Sheffield's new Millennium Galleries do Francis Bacon proud. Here, just as the artist intended, his cast of naked wrestlers, drunken contortionists and lop-headed harpies look perfectly well-groomed and dandified in their miserable predicaments. Despite the studied squalor of his studio, and the voyeuristic bent of popular opinion to view the artist as a purely impulsive genius, Bacon's existentialist angst was in fact tempered by the immaculate good taste of a highly sophisticated aesthete.
This selection from the artist's work looks its best set off against the gallery's polished marble floors, elegant scalloped ceilings and subtle, blind-filtered daylight.
Bacon was such an idiosyncratic painter that one can easily develop a tolerance to his initially breathtaking images. Yet it is an undeniable fact that he created some of the most memorable figurative pictures of the 20th century. And, in this setting, the formal transgressions of his images are easily as evident as their tendency towards expressionist sensationalism.
The flicks and slurs of white pigment that obliquely distort his portraits might be based on cum-shot porno stills, but they also serve to set off the delicate and vulnerable bloom of the pinkness of his unfortunate subjects' all too bruisable flesh. His Study of a Dog is a giant of entrapped wildness, spinning endlessly on its roundabout pedestal as miniature cars flash by in the distant background. The 1944 Crucifixion triptych, together with the Second Version remake of 1988, is perhaps the only really serious and convincing image on a Christian theme created in any medium over the past 100 years.
It's true that Bacon might not have finally achieved his ambition of equalling the transvestite grandeur of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X. His rabid dog might not approach the poignant quicksand of loneliness into which Goya's Black Period dog eternally sinks. Yet give Bacon his due: what other painter of our times could we even begin to compare to such epoch-defining names?
Until 23 September. Details: 0114 278 2600.
Related links:
23.07.2001: Bringing home the Bacon
22.07.2001: Posters beg Berliners to bring back the Bacon
16.05.2001: Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on
10.05.2001: Bacon triptych sets new sale record
26.04.2001: Dealer 'snatched Bacon paintings away'
08.02.2001: Disputed Bacon art works go on display
