974 and 1976 of every man she knew sporting a bomber jacket she had pulled out of a skip in Chelsea in 1973.
Also in the show is the original leather jacket with its slashed back. However, French House landlady Lesley Lewis has decided this is the one that belonged to Bacon, who favoured that style and, of course, drank in The French with the 31 men. CSL concedes she may be right. “He was living near the skip then, so it would fit.”
