Visual Arts: A slice of lean Bacon

Despite huge exhibitions in Germany and France, the work of Francis Bacon has not received a proper airing in Britain for over 10 years. Yet in just 23 paintings, the new show at the Hayward Gallery has managed the impressive job of summarising Bacon's complex career

It is some time since we in this country have had a chance to see a major exhibition of work by Francis Bacon, the man most often billed as the century's greatest British painter. Recent years have seen several large-scale shows further afield, including enormous exhibitions in Paris and Munich, but there has been nothing of consequence here for at least 10 years.

Whichever way one looks at his work, Bacon could not be called an intimate artist - yet, somehow, a veil of intimacy has snuck into the Hayward Gallery's current show. It's partly the scale of the thing (just 23 paintings made over 40 years) and partly the selection, which concentrates on self-portraits and pictures of his friends and familiars such as Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and the tragic George Dyer.

This exhibition, which is titled The Human Body (as if Bacon ever painted anything else) succeeds, surprisingly, in capturing the essence of a complex career in a couple of dozen pictures. It's a good deal less extravagant than the recent shows in France and Germany, and all the better for it. The credit for this success belongs to David Sylvester, whose excellent selection is accompanied by a pithy catalogue composed of pointed observations about the man and his work. It's a format which allows Sylvester to touch on all the main themes: on Bacon's curious androgyny; on the balance between grandeur and grotesqueness in his images; and on the various references which appear and reappear, from Velasquez and Degas to Eisenstein and Muybridge.

It's one of the best bits of writing about Bacon to appear for many years, but the over-riding sense that emerges from the catalogue, and to a lesser extent from the choice of paintings, is of Sylvester himself growing old with Bacon's work. It is not an inappropriate tone, as, over the years, Sylvester has done as much as anyone to cement Bacon's reputation, and it's his involvement here which defines the unexpected intimacy of the occasion. Don't miss it.

The Human Body, Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0171-928 3144) 5 February-5 April