Despite the dark, gloomy weather that is London this time of year, if I had time, I'd hop a plane right now to check out the massive Francis Bacon retrospective currently on at the Tate Britain.

While I've never been a huge fan of Bacon, in looking through the images on the Tate's site, I've had a chance to see the breadth and scope of his work and must admit that I'm turning into a bit of a fan. As with food, music, and many other things, my taste in art has changed dramatically since I was first introduced to Bacon's work, which is part of the reason for my new found interest.

Francis Bacon is internationally acknowledged as among the most powerful painters of the twentieth century. His vision of the world was unflinching and entirely individual, encompassing images of sensuality and brutality, both immediate and timeless. When he first emerged to public recognition, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his paintings were greeted with horror. Shock has since been joined by a wide appreciation of Bacon's ability to expose humanity's frailties and drives.

This major retrospective gathers many of his most remarkable paintings and is arranged broadly chronologically. Bacon's vision of the world has had a profound impact. It is born of a direct engagement that his paintings demand of each of us, so that, as he famously claimed, the paint comes across directly onto the nervous system.

As an atheist, Bacon sought to express what it was to live in a world without God or afterlife. By setting sensual abandon and physical compulsion against hopelessness and irrationality, he showed the human as simply another animal. As a response to the challenge that photography posed for painting, he developed a unique realism which could convey more about the state of existence than photography's representation of the perceived world.

Read more here. Start to look at the work in the first section Animal and make your way through the rest of the exhibit online. The amount of info on each section and the number of images is nothing short of amazing. One of the best I've seen on any site ever.

Don't miss this page with a link to archive interviews with Bacon on the BBC's site, as well as an interview with the artist from 1965, a listing of talks and discussions related to the exhibit, and info on how to get tickets.

Check out some highlights of work from the show below.

Francis Bacon
Tate Britain
Millbank London SW1P 4RG
09.11.08 through 01.04.09