Gilbert & George and the Communists: an 'illuminating' look at the 'peculiar' world of the art duo

"James Birch is a somewhat mysterious art dealer and curator" who made a name for himself in 1988 by mounting a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow, said Lynn Barber in The Spectator.

In 2022, he published "Bacon in Moscow", a "gripping book about that adventure". Now, he has "written an even more gripping follow-up, about taking Gilbert & George to Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai".

Birch first met the collaborative art duo in 1979 at the Blitz, a nightclub in Covent Garden. One time, he drunkenly drove them home; when he was arrested for dangerous driving, they "just melted away". A decade later, after he had successfully mounted the Bacon show in Moscow, they asked him to do the same for their work. They'd invite him to their home in Fournier Street, east London and, dressed in their trademark suits, discuss the details over tea and biscuits. Birch observed that "they seemed to me more like maiden aunts than lovers, or perhaps bachelor uncles who are telepathically in sync with each other".

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The Moscow trip took place in 1990, and Birch paints a very funny picture of the two Thatcherite artists "floundering around in the slowly imploding nucleus of the Soviet Union", said Christian House in the Financial Times. Each night, a KGB fixer would ply them with vodka. The opening of their show was delayed by the curators at the Central House of Artists being "woefully slow at packing up the previous exhibition on Lenin postage stamps". Birch evokes not only the "fog-like Soviet bureaucracy", but also the "Machiavellian interference of the British Council", which objected to an exhibition of British work being staged without their involvement. Yet when the show finally opened, it was a big success; this led to Birch taking a new series of Gilbert & George paintings – mainly of "sexually fetishised young men" with "cast-iron sewer lids" floating in the background – to China a few years later.

A "chummy" companion with a "raffish, Bertie Wooster charm", Birch provides an "illuminating look into the peculiar world of Gilbert & George", said Orlando Whitfield in the TLS. For decades, they've lived the same "hermitic and ritualised" existence – eating all their meals at the same three restaurants – while the world about them has changed beyond recognition. Evoking a "madcap demi-monde" that has now all but disappeared, this is an enjoyable read, and an "excellent book".