Mmmm...Bacon

I went to Tate Britain this afternoon to see the Francis Bacon centenary exhibition. It was a bright sunny day, just a bit of autumn bite in the air. Fall is my favourite time of year, and I sauntered down Millbank to the museum with a spring in my step, an ain't life just fuckin' grand smile on my face.

Then I went inside and was bludgeoned by Bacon's paintings, my spirit crushed by their unrelenting bleakness and unyielding brutality. In Bacon's work there is no hope, no humanity - life is just suffering and violence and horror. It is his portraiture that disturbed me most, his subjects scream (as in the famous reworking of Velazquez' Pope Innocent X), their faces are blurred or partially erased or distorted. They all made me feel hollow and despondent.

There was an interesting room which with collected ephemera from Bacon's studio. Bacon, apparently, always claimed his paintings came out in a spontaneous rush. But this archival room showed that he obsessively planned, made lists of potential subjects and worked and reworked preparatory drawings. That Bacon self-mythologised in this way probably says more about how the public believes an artist produces his stuff - it all must be in a mad spontaneous rush, Mozart dashing off the Jupiter symphony in an afternoon, say - not about grit and hard work.

Of course, the Tate being a modern museum, it has to be down the the kids, and I mean little kids. In the middle of the exhibition, they had a table with paper and art supplies so that little children can doodle and paint. This is in a room called Apprehension with Bacon's work from the 1950s which, according to the exhibition notes, is fuelled by "a sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life" and has "an air of personal menace" due to his violent affair with lover Peter Lacey. In one painting, a distorted, grotesque baboon wails, in another two naked men grapple in what could be construed as a rape scene. And today, there was some little girl at the table drawing a golden sunset with a box of Crayolas.

It gets more bizarre. The events around the exhibition include a session for kids aged 5-12 called, I shit you not, Bend it Like Bacon, where the little shavers get to "re-enact the lying, crawling, bending, standing, turning and falling figures you can see in Bacon's paintings." Ooh, that'll be fun. Especially if they get to pretend to be the half-human, half-cow eviscerated carcasses of the Crucifixion triptychs.