A Life Among Artists
Art dealer, curator, gallerist and author James Birch has spent more than four decades championing artists, staging ambitious exhibitions and collecting works that tell the story of an extraordinary career. This October, approximately 300 lots from his private collection will form the opening day of Sworders' Modern and Contemporary Art sale.
Birch was brought up surrounded by art. His parents met at Chelsea School of Art, where his mother was taught by Henry Moore, and his own career began at Christie's, first in the Old Master Pictures department and later as a specialist in rock and roll memorabilia. It was, however, as a pioneering dealer in British contemporary art that he made his name, opening James Birch Fine Art on the King's Road in 1983.
Among the most significant works in the collection is a group by Sir Grayson Perry, to whom Birch gave his first solo exhibitions in 1984 and 1985. More than a dozen ceramics will be offered, including the early green pot, titled Il Douche, estimated at £40,000-60,000, and Crown of Penii, 1982, estimated at £60,000-80,000.
Birch first encountered Perry through his then girlfriend Jennifer Binnie, co-founder of the Neo Naturists performance group. Having previously exhibited Binnie's work, Birch was told that her boyfriend was a sculptor working in clay. 'On seeing the pieces, I thought they were fantastic,' he recalls.
His personal favourite is Saint Diana (Let them Eat Shit), a mixed-media miniature throne from Perry's first exhibition, now estimated at £40,000-60,000. 'It's just an extraordinary piece, and he hasn't really made anything like that since,' Birch says. The work was included in the Holburne Museum's 2020 exhibition Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years, which revisited the artist's overlooked early career.
Other objects relate directly to Birch's fascination with the Soviet Union and his role in organising Francis Bacon's landmark Moscow exhibition in 1988, during the era of perestroika. The idea arose unexpectedly while Birch was visiting artists' studios in Russia and asked which British painter they most wished to see. 'All replied with Francis Bacon,' he remembers. 'They would bring out old magazines and books which were falling to pieces, they had been looked at so many times.'
Back in London, Birch approached Bacon at an exhibition opening and asked whether he would consider a show in Russia. Bacon agreed, and the remarkable project began. Birch later documented the experience in his book Bacon in Moscow.
The collection includes letters and telegrams from Bacon discussing the exhibition, including one in which he calls Birch 'Rawhide', a reference to Birch's childhood obsession with the television series starring Clint Eastwood. Also included is Moscow Nights, an anonymous 20th-century painting given to Birch by his KGB minder, Sergei Klokov. Bacon later reciprocated, giving Klokov an original Bacon oil. 'Moscow Nights hanging at home, was a constant and amusing reminder that I had received this, and he a Francis Bacon,' Birch says.
Many of the works were acquired directly from artists Birch exhibited. They include pieces by Keith Coventry, David Robilliard, Mary Lemley and members of the Neo Naturists. There are also works connected to Christine Keeler, whom Birch exhibited in My Life in Pictures at the Mayor Gallery in 2010, including a gelatin silver print of a David Bailey contact sheet and a portrait commissioned from Nina Fowler.
The collection's more unusual objects reveal Birch's broad curiosity. Alongside paintings, prints and sculpture are Oliver Cromwell's death mask, a Victorinox Swiss Army knife automaton and the reconstructed egg of an elephant bird, acquired from a West Country taxidermist who claimed it had appeared in a David Attenborough documentary.
Although estimates range widely, Birch makes little distinction between the valuable and the affordable. 'I've never really approved of the art-for-investment idea,' he says. 'I've always just bought things I liked. If they go up in price, that's a bonus. If they don't, that's fine too.'
For Birch, the sale marks a moment of transition rather than an end to collecting. 'It's time to move things on,' he says. 'It's a time to change one's taste and views of what one likes.'
