LONDON>> The last time Barry Joule saw his friend Francis Bacon, it was 10 days before the celebrated painter’s death.

No one in the art world disputes that.

For over a decade before that spring day in 1992, Joule, a Canadian handyman with a rock-star mane, had been one of Bacon’s helpers, doing odd jobs around the artist’s London home and driving him to exhibitions. In Joule’s telling, the two became friends, and even went on the occasional “drunken bender” together.

No one disputes that, either.

What some do contest — fiercely — is a trove of papers and artworks that Joule says the artist gave him at that final meeting.

According to Joule, Bacon, then 82, handed over some bundles that included hundreds of newspaper and magazine cuttings, some of them with added brush strokes and paint splotches. Joule says Bacon also gave him an album of sketches, with drawings that look like the artist’s famous “screaming pope” paintings, and some canvases in the style of artists like Picasso or Dalí.

All those works, Joule insisted in hours of interviews, were by Bacon’s hand and are important historical documents. “It’s my rock-solid belief,” he said.

Some in the art world appear to agree with Joule, including staff from the Tate museum group in London who accepted his donation of the trove in 2004 and then, almost two decades later, quietly gave everything back. Now, the Pompidou Center in Paris is considering taking them — though Bacon’s own estate has urged it not to.

Is Joule a keeper of Bacon’s secrets? Or is he, at best, misguided — or, at worst, a fantasist and a trickster?

The art world can’t seem to decide.

Unlikely friends

Art historians have long viewed Bacon, who was born in Dublin in 1909, as one of the 20th century’s great artists. With a louche private life that also made him a tabloid celebrity, Bacon first came to prominence in the late 1940s.

Since his death, Bacon’s paintings have become among the most expensive ever auctioned. In 2013, a Bacon triptych sold at Christie’s for $142.4 million dollars — a record for an artwork at the time.

When an artist reaches those heights, people often come forth claiming they have a lost masterpiece that they want to sell. Those cases normally end once experts weigh in. But Joule said he had never tried to sell anything from the archive, which The Times of London said was once valued at 20 million pounds. His quest to have the works recognized wasn’t a cash grab, he said. It was about honoring his friend.

Throughout his life, Bacon gravitated toward eccentrics and people on society’s margins. He hung out with the Kray brothers, famous cockney gangsters. The love of his life was Peter Lacy, a former air force pilot who used to beat up the artist for both men’s sexual pleasure. He also had relationships with George Dyer, a petty thief, and John Edwards, a barman who went on to inherit Bacon’s multimillion-dollar fortune.

When Joule met Bacon, he was in many ways an outsider himself. Joule was born in Montreal, but the date is unclear. As a condition of the interviews, he refused to answer questions about two topics: his age and his hair.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1966, then left for London four years later, lured by the music of the Rolling Stones and other bands. There, he worked odd jobs, traveling in between.

Joule would likely never have gotten interested in Bacon if the artist hadn’t stuck his head out of a window one morning in 1978 and shouted “Oy!” at Joule, whose apartment was at the back of Bacon’s studio. The night before, a storm had blown through London, Joule recalled, and Bacon asked if Joule could see any damage to his roof.

Joule said he climbed a ladder, sweating and wearing a pair of shorts, and reattached a television aerial that had been blown over. Then, as a thank you, Joule said, Bacon invited him into his studio to drink Champagne.

Soon, Joule said, Bacon started telephoning him for help with odd jobs and repairs. Over the next 14 years, a friendship bloomed.

“My moment of glory”

On April 18, 1992, Joule arrived at Bacon’s studio to give the artist a ride to the airport. But before leaving, Joule said, Bacon handed over the bundles of paper and the canvases and told Joule to put them into his car. “You know what to do with them,” Joule recalled Bacon saying. (One of Bacon’s former neighbors said in an interview that she saw the handover.)

Marvin Gasoi, a friend of Joule’s at the time, said that two months later, he visited Joule in his London home, where he saw several trash bags filled with newspaper cuttings covered in paint.

The cuttings, he said, looked like things he had seen in photos of Bacon’s messy studio.

William A. Ewing, a photography curator who has known Joule since childhood, said he also saw some of what Joule had in the 1990s. He said that some of the pieces had felt instinctively like Bacon’s work and reminded him of specific paintings.

Critics expressed different views, however, when Joule started showing items to curators, some of whom displayed them at the Barbican Gallery in London and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Richard Dorment, reviewing the Barbican show for The Daily Telegraph, said it was “clear” that Bacon’s witty, inventive markings were present on some of the altered newsprint, though he didn’t believe Bacon had made the preparatory sketches. “My impression is that they were created by someone who already knew the famous painted images, but who didn’t understand the anatomical or spatial complexities of the originals,” he wrote.

Joule dismissed that theory in interviews, including during one at his apartment overlooking Marseille’s waterfront.

Joule had laid out paintings from the archive that he insisted Bacon painted while learning his craft as a young artist. They didn’t look anything like Bacon’s acclaimed work. To me, they looked more like thrift-store cubism.

Joule appeared downtrodden to hear that. “I’m not saying they’re any good,” he said. “I don’t think they’re very good, OK?” he added. “I’m just saying they’re Francis Bacons.”

Even with questions over its artistic quality, Joule said Bacon’s estate had tried to obtain the archive in 1998; Edwards asked him to hand over the works. Edwards died in 2003, but a letter from the estate’s lawyers shows that a few months after that meeting, Edwards demanded that Joule hand over anything by Bacon in his possession “within 48 hours” or face legal action.

Joule said he knocked away the estate’s demand. He gave a few items from the archive to museums in France and Canada, and achieved something of a coup in 2004, when Tate accepted the majority of the items as a major donation.

But though the works were listed in the museum’s database, Tate only displayed a few items from the trove, in 2019.

Two years later, the Bacon estate published a collection of essays, including one that claimed Joule’s entire trove was a fraud. In it, Sophie Pretorius, the estate’s archivist, wrote that Bacon’s work was “not easy to mimic,” but that “the author of the items in the Barry Joule Archive made a stab at it.”

Many things didn’t add up, Pretorius said. Items in the archive feature markings in watercolor or gouache, but there were none of these materials in Bacon’s studio when he died, she said. A small newspaper clipping in the archive even dated from three years after Bacon’s death, according to Pretorius.

In 2022, Tate took the rare decision to remove the items Joule had donated from its collection, a process known in the museum world as “deacessioning.” In an emailed statement, a Tate spokesperson said that Pretorius’ research had “raised credible doubts about the nature and quality” of Joule’s archive.

Missing the point

The longer I researched this story, the more I came to feel that, by focusing on the archive, everyone involved in this dispute, including Joule himself, was missing out on the great story here: a movie-ready tale of how a chance encounter led to a 14-year-long relationship between a handyman and one of the 20th century’s great painters.

And I also realized that those sketches and old paintings might not even be the most interesting Bacon ephemera that Joule owns. He also has tapes.

Joule said that he had sometimes recorded his conversations with the artist, with Bacon’s consent. The discussions usually started with art, he said, but as the pair drank glass after glass of wine, the topics would drift.

On my last day in Marseille, Joule called in at my hotel for a farewell chat and placed an old-fashioned portable tape player on a table in a lobby. Out of its small speaker sprang Bacon’s fragile voice, pontificating about Charles de Gaulle, the French military leader in World War II. “He did a lot of things for France, of course he did,” Bacon said, “but for some reason, he and Churchill got on very, very badly.”

Joule would only let me hear that bizarre snippet, but he insisted he had hours more. If so, it seemed like great material for a radio documentary or a podcast. But Joule said he wasn’t interested in anything like that.

“There’s nothing else interesting to me, really,” Joule said, “except for the Bacon connection.”