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LINKS
The Colony Club
Image: Museum of London
THE COLONY ROOM CLUB
- The Colony Room: Museum of London
- Colony Room Club's half-century exhibition.
- The Colony Room Club . . .You walk up a dingy, stygian stairwell into a small, slightly claustrophobic room full of paintings, posters, yellowing cuttings and artworks. A piano lies on one side, a bar the other. The green carpet has fag burns all over it. . . " by Oliver Bennett, The Guardian, Saturday January 16, 1999
- Loafer's guide: The Colony Room - Observer, October 28, 2001
I shay, I jusht met the mosht shintillating bunch of artistsh, but I sheem to have had one over the eight Don't tell me; you've spent a lost weekend in 'a smallish dingy Soho room, painted a bilious green, reached by an evil-smelling staircase flanked by dustbins'?
How did you guesh? It's the legendary Colony Room, a refuge for Bohemians since 1948 when it was opened by Muriel Belcher, 'a handsome Jewish dyke', as one member fondly recalls, who paid Francis Bacon �10 a week (and plied him with free stimulants) to procure mates like Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Michael Andrews as members and fellow carousers. Princess Margaret popped in, tacky columnist Taki got thrown out, Dylan Thomas thoughtfully enhanced the puce surroundings with copious amounts of vomit and David Bowie asked for a cup of tea - and didn't get it (you'll also get short shrift if you want cocktails, draught beer, coffee or ciabatta sandwiches). . .
- THE COLONY ROOM CLUB: PART 1
- THE COLONY ROOM CLUB: PART 2
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SOME COLONY CLUB MEMBERS:
MICHAEL ANDREWS
Tim Behrens, 1962
oil on canvas, 123 x 123 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Lugano Switzerland
- MURIEL BELCHER: enter here
 click on image to enlarge
LUCIAN FREUD
"Bruce Bernard," 1996
oil painting
(image source)
- BRUCE BERNARD: (1928-2000)
- Bruce Bernard by Adrian Searle (March 31, 2000) Picture editor and writer whose passionate eye honed a sharp response to the images of a century
"Bruce Bernard, who has died aged 72, was an alarming, angry, affectionate and singular man. . . Bruce may have been a stalwart of a dying bohemia, but he achieved far more than he squandered in Soho's white nights and black afternoons. . . Having left the Sunday Times, Bernard went on to be picture editor for the Independent magazine . . . he continued to drink in Soho and to chronicle, in photography, the life about him - and, in particular, his friendships with Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Freud, with whom he sometimes used to breakfast at the Savoy. . . As well as compiling the definitive survey of the work of George Rodger, co-founder of Magnum, and curating an exhibition of the work of photographer John Deakin for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bernard went on to curate a photographic exhibition for the Barbican gallery in1994 and to show his own photographs. His portraits of Leigh Bowery and Lucian Freud (about whom he produced an excellent, image-based monograph), Francis Bacon in the studio doorway, Euan Uglow trapped by the string sight-lines which measure the space of his studio, are incredibly powerful...
- Lucian Freud by Bruce Bernard
- Humanity and Inhumanity. The Photographic Journey of George Rodger. Text by Bruce Bernard. Picture research by Peter Marlow. Foreword by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Phaidon, London, 1994.
- "Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope" by Bruce Bernard, Phaidon Press, 1999
- Cornerhouse Publications
index
- JEFFREY BERNARD: (1932-1997)
- "Jeffrey Bernard, intermittent Spectator columnist and formidable vodka drinker, used to wander into the bar at the London theatre where the play about his louche life was being performed. He would proclaim that the star, Tom Conti, did not approve of his lifestyle and was therefore unsuitable for the part. Bernard died three years ago but the play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, lives on. . . " - Caledonia Magazine
- Interview from The Idler
"Bernard was shown to be a likeable alcoholic filled with wit." His books include anthologies from his Spectator column (Low Life and Reach For The Ground, the downhill struggle of Jeffrey Bernard), and his biography Just the One: the Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard.
- Jeffrey Bernard
- Jeffrey Bernard Memorial Site
index
- IAN BOARD: (Belcher's successor 1979-1995):
- PATRICK CAULFIELD: (painter) enter here
- NOBBY CLARK: (illustrator):
- ROBERT COLQUHOUN: 1914-1962
- JOHN DEAKIN: (1912-1972):
- image: JOHN DEAKIN by LUCIAN FREUD, 1963/64
oil on canvas, 30.2 x 24.8 cm, private collection
- Bacon's Soho
"John Deakin began the Colony years as a Vogue photographer, but was sacked from his prestigious job after turning-up with one too many hangovers."
- Hugh Lane Gallery: Photographs by John Deakin
- Influence and Inspiration: Francis Bacon's Use of Photography.
"They were a particularly ambivalent yet strangely fitting pair of friends. Francis Bacon was one of the pre-eminent post-modernist painters of our times, while John Deakin, despite a prolific career as a photographer for British VOGUE, remains a relative unknown. . .
Francis Bacon by John Deakin, 1954
source
". . . Bacon rarely refers specifically to his use of Deakin's portraits. Deakin started photographing in 1939 and continued to work intently if intermittently through the mid-1960's. His heyday occurred during the '50's when he was under contract to VOGUE (where he had the dubious distinction of being the only staff photographer ever fired twice by the same administration). Although his tenure there was short-lived, in a period of approximately 4 years he produced more work than his contemporaries at VOGUE, including Norman Parkinson, Clifford Coffin and Cecil Beaton. . . The poet and novelist, Elizabeth Smart, remarked that Deakin had"tyrannical eyes," and the art critic, John Russell, wrote that Deakin 'rivaled Bacon in his ability to make a likeness in which truth came unwrapped and unpackaged. His portraits, like Bacon's, had a dead-centered, unrhetorical quality. A complete human being was set before us, without additives.' Deakin's portraits were characterised by a monochromatic austerity and raw clarity that wasn't in keeping with the buoyancy of the work done by Parkinson or Beaton; indeed, it precedes the nearest thing to it - the photographs of David Bailey and Richard Avedon - by a decade. 'Whoever the sitter, Hollywood actor, celebrated writer or valued friend,' writes Robin Muir in his catalogue essay, 'Deakin made no concessions to vanity, his portraits are never idealised or evasive, and typically contain no pretense to flattery. There is no soft focus, no blurring or retouching. At their most extreme these images are cruel depictions. And even now, over forty years later, his prints are still defiantly modern.' "
". . . Many of his subjects were his friends and drinking companions from the pubs and clubs of Soho; Bacon and Deakin, along with Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and Lucien Freud comprised a group (virtually a subset of R.B. Kitaj's "School of London"), that would frequently gather for drinks at Muriel Belcher's club, the Colony Room, a setting described as "a place you could take your grandmother, and possibly your father, but not your mother." But while Bacon would regularly return to his studio from a late night out and religiously put in several hours painting, drinking affected Deakin's work . . ."
". . .Deakin's photographic output essentially ended in 1961, yet he and Bacon retained some semblance of a friendship. It was Bacon who was listed as Deakin's next of kin during his last hospital stay and it was Bacon who paid for his convalescence in Brighton where Deakin died of heart failure in 1972. . . Deakin could have been speaking for Bacon . .. when he said 'Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I photograph it is to make a revelation about it. So my sitters turn into my victims.' "
APERTURE, Fall, 1996
- John Deakin crude, cutting and brutal photos by an anticonformist photographer
- John Deakin: Photographs
San Francisco Chronicle, 8-24-97
 "Deakin made everything from street photographs to portraits of his friends in London's Soho demimonde to fashion photographs for British Vogue. He took the definitive portrait of the young Francis Bacon, filling the frame with Bacon's face, making its natural pudginess look like the onset of an allergic reaction and revealing a pulse of fear behind Bacon's confrontational gaze. . ."
". . . After he was fired again from Vogue, Deakin continued to be recognized for his photographic work, two books of which were published. But he soon began a long, steep decline into drink and illness. After his death, most of his prints and negatives were found, ill-treated, in a box under his bed. Creased, scratched and torn, many of the images in John Deakin: Photographer seem to convey his fecklessness as well as his brilliance."
- RETURN TO: FRANCIS BACON SLIDE SHOW
MICHEAL ANDREWS
Portrait of John Deakin, 1963
oil on board, 92 x 90 cm
private collection
index
- DANIEL FARSON: (1927-1997)
"'If I described a Soho type of person, it would be someone who enjoyed drink and food and conversation and laughter, who would never cash a cheque at a bank but always with a friend or pub or shop, who'd probably cry quite a lot and enjoy it, and would miss the train back home if a party was going on.' So said the photojournalist and Soho habitu� Daniel Farson in a 1991 radio interview."
"'Dan had a sort of despair, I think,' George Melly recalled. 'It didn't kill him for a long time, but the fact is that at a certain point in the evening he turned from being the very charming man he was into a werewolf.'>
Nigel Richardson
Daily Telegraph
September 16, 2000
- BARRY FLANAGAN
- LUCIAN FREUD:
LUCIAN FREUD
"Naked Portrait," 1980-81
oil/canvas, 90 x 75 cm
INDEX
- RONALD B. KITAJ:
- ROBERT MacBRYDE (1913-1966):
- GEORGE MELLY:
George Melly met his wife in the Colony Room.
Painting by Maggi Hambling
George Melly at Ronnie Scott's,
Looking out at the Audience
2000, oil/canvas
Marlborough Fine Art, London
- JOHN MINTON: enter here
- HENRIETTA MORAES: enter here
- EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
- MICHAEL PARKIN
Organized an exhibition of Colony Club members ( Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Eduardo Paolozzi, etc.) in 1982.
- ISABEL RAWSTHORNE: enter here
- MICHAEL WISEHART:
- MICHAEL WOJAS:
Michael Wojas, the Colony Club's current proprieter, was barman before he took over on Ian Board's death in 1994. . .
"In the old days Lucian Freud and Lord and Lady Muck would be mixing with Brian the Burglar and barrow boys from Berwick Street Market," says Michael, "and Francis Bacon and Dan Farson were particularly fond of them. The club is just too small not to mix and I've reflected that by using the hot-shots of the day with people who have been members of the Colony for quite a few years but aren't so well known."
Clancy Gebler Davies (10-22 -98)
OTHER MEMBERS
"At 50 years old the Colony Room Club has survived longer than many of its members - but then membership of this Soho drinking den was never the sort of thing you'd want to own up to on life insurance forms. So it's a relief for those of us sick of hearing that Soho isn't what it used to be to find the Colony in surprisingly good shape after all those years of serious service to hedonism."
"Now Francis (Bacon) is dead and Lucian Freud prefers to prowl pastures new, but a new generation has joined the Colony to be seen happily propping up the bar and falling down the stairs. It has become a watering-hole of BritArt stars such as Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Daniel Chadwick as well as the older guard including Barry Flanagan, Patrick Caulfield, David Remfry, Chris Battye, Nic Tucker and others, many of whom have drunk there for years and whose work adorns what you can see of the bilious green walls - and all of whom are in the show."
Clancy Gebler Davies (10-22 -98)
- Chris Battye
- Daniel Chadwick
- Brian Chalkey
- Mat Collishaw
- Kathy Dalwood
- Tracey Emin
- Angus Fairhurst
- Damien Hirst
Damien's son Conor was granted honorary membership
as youngest person (at 8 days) to have visited the Club.
- Bobby Hunt
- Jay Jopling
- Catherine Shakespeare Lane
- Sarah Lucas
- Justin Mortimer
- Marc Quinn
- David Remfry
- Lisa Stansfield
- Nic Tucker
- Sam Taylor Wood
"Perhaps the secret of the Colony's success and longevity is that it has always been a mixture of the famous, the infamous and - by far the largest group - those who couldn't give a damn. Princess Margaret has popped in, columnist Taki got thrown out and David Bowie is the only person to have survived asking for a cup of tea (not that he got it)." Clancy Gebler Davies
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