Matisse has been damned from the grave by Francis Bacon in a previously-unknown interview which is to be made public for the first time. The French master is revered worldwide as a giant of modern art, but Bacon could not have been more dismissive of him in recordings revealed to The Times.

In the recordings, which will be published next month, Bacon was talking privately to Michael Peppiatt, his official biographer and friend, in 1987 when he said of Matisse: “I’ve never liked his things very much, except the very, very early things... I loathe them. I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can’t bear the drawings either - I absolutely hate his line. I find his line sickly.”

Nor was he impressed by Matisse’s sculptures.

Dr Peppiatt had refrained from publishing the comments at the time because he thought Bacon might object. Wary of using an off-the-record conversation, he recalled: “Bacon wouldn’t have wanted to be seen as slagging off another artist.”

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He was astonished to rediscover the material in returning to the tapes for a new biography for Yale University Press.

“I thought I’d better listen to them again,” he said. “I was surprised to find quite a few things that 25 or 30 years ago didn’t seem so important. Now we regard Bacon with such fascination that even the odd asides become significant.”

Commenting on why Bacon would have disliked Matisse so vehemently, he singled out works such as the images of odalisques.

He said: “The odalisques were everything Bacon isn’t. They are very fluent, fluid, easy, graceful, harmonious - and Bacon is the opposite of all that.”

Dr Peppiatt will now include the interviews in Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, whose publication coincides with a major Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain and as the artist continues to break records in the salerooms.

The Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich is among his most fervent collectors, paying a staggering $86.3 million (£44.4 million) for the 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s New York. The purchase set a new auction record for a post-war work of art. Yet, in the 1940s, an art charity in Britain struggled to persuade any public collection to accept another major Bacon painting as a gift. Not one of the museums and galleries approached was remotely interested then in his angst-ridden pictures.

Bacon, whose paintings express the isolation, brutality and pain of human existence, is best-known for images such as his screaming popes in which Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was converted into a nightmarish depiction of hysterical terror.

This month, the James Hyman Gallery in London will also be exhibiting a previously-unseen mutilated Bacon canvas, an untitled Study for a Pope, which dates from around 1959. Bacon slashed and gouged out the central section, leaving only the top of the head and shoulders.

It was acquired by a collector last year from Ron Thomas, a porter at Marlborough Gallery, Bacon’s dealer. Mr Thomas used to deliver and collect paintings for Bacon, and do odd jobs around the house. Over the years, they became great friends, so much so that Bacon would give him and his family cheques at Christmas.

Its owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Times: “I could never afford to pay £10 million or £15 million for a complete large canvas. To me, this was the next best thing. I have part of an original Bacon.”

Bacon, a self-taught and deeply self-critical artist, was famous for destroying works, taking a knife to even his finest pictures. He once said that he destroyed “all the better paintings” in attempting “to take them further”.

James Hyman, a Bacon expert, said: “We are delighted to be able to present his mutilated Pope for the first time. The discovery of this abandoned and slashed canvas... provides an insight into somebody who was very ruthless and self-critical. Putting a knife through your own picture is a very self-destructive thing to do.”

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