Red-letter days for Gilbert & George
James Birch is a somewhat mysterious art dealer and curator, whose first great triumph was mounting a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow in 1988. He wrote a gripping book about that adventure, Bacon in Moscow, and has now written an even more gripping follow-up, about taking Gilbert and George to Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai. Mounting the Moscow exhibition meant getting drunk every night, but Birch carried it off with aplomb Birch was born ‘circa 1956’, according to Wikipedia, and grew up in Primrose Hill, London. Both his parents were artists and also communists, which he claims was not unusual in the 1960s (though I’d say it was, quite). At the
