The horror of the ordinary

Ireland's Hugh Lane gallery can take credit for some of the insights into Francis Bacon's methods that are a feature of Tate Britain's outstanding exhibition of the painter's work, writes Aidan Dunne

A YEAR IN advance of the centenary of Francis Bacon's birth, Tate Britain has stolen a march on the opposition and put together an outstandingly good retrospective of his work. While the Tate has the budget and the clout to bring in paintings on loan from far and wide in a way that is beyond the reach of any Irish gallery, the Hugh Lane gallery can afford to feel quietly pleased that the exhibition draws substantially on the research into the Francis Bacon Studio done here in Dublin, and incorporates some material from the studio. While other archival documents are also in evidence, the contents of the studio, which were excavated and researched in a meticulous, archaeological fashion, have proved to be enormously revealing of Bacon's working methods.

He has been periodically acclaimed as one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century, and the greatest British artist since Turner, though there are doubters and detractors. There's always the risk that, subjected to the intense scrutiny afforded by a substantial retrospective, even the most established reputation will crumble. In this case, however, the Tate exhibition should confirm his reputation as a major artist, if not quite as brilliant a star as his most enthusiastic advocates would claim. He is not without artistic failings, including a progressive inclination towards self-parody and a certain carelessness that could work both for and against him, so that the paintings, even in a show as well selected as this one, are uneven. But, without question, the better ones, in their bravura audacity and inventiveness, are tremendously exciting to encounter.

Bacon, who died in 1992, was born in Dublin in 1909. Throughout his adult years Bacon retained a dislike of Ireland, largely because, while still in his teens, he was summarily banished by his father for, reputedly, dressing up in his mother's underwear and/or being caught in flagrantewith a groom. He found himself alone in London, subsisting on an allowance from his mother, and drifted for several years, eventually spending time in Berlin and Paris and working as an interior decorator before seriously applying himself to being a painter.

The Tate's show is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically and, though a broad chronology does emerge, we get a welcome chance to see Bacon's work as a unity.

It is immediately apparent that he was brave enough to take real chances and, while he was not at all a technically adept painter, unlike say the astonishing Velásquez, of whose Portrait of Pope Innocent Xhe made several versions, he was frequently an inspired one, willing to make technical leaps in search of startling effects. In a way he had to take leaps, because his art is not academic, not built-up cumulatively on a solid armature of drawing and tone, volumes and spaces. It is something fleeting and glimpsed in the corner of the eye, blurred and ambiguous, and often its power derives from what we can't actually see in the work but what we think we might be seeing, something forbidden or dark or disturbing.

Bacon's descriptions of his own work, as trying to capture "the brutality of fact", or as going straight to the nervous system, are a clear statement of what he's after. Coming out of the second World War, and entering the age of uncertainty that ensued, he addressed an awareness of the human capacity for cruelty and atrocity, and a more personal, existential anxiety. An atheist, he drew extensively on religious iconography and the classical altar-piece format of the triptych. But, disconcertingly, his imagery modulated from such generalised symbols of human suffering to the domestically prosaic.

The Tate's own Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion(1944) is quintessential Bacon. The weirdly hybridised bodies, conflations of internal and external anatomies, with predatory jaws, influenced by Surrealism and inspired by the Furies in The Oresteia of Aeschylus, anticipate the monstrous baby in David Lynch's film, Eraserhead, and, in subsequent incarnations, the toothy title creature in Ridley Scott's and HR Giger's Alien. Bacon's high art does recurrently veer close to the lowbrow thrills of pop-gothic sci-fi.

He returned to the Base of the Crucifixion several times and, despite the over-ripeness of some of his imagery, the paintings are quite powerful, with distinctly Pinteresque notes. But then many of Bacon's most powerful paintings from the 1950s, the studies of individual animals, of businessmen in suits, of popes and nude figures, could also be described as Pinteresque - except that they comfortably pre-date Pinter's emergence as a dramatist late in the decade.

RIGHT FROM THE first, Bacon tended to ratchet up the melodrama. Although influenced by cinematic imagery and montage (most famously the screaming nurse in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin), he was an explicitly theatrical painter, placing his actors centre-stage against plain backdrops, augmenting the action with a few strategic props: light bulb, chair, bed, toilet bowl, washbasin. But the heads and bodies are often violently disassembled, their flesh hideously contorted. Painted equivalents of bodily fluids - blood, spittle, semen, vomit - swirl about the canvases.

Much of the time, the distortions relate to ordinary states of being, dramatically reconfigured, but Bacon also inclined towards graphic, visceral imagery, drawing on such sources as medical textbooks and photographs of the aftermath of atrocities. Bodies are torn apart and Snow's "secret", as revealed to Yossarian in Catch-22, is reiterated again and again: Man is meat.

While the figures and props in a great deal of Bacon's work, particularly in the 1950s, emerge like shimmering apparitions from velvety dark grounds, he became fond of using brighter, bolder colours as backdrops. These flat, often extensive expanses are thinly painted in contrast with the heaped, turbulent pigment that describes the figures. The effect can be starkly effective, though as time went by the backgrounds could come across as being just cursory or even misjudged.

Several critics have observed that the intense emotional pitch of the work is at variance with the mundane facts of Bacon's life when he made it. The critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, has commented on his "histrionically miserable homosexuality". And there is an apparent mismatch between his relatively comfortable life - painting, usually with a hangover, from 7am, leisurely lunches at Wheeler's in Soho, afternoons drinking and conversing in the Colony Room just along the road, late-night drinking, and gambling at such places as Charlie Chester's Casino - and the tales of terror told in the paintings. But then the work can certainly be interpreted as being about the horror of the ordinary.

By all accounts, as well, Bacon was profoundly miserable at some level. Smart and acerbic, he was certainly difficult to live with. His romantic relationships were bristly, fraught, and tragic. One companion, Peter Lacy, died on the day a Bacon retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery in 1962. Nine years later, Bacon's companion, George Dyer, committed suicide by taking an overdose two days before the opening of another major retrospective, in Paris. The physically imposing but psychologically vulnerable Dyer was the inspiration and subject of some of Bacon's finest paintings, in life and death, works full of helpless, edgy tenderness.

Several accounts attest to the fact that Bacon was also a generous, loyal and affectionate friend. He courted the company of East End geezers, knew the Krays, and liked there to be a certain level of menace in the atmosphere. Several sources claim that he had a masochistic streak that could, and occasionally did, get him into real trouble. In his work, the union of two male figures, the subject of several of his most compelling paintings, is always an occasion of ambiguously violent grappling. Photographs of wrestlers served as a visual source. He was famously dismissive of most other art and artists, but then artists, intensely committed to their own vision, often are, and there was something defensive about Bacon's aggression, because he did doubt himself.

An avid and witty conversationalist, he was fortunate in finding a Boswell to record his thoughts. David Sylvester's Interviews with Francis Bacon, originally published in 1975 (though they'd been friends for a long time), is a classic of contemporary art writing.

For many years, virtually every art student prized it and read it out of interest rather than duty, identifying with Bacon's breezily offhand bohemian attitude and his frankness about the business of being a painter. It is still popular, though more recent research suggests that Bacon wasn't entirely frank, and some self-mythologising was involved. The association between Bacon and Sylvester strengthened and became a major factor in the perception of his work. Pretty much every major exhibition was overseen by the guiding spirit of Sylvester up to the time of his death in 2001.

THE QUESTION OF whether, and to what extent, Bacon made and used drawings, preparatory or otherwise, is oddly contentious and still partly open. He told Sylvester flatly that he did not make preparatory drawings. Perhaps, having made that assertion, he didn't want to contradict it, but it's hard to see why he should want to conceal the perfectly legitimate use of drawings when he was absolutely candid about using photographs as direct sources, and even central points of inspiration, something that was frowned upon in certain fine art circles at the time.

In any case, several accounts and examples of his drawings have emerged since his death. Even Sylvester owned up to seeing some casual sketches. Bacon certainly did make notes and thumbnail sketches, though not consistently. At least one person who was close to him during his lifetime claims to possess a group of more finished drawings. And his neighbour and occasional handyman, Barry Joule, controversially produced a trove of material, some of which resides in Dublin and some of which was acquired by the Tate. Whatever its status, this work is rudimentary in nature and never intended for exhibition.

Later on, one feels that Bacon would have reinvented himself but just didn't know how to go about it. The labyrinthine forms and empty backdrops became increasingly forced and mannerised. Uncertainties are apparent even in some work from the 1960s. In the Tate show we get to see a big 1976 triptych, apparently the painting for which Roman Abramovich set a new auction record earlier this year, and it's hard not to think, uh-uh, that's a second-rate Bacon, nowhere near the edgy uncertainty of the first-rank works. There's no invention or discovery; instead, the artist riffled anxiously through a collection of stock motifs, packing more and more of them in for added value. When working, he referred constantly to reproductions of his own paintings, and spoke of his frustration at not being able to recapture the spirit of paintings he'd made years earlier.

Yet he was still capable of bold strokes: Blood on Pavement, from 1988, is almost abstract, apart from a mess of blood and tissue smeared into the ground. It's an example of a route Bacon might have followed, one in which figure and ground are perfectly fused in an image of subtle menace.

• Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London, until Jan 4. Online booking: www.tate.org.uk/tickets, 0044-207-8878888