Take a video tour of the exhibition

He is the single greatest artist that Britain has produced in the hundred years that have passed since his birth in 1909. There is no great secret to his success. Francis Bacon is quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters. And you don't need to study the intricacies of art history or peruse complex philosophies to see why. You just have to look at those shocking, disturbing and sumptuous canvases. This was the man who (to steal a line from Paul Valéry) aimed to evoke sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul.

Tate Britain's Francis Bacon is a classic show. It moves chronologically - except in a few cases where works have been reshuffled to thematic galleries - through the artist's career, examining its principle phases through a succession of mostly superlative paintings. From the first thickly encrusted canvases of a maverick who, coming late to painting after an abortive career as an interior designer (you can still spot its legacy in the strange tubular steel furniture) at the age of 35, it moves through all the most famous images - the popes screaming in their gilded prisons, the howling baboons, the wrestling copulators, the haunting triptychs, the Furies, the handgrenade faces - to the late but still unflinching meditations on the futility of life.

Times Archive, 1985: The colour of meat is so beautiful

Francis Bacon's preview tour of his Tate retrospective

• Tate Gallery, 1962: The horrific vision of Mr Francis Bacon

• Mr Francis Bacon's new paintings, 1953

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Multimedia

• Video from Tate Britain

This is a show that invites us to consider Bacon's place in the postwar pantheon. It coincides with two other shows that offer an illuminating context: Mark Rothko at Tate Modern represents all that Bacon struggled against as, stubbornly resisting the forces of abstraction that were flourishing in America, he sought a place for the figurative in a disillusioned postwar world. Damien Hirst, whose glitzy spectacular is now at Sotheby's, is Bacon's closest successor. At his most powerful he translates it into 3-D.

But 15 years after Bacon's sudden death in Madrid, neither the artist nor the critic David Sylvester, that impassioned purveyor of his reputation to the public, is there to put the works in their usual biographical context. Does the legacy need the legend? Or can it stand alone?

Straightforward correlations between life and art are reductive, but Bacon's work, more than that of any other artist of his generation, has been illuminated by his infamous life story. It was, after all, through his upbringing as the rebellious son of a racehorse trainer in Ireland, the decadence of Paris and Berlin, the drinking and gambling and sadomasochist homosexuality of his “gilded gutter life” in Soho that he discovered his subjects.

The man whom his former friend (their paths later diverged) Lucian Freud described as the wildest and wisest person he had never known wilfully flouted convention, working to make himself as unnatural as he possibly could, espousing a philosophy of futility with an almost religious fervour. “We are born and we die,” he said. “But in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.” These were the drives - the lusts, the despairs, the cruelties and the loves - that lent frenzied life to the carcass of a creature that was fundamentally no more than meat.

This was the philosophy that, passed down by Sylvester like an article of faith, became the single most powerful shaping force on our perception of his work.

But now we are asked to reconsider. A few years ago, great bundles of overpainted newspaper clippings and sketches were discovered in Bacon's studio. And yet this was the artist who supposedly (remember that ludicrous biopic) hurled fistfuls of paint, swiped handfuls of rags and pitched buckets of turpentine at his canvases, allowing his creations to grow, or destroy themselves with complete spontaneity. He had always said that he didn't draw; that he didn't want the brain to interfere with “the inevitability of an image”, that accident was essentially at the heart of his vision, that he wanted to trap its vitality with “the foam of the unconscious locked around it”.

As the tattered studio relics are given a focal place in this show, curators ask us to think about the processes of making. Wall texts pick over the paintings in technical detail like beetles pick over the skeletal mechanics of a corpse.

They can't spoil the show. These paintings are too powerful. You only have to look at the portraits that attack and brutalise the human appearance, mashing and twisting it into bruised hues that show us not how repulsive but how beautiful violence can be. You only have to stare into those bright uninflected arenas against which human life struggles like some half-squashed insect. You only have to listen to the primal scream of those popes. A gallery dedicated to images of crucifixions, including three triptychs, is the high point of this show. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, man is butchered like an animal on the cross of his life. The raw brutality of pain is overpowering.

Another key gallery, themed around Bacon's late lover George Dyer, is equally evocative. A haunting triptych from 1973 unfurls across the walls telling the story of how, on the night of Bacon's first great triumph (a Parisian retrospective) his lover stayed up in the hotel bedroom and took an overdose. Vomiting into the basin, hunched over the lavatory, he died alone under the stark electric light. With all its macabre desolation it is one of the most haunting images of our era.

This show offers front-row seats in an arena in which atrocities as complex and cruel, as flamboyant and painful, as the bullfights that inspired Bacon take place. Maybe, ironically, there are too many great paintings. Visitors should certainly head for the “crisis” gallery, which presents Bacon in the late Fifties fumbling clumsily amid thick pigments and garish colours for a fresh way forward. Here are some disasters. And you need them. Bacon does not always pull off his impetuous canvases. He destroyed countless works. But surviving mistakes remind us how much of a gambler he was, of how close to the ridiculous, the melodramatic, the downright ludicrous his vision could be.

“I am greedy for...what chance can give me far behind anything I can calculate logically,” he once said. As a young man staying in Monte Carlo, Bacon ended up one night winning the (in those days vast) amount of £1,600 in a casino. He used the money to rent a villa which he stocked with food and wine for friends and ten days later he hadn't the cash to buy his ticket home.

This is the sort of gamble that every Bacon painting takes. Curators will not establish his place in posterity through technical analysis. The works are not illuminated by logic. Photographic images, from pictures of mouth diseases through Muybridge's motion studies, to a golf manual (the arrows with which he peppers his later works supposedly come from it), may, undeniably, have inspired him, but they are not the key to his paintings for at the heart of his work lies an essential mystery. You can't just fill in the blanks.

So far better to ignore those irritating wall texts and pass over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings do their work.

These are not canonised masterpieces they are desperate gambles. Each time we look at them the dice are rolled again. Maybe for another generation they won't work. But for now watch your reflection glide across the glazed darkness of his surfaces. The blackness has a bottomless depth in the gallery's stark brightness. The colours glow lurid and vivid. As you step across those images of crushed flesh and gristle, of mankind crouched, knotted and crawling, broken and yowling, you are stepping into an arena where human flesh wrestles with its terrible fate.

Bacon paints the frenzied reality that lies beneath the veneer of civilisation. His vision is as powerful as that of the great Renaissance Masters except that he reveals savage mystery where others sought redeeming grace.

A ‘purposeless existence': Bacon's life of rebellion

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain from Thursday to Jan 4 (www.tate.org.uk 020-7887 8888)

1909 He is born in Dublin to an English family, the son of a steel heiress and a race-horse trainer

1926 His father throws him out for wearing his mother's clothes. Goes to London with a weekly allowance of £3

1927 Travels to Berlin and sees Picasso exhibition, and begins to draw and paint

1934 First solo exhibition of paintings is poorly recieved and he destroys the works

1939 Exempted from military service because of asthma

1954 He shares British Pavilion of Venice Biennale with Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud

1962 Major retrospective of his work at the Tate

1963 Show at the Guggenheim in New York confirms his reputation

1971 His lover George Dyer commits suicide in Paris

1974 Forms a relationship with John Edwards, who also becomes his model 1992 On a visit to Madrid Bacon dies of pneumonia exacerbated by asthma

Louise Cohen

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