PAINTINGS by David Hockney have been damned from the grave by Francis Bacon as “such rubbish”.

Bacon’s criticisms can be heard in private recordings that have been revealed to The Times before their publication this year. In a conversation taped on a summer’s day in 1982, Bacon can be heard un-equivocably dismissing Hockney’s paintings.

Having just visited the Tate, he complains about the gallery’s incongruous juxtaposition of one of his own favourite works, his huge and powerful Triptych — August 1972, with Hockney’s well-known painting My Parents.

Bacon says on the tape: “They are such rubbish, those Hockneys . . . I mean that awful one of his mother and father — so depressing, it really is, the dreary side of north England.”

He was referring to Hockney’s 1977 painting, in which the Bradford-born artist depicts his mother being attentive and graceful, while his father reads. The Tate bought it in 1981, a year after buying Bacon’s Triptych, in which two solitary figures frame a couple engaged in a struggle that seems both violent and sexual. It was Bacon’s haunting farewell to his friend George Dyer, who had committed suicide.

Bacon objected to the displaying of the works together, saying that the Hockney “doesn’t mean anything to me — I don’t know why I should have been put in the room with David Hockney . . . I don’t care for him and he doesn’t care for me”.

The comments are particularly controversial because Bacon and Hockney are so widely revered and the criticisms have emerged only after Bacon’s death. Bacon is admired for iconic paintings that convey brutality and pain. His masterpieces include his screaming popes in which Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was converted into a nightmarish depiction of hysterical terror.

Hockney’s best-known paintings include A Bigger Splash (1967), which shows a splash made by an unseen diver in a brilliant-blue swimming pool.

Bacon’s view of Hockney was preserved in 16 hours of interviews with Barry Joule, a Canadian friend and neighbour in South Kensington for 14 years. Mr Joule, 51, who will publish the tape’s contents in a book, Francis Bacon — Verbatim, said Bacon knew that they would one day be made public. “He trusted me,” Mr Joule said. “The book will be Francis absolutely verbatim — not a single word altered — his views on a huge range of topics . . . art, people, you name it.

“Francis put a stranglehold copyright on me . . . for 12 years after his death. That is up now and my book will set many a Francis Bacon record straight.”

The two men met in 1978, forming a friendship that would last until the artist’s death in 1992. They would sit down together to make the recordings, chatting until they ran out of tape.

The artist gave his friend works that included 1,200 sketches, which Mr Joule donated to the Tate in 2004. Estimated to be worth £20 million, it was one of the most generous donations in the Tate’s history. He will donate all his tapes to the Tate after the book’s publication.

Mr Joule also has a large number of unpublished photographs of Bacon, which he will feature in the book. One of them is the subject of a legal action against the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in Paris, headquarters of the French museums, over an alleged breach of copyright. Mr Joule claims that the organisation reproduced one of the pictures without his permission.

On being told of the tapes, Hockney’s dealer, David Juda, said: “Bacon is a great artist. I’m sure David would think Bacon is a great artist . . . I cannot believe that deep down in his latter years he [Bacon] didn’t respect Hockney.”

FRANCIS BACON

• Born in Dublin in 1909 to wealthy English parents
• Inspired to become an artist by a Picasso exhibition at a Paris art gallery
• The blood-spattered face of the screaming nurse in Sergei Einsentein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925) also inspired him, notably in Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope (1952)
• Based mainly in London, he achieved some renown as a furniture designer in the 1930s, but soon returned to painting
• Died in Madrid in 1992

DAVID HOCKNEY

• Born in Bradford in 1937. Now based in California
• Paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools are among his best-known pieces
• Many of his works are portraits of friends, most frequently of Celia Birtwell
• Experimented with collages of Polaroid snaps
• Appointed Companion of Honour in 1997
• Many works are housed in Salts Mill near Bradford
• Last September declared his opposition to the proposed British ban on smoking in public places

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