en years after London's Tate Gallery, Paris has finally given itself its own retrospective of the greatest British painter of the twentieth century. In total, 79 oils and some 7 gouaches on paper. Less exhaustive than the Pisanello show at the Louvre (which certain uninformed Parisians still insist on pronouncing "Pizzanello" as if he were some sort of pizza delivery boy), but more copious than the "Vermeer in The Hague" show which was so unrelentingly shoved down our throats this Spring, this anthology of Francis Bacon's swollen-fleshed figures, currently taking up the fifth floor of the Georges Pompidou Center until October 14, clearly constitutes THE cultural event of 1996. The press had already sufficiently set the stage with its barrage of cliched Baconisms ("quartered thoraxes," "disemboweled intestines"). In fact, the tales of entrails and blood-stained sheets had reached such a point that some articles read more like accounts of a visit to a slaughter-house (said journalists would have done much better to remind readers that that man sitting in his glass cage was possibly none other than Eichmann, the Nazi executioner, at the time of his trial in Jerusalem). But, thanks to the loans from Marlborough Fine Arts collection and the Beyeler collection from Basel (among others), several already well-known facts were now verified: 1) the Church does not hold a monopoly on chalices, crucifixes and triptychs, 2) Bacon was certainly not Jack the Ripper, and 3) all Parisians are not equal before Painting. For proof of this last point, one need only consider the hushed chit-chat overheard at the opening. Some only saw in the master's art a display of butchery, spasm and convulsion. Others murmured in perplexed tones the language of claustrophobia and psychological imprisonment (But who said painting had to be happy?). One person had scurrilously titled his comments in the visitors book "A Nice Slice of Bacon." And there were some who railed at the fact of their own reflections in the paintings, never considering for a moment that the constant use of identical glass framing was perhaps a deliberate choice on the part of Bacon himself, given his concern for the notion of unifying all pictorial surface. Still others had hastily gone through Gilles Deleuze's well-known (if not slightly incomprehensible) essay "The Logic of Sensation" before declaring to their companion just how much they liked "Bacon's use of the diagram." (!) I also saw a gentleman from City Hall discussing other things entirely with a woman from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; an adolescent who proceeded from painting to painting, facetiously counting the number of wash basins, bidets, and toilets; and another who stopped in front of one painting to consider the creamy thickness in Bacon's depiction of an extremely muscled male calf. As for me, I was quite simply hooked by the colors: after all, it wasn't all hemoglobin-red -- there was also plenty of muck green. Initially, it was the green touches of an early Tangiers landscape which seduced me (between 1956 and 1962, Bacon seems to have rented an apartment in Tangiers next door to William Burroughs, but the details are hard to pin down). Next, certain flashes of orangey-pinks, then, the crude contrast of navy blue and apple green in the superb Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem Sweeney Agonistes, 1967 (from the Smithsonian) But ultimately, it was the later series which definitively stole my heart: their monochromatic expanses, especially of pink, occasionally interrupted by hopelessly black Venetian blinds. I loved this later pink in Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog, 1968, Lying Figure, 1969, and Studies of the Human Body, 1970. Now, suddenly, crimson erupted into these pools of pink. The floor plan in my catalogue told me we were in room D. D as in Bacon's friend Dyer. Or, as in implacable Death. Hence, the period 1971-1973, and now in front of our eyes was the Triptych, August 1972 (Tate Gallery) and the Triptych, May-June 1973 (private collection, Switzerland), surely among the most poignant and disturbing of Bacon's works. I had to turn away. And suddenly , there it was: an enormous wall of glass. At this last moment, the exhibit's first and only window. And through it, the vast, open sky and the rooftops of Paris, a chance to breathe. On leaving the Grand Gallery, eyes still filled with the Second Version of Triptych 1944, painted in 1988, the most conscientious visitors will not miss the 13-minute film on view -- a chance to see the master in his South Kensington studio, armed with his brushes, rags and spray paint. But the film shows much more than that. From this wounded man who compared himself to a cement mixer (which mixes everything, images and lived moments), precious confidences are revealed. Listen closely -- they speak solemnly, reverentially, of the progressive and irreversible progression of death. And as the faces of all the now-departed friends Bacon painted marched before one's eyes -- Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund), Henrietta Moraes, George Dyer, Isabelle Rawsthorne and John Edwards -- Bacon ponders two questions: Is there a good reason to remain optimistic? And, how does one deal with Sorrow? And so, the visitor takes leave of Francis Bacon, genuinely touched, thinking how next winter, the show will be in Munich, at Christoph Vitali's Haus der Kunst, formerly the Third Reich's official temple of art. It's an appropriate nose-thumbing at dictators.

Exposition Francis Bacon (1909-1992) Georges Pompidou Center, Paris Open Monday-Friday, 12 noon - 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. - 10 p.m. Closed Tuesday Admission: 45 francs Tickets reservable on Minitel 3615 Beaubourg Tel. (33) 1.44.78.12.33

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