Erica Brausen

Erica Brausen was Francis Bacon’s first gallerist, and played a pivotal role in launching his stellar career. “She came to see me and immediately bought a large canvas I had done”, Bacon recalled, “[t]hat’s how it began.”[1] 

Emma Erica [originally Erika] Brausen was born on 31 January 1908 into a wealthy family in Düsseldorf, Germany. Early influences on her taste in art and professional role models may have included Johanna “Mutter” Ey, whose gallery focused on local modernist art, and which was just a stone’s throw away from her family home.[2] Around her twentieth birthday, she relocated to Hanover, where she socialised with Herbert von Garvens-Garvensburg, an early collector and dealer of Expressionist and New Objectivity art.[3] Brausen then moved to Paris, where she immersed herself in the art scene in Montparnasse, becoming friends with artists such as Fernand Léger and Georges Braque, the writer Michel Leiris and the socialite and club owner Suzy Solidor.[4] Here, Brausen organized her first exhibitions.[5] Her friendship with the Spanish artist Joan Miró led her to move to Mallorca in 1935, where she ran a bar frequented by creatives and intellectuals, and where she sold work by local artists.[6] Brausen helped Jewish and Socialist friends – among them Leiris and his wife – escape the naval blockade of the island during the Spanish Civil War.[7] After a brief period of moving back and forth between Mallorca, Paris and London, Brausen settled in London in the late 1930s.[8] As a lesbian, returning to Nazi-ruled Germany was not an option. 

Initially starting out in the fashion scene, Brausen staged small exhibitions in artists’ studios in London during the war and later worked at Storran Gallery, St. George’s Gallery and Redfern Gallery.[9] With her mind set firmly on running her own gallery, she started her stock book in 1945.[10] In 1947, she founded the Hanover Gallery at 32A St. George Street in Mayfair with Arthur Jeffress, the affluent heir of an American tobacco empire.[11] The art historian Robert Melville, who later wrote important early texts on Bacon, joined them as gallery manager.[12]

Their first show was a solo exhibition of the painter Graham Sutherland in 1948.[13] Over the next few years, Hanover Gallery became known for showing exciting established contemporary artists and newcomers from Britain and abroad, including Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Pavel Tchelitchew and Peter Barker-Mill.[14] They also featured some of Bacon’s friends too, such as Isabel Rawsthorne, then Lambert, who exhibited her work in 1951, and briefly represented Lucian Freud.[15] Jean-Yves Mock, who worked for Brausen from 1956 until the gallery’s closure, remembered her keen eye for talent: “With her it was a sort of visceral gaze. Erica Brausen had a way of looking that was absolute. It was instinctive.”[16] Jeffress and Brausen eventually fell out over how to run their joint business, and in 1954 Jeffress left to open his own dealership.[17] Hanover Gallery was bought by the wealthy businessman Michael Behrens, with Brausen left in sole charge.[18] She successfully ran it until 1973, when, due to her worsening health, Brausen had to close the gallery for good.[19]She continued to sell art from her home in London but also via Gimpel–Hanover Galerie she had started in Zurich in the early 1960s with Gimpel fils.[20]

In 1946, Brausen married the homosexual Clement Hazelden for mutual social protection and to obtain British citizenship.[21] But the love of her life was Catherina “Toto” Koopman van Halmaëll, a famous Dutch-Indonesian model and flamboyant socialite, who had worked for Chanel and had been photographed for Vogue, was a spy for the French and Italian Resistance during WWII, and after trained as an archaeologist, taking part in various excavations in the Near East.[22] Koopman also worked with Brausen at Hanover Gallery, taking advantage of her excellent network.[23] In 1959, Koopman and Brausen bought a property on Panarea, a small Italian island north of Sicily, that was to become their home away from home, but which they also used to socialize with artists and collectors, museum directors and critics to the benefit of the gallery.[24] Koopman and Brausen had met in Italy in 1945 or 1946, and shared a complicated but devoted relationship until Koopman’s death in 1991.[25]The painter Louis Le Brocquy described Brausen as ”a powerful person, very impressive, through her convictions,”[26] and Jean-Yves Mock remembered that “in spite of abrasive appearances, Erica Brausen was a woman of great femininity. Sensitive, emotional. Refined and decisive, and decisive about who she wanted to be.”[27]

Bacon and Brausen first met in the summer of 1946 upon Graham Sutherland’s urgent recommendation for her to see Bacon’s latest work.[28] When Brausen did see what was Painting 1946 at Bacon’s Cromwell Place studio, she was so impressed by its originality and raw power that she acquired it on the spot for £200.[29] In 1948, she was to sell it to Alfred Barr, who bought it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which formed an important step in promoting Bacon internationally.[30] Despite the fact that Jeffress loathed Bacon and his art, Brausen decided to work with him.[31] “She was among the first to recognize the magnitude of [Bacon’s] importance as an artist and, at a time when his work was almost unsaleable, […], was passionately committed to supporting it”, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, Stephen Spender and David Sylvester agreed in hindsight.[32] In the winter of 1949, Bacon received his first show at Hanover Gallery, alongside drawings by Robin Ironside.[33] After that, Brausen organized exhibitions for Bacon each year between 1949 and 1957, except in 1956.[34] Under Brausen’s care, Bacon’s career flourished: In 1953, he held his first solo exhibition in the USA at Durlacher Bros. in New York, represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1954 – his first institutional exhibition, had his first show in Paris at the Galerie Rive Droite in 1957, and his first travelling exhibition in Italy in 1958, with shows at the Galleria Galatea Turin, the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan and L’Obelisco in Rome.[35] Bacon’s early patrons, (Sir) Robert and (Lady) Lisa Sainsbury bought all their Bacon paintings except one from the Hanover Gallery.[36] Brausen’s relationship with Bacon was described as “a volatile mixture of real friendship, possessiveness and ambition”.[37] Their professional exchange was based purely on trust and an oral agreement.[38] It was soon determined by unsustainable dynamics, however. Bacon, the notorious gambler, was constantly out of money, and, in suppliant letters, kept asking for advances for works that were yet to be painted, let alone sold.[39] In return, Brausen, keen to organise exhibitions for her most promising artist, and most importantly to sell his work to recoup what she had already paid, pressured Bacon to produce new paintings for her shows.[40] While Brausen did provide Bacon with a monthly allowance and tried to satisfy his never ending demands for more funds, this eventually proved to be beyond her means.[41] 

Much to Brausen’s displeasure, Bacon resorted to selling paintings behind her back to friends and other dealers.[42] In 1957, Bacon came to an agreement with Marlborough Gallery and signed a contract with them the following year.[43] He may also have preferred a less personal relationship with his dealers, but ultimately it was financial reasons that drove him away from Brausen.[44]Marlborough Gallery, incomparably bigger and financially stronger, instantly paid his gambling debts and what he owed to Hanover Gallery.[45] Bacon – apparently visibly upset – delivered the news and the cheque in person to Brausen’s assistant Michael Greenwood.[46] Brausen was abroad at the time and Bacon did not wait for her return.[47] When she learned that Bacon had left, she was devastated and briefly considered pursuing legal action, but finally acquiesced to what she perceived as a betrayal and a personal defeat.[48] While this was the end of their private and professional relationship, Brausen provided vital archival information and support to the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné published in 1964.[49] When in the late 1970s Bacon heard that Brausen was unwell, he sent her £100,000 to pay for medical bills she could not afford herself.[50] Brausen died in London on 16 December 1992.

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