Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In James Birch’s 2022 memoir Bacon in Moscow, the former London art dealer produced a rattling memoir about his haphazard attempt to stage a Francis Bacon retrospective in Russia’s shadowy capital in the late 1980s. The title was somewhat misleading: the elderly and ailing Bacon didn’t get to Moscow even if his paintings did. Birch’s follow-up, Gilbert & George and the Communists, doubles down on his successful formula — a combination of travelogue, art history and anarchic humour — with a tale of two artists who at least went east, first to Moscow in 1990, then Beijing and Shanghai.Italian-born Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, the English son of a single mother from Plymouth, met at St Martin’s School of Art in London in the late 1960s and swiftly restyled themselves as “Gilbert & George”. To this day, this self-identification as “living sculptures” involves them dressing in tandem (tweed suits preferably), finishing or repeating each other’s sentences and living together in an 18th-century house in east London. In addition to this personality brand, they are best known for large-format photo montages, often self-portraits inserted into colour-saturated compositions of flying underpants and bodily fluids.Birch recalls how, over tea and biscuits in their Spitalfields kitchen, the couple commission him to take their art to Moscow. Birch’s recollection of the meeting sets the tone: “In the flesh, there was no noticeable sexual frisson between them. They seemed to me more like maiden aunts than lovers, or perhaps bachelor uncles who are telepathically in sync with each other.” The duo married in 2008.While Bacon’s character — caustic, brilliant, masochistic — was all on the surface, Gilbert & George remain a mercurial subject. This makes for a more interesting book than its precursor. Similarly, the pair’s engagement with communist countries — a mixture of curiosity, amusement and enthusiastic partying — is particularly strange considering they are committed Thatcherites.Much comedy is created out of these two gay conceptual artists floundering around in the slowly imploding nucleus of the Soviet Union. They arrive in Moscow with an entourage that includes their housekeeper and the alcoholic writer Daniel Farson. Night after night, a KGB fixer gets them all drunk on vodka; meanwhile, the curators at the Central House of Artists are woefully slow at packing up the previous exhibition on Lenin postage stamps. At a press conference, George tells bemused reporters that he is looking forward to seeing the Kremlin’s collection of royal dildos. And, in the background, Gorbachev is dealing with unrest on all sides.Birch has a winning and wry delivery (the book was co-authored with the journalist Michael Hodges) that balances his genuine love of art and artists with a frank takedown of the outrageous egos that pepper his days. And he has the gallerist’s knack for talking up a scene.He is particularly funny in his dissection of officialdom, both Russian and British. The fog-like Soviet bureaucracy is unnavigable but is as nothing compared with the Machiavellian interference of the British Council, the civil service organisation designated to promote British culture overseas. And yet, against the odds, the show opens to considerable fanfare in 1990. Bolstered by the Moscow success, Gilbert & George called on Birch to present a new series of pictures — “a chorus of sexually fetishised young men, and, in the background, cast-iron sewer lids floating in the sky” — in the National Gallery of Beijing. The reticence of the Chinese to connect with the westerners makes for a low-key coda to the misadventures in Moscow. It also, however, makes for a striking comparison between two forms of communism, one coming to an end and the other, having just cudgelled an uprising in Tiananmen Square, reasserting its power. Birch has written a fond but objective account of his time with Gilbert & George. “I began to wonder if their strange mutually reliant and supportive cocoon also trapped them in a solipsistic world,” he notes in this entertaining portrait of a pair of unknowable peacocks.Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch and Michael Hodges Cheerio £19.99, 208 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
