June 22 – Valencia
Dear friends, Authorithies, dear President of the Bancaixa Faundation Rafael Alcon Traver, I wish first of all to apologize if for personal family reasons I cannot be with you and to have the pleausure and the privilege to see some of the items beloved Francis Bacon gave me welcomed in your wonderful city. Not only his bioghrapers but also is still living inner circle know that the artist used to say “I have two hearts but out of my body, one is Italy one in Spain.” This is so true that he made his last holiday in Sicily with his last companion the spanish Jose Capello and is a destiny sign that in your country in Madrid the painter died.
They are too many things to say between his relationship with spanish culture to be exaustive but please let me quote something which is very meaningful about his character. It’s written in all the articles about him that he never had the courage to see the Innocenzo X by Velasquez (a painting which turned in a archetype for him) preserved in Rome by five hundred years in the same place, palace Doria Pamphilj. But he was very happy when recently the last descendant of this historical family prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj invited me in his prestigious house to discuss a show inside with some of the Popes the painter gave me (which would be the first exhibition of modern art in five hundred years in what is believed to be the most beautiful old private palace in the world )and told me he was aware that in 1977 when first I met Bacon in Rome the first thing he asked was to go to see this painting… and is true he let people think he never saw this work but he was a gambler not only with roulette but also with his life.
I cannot not to thank, deeply, by heart, professor Ferdinando Castro who made a wonderful very poignant sharp Catalogue in his amazing show in Madrid in Circulo de Bellas Artes , my editor of my Catalogue Raisonnè (whose second and last volume is going to be ended) the director of the London Art Collector Sergei Reviakin who went in Valencia from London, my Swiss referent Lars Malmberg who honourated the Madrid show with the nephew of the spanish King and, last but not least, my lawyer who is reading Umberto Guerini who defended so brilliantly my story that not much time ago the english ArtNews Paper -alluding to him- wrote “Are lawyers replacing the art historians?”
To end If Francis was among us he certainly would have suggested: “Drink the best champagne you find and flatter the most beautiful person you like: life is more important than art.”
CRISTIANO LOVATELLI RAVARINO
