Abbreviate into intensity

Francis Bacon
Tate Britain (sponsored by Bank of America), until 4 January 2009

At Tate Britain is a glorious centenary show of paintings by one of our greatest modern painters, Francis Bacon. It’s more than 20 years since the last Bacon retrospective at the Tate, but the Bacon industry has been chugging steadily away in the interim. His studio — which the Tate declined, astonishingly — was transported to Dublin, and opened there with much fanfare over the vast archaeological operation of decoding the layers of source material and detritus which comprise the studio floor. Then there was the revelation of the cache of Bacon drawings (shown at the Tate in 1999) after the artist himself and the leading Bacon expert David Sylvester had spent their lives insisting that Bacon never drew. Other exhibitions have taken place — most recently Bacon in the 1950s at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (2006) — and various books have appeared.