‘Didn’t get it’. ‘Bizarre paintings. Give me mixed feelings. Doesn’t cheer you up.’ ‘I really think that Bacon is a weird guy.’ These are entries from the Guestbook on www.bacon.nl. The site was made on the occasion of the Bacon exhibition at the The Hague Gemeentemuseum in 2001 and has been kept online ever since. As the organisers wrote: ‘The Francis Bacon exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague was a great success, attracting 80,000 visitors. The associated website about the life and work of the artist was also visited over 70,000 times and therefore seems well worth keeping open.’ Moreover, the Gemeentemuseum has a permanent Bacon presentation including five works of the Irish-born British master.

‘Fascinating and going under your skin.’ That’s what an another visitor to the 2001 exhibition wrote down. Not too bad an observation of the work of a painter who once said: ‘Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.’ Which is a doubly discerning remark coming from a man with such a meaty name.

A major retrospective of Bacon's work opened on 11 September 2008 at Tate Britain, London. It is billed as the largest retrospective of his work ever mounted, containing around sixty of his works. In January 2009, it will travel on first to the Prado Gallery in Madrid, Spain, and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will end in the summer of 2009.

The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which incidentally harbours the single largest collection of Mondrian paintings in the world, gets a piece of the Bacon action too now. The works already present in The Hague are being complemented by four works on long-term loan from the Estate of Francis Bacon. These paintings will not only perfectly illustrate the developments in Bacon’s oeuvre, but they will also be part of the new Modern and Contemporary art set-up at the Gemeentemuseum, entitled ‘ XXst Century’, on display from November 8 onward.

Picture: Francis Bacon, Seated Figure (1989). Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; on loan from The Estate of Francis Bacon.