Francis Bacon: at home with history

Bacon sandwiched

Rembrandt, Velazquez, Michelangelo, Picasso, Bacon in one room? In a regional gallery? Just arrived at Norwich's Sainsbury Centre from the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Francis Bacon and the Masters is the UK's most stimulating, alluring, unexpected and insightful current exhibition.

Robert and Lisa Sainsbury were Bacon's first patrons and in the 1950s bought 13 paintings, costing £8,000 in total. The painter and the Sainsburys became good friends and were among the extremely rare subjects that Bacon painted from life. His audaciously stylised, extravagantly vertical portrait of Lisa, emphasising her strong, decisive features, was inspired by the bust of Queen Nefertiti and here it hangs opposite 11th-century BC Egyptian mummy masks visiting from Russia. A second depiction carves out the linear structure of Lisa's face with black arcs around eyebrows, eyes, cheekbones: individual, yet totemic and potent as ancient sculpture.

Bacon's portrait of Robert in dark suit and glasses, head floating over a deep rich black ground, is more distant: it suggests the reticence, reserve, wary thoughtfulness of the sitter. But displayed here alongside Rembrandt's hunched, heavy-lidded, meditative "Portrait of an Old Man", a figure also fading into a dark void, its psychological intensity and sense of isolation is enhanced. Bacon loved Rembrandt's "coagulation of non-representational marks" fusing into an image; his own paint has a Rembrandtesque quality - fat, rich, sombre.

In theory, this show sounds forced: in exchange for loans earlier this year of the Sainsbury pictures plus other significant Bacons, the Hermitage has sent back masterpieces across millennia which together form a lexicon of Bacon's art-historical interests and influences. But triumph lies in the detail: every juxtaposition is pertinent, invariably shedding light on Bacon, and on occasion on the masters too.

Matisse's "Nymph and Satyr", for example, acquired by St Petersburg collector Sergei Shchukin on its completion in 1909 and little known in the west, has a menacing sensuality - aggressively direct draughtsmanship, distorted, tumbling naked forms, shrill flesh tones, expressionistic brightness - unique in the artist's oeuvre: the red-headed nymph was inspired by Olga Merson, the Russian student with whom Matisse was infatuated.

In Norwich, the painting looks spectacular alongside Bacon's triptych "Studies of the Human Body" (1970), where a single curvaceous female nude, twisted and truncated, is placed on a rail on a lilac ground, the central figure holding a striking black umbrella. Bacon's bold expanse of single colour and flattened space recalls Matisse's decorative schemes; the sculptural treatment of the figure references the deformations employed by Matisse - here the late bronze "Standing Nude (Katia)" (1950) - and Rodin.

Bacon always considered making sculpture himself, but "I haven't done it yet because each time I want to do it I get the feeling that perhaps I could do it better in painting". How sculptural a painter he was, however, is sharply highlighted by a display pairing compositions of crouching nudes: the violently charged powerplay on impasto red ground in "Two Figures in a Room" (1959); the curled forms, within a sort of golden cage, engulfed in rapid, sweeping strokes representing the long grasses of the South African Veld in "Figures in a Landscape" (1956), with the plaster cast of Michelangelo's "Crouching Boy" (1530) which directly inspired them.

Bacon noted how the spine here "almost comes out of the skin altogether"; of his own raw, muscular male figures he acknowledged, "I am sure I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts". In "Study of a Nude" (1952-53), the lonely figure, seen from the back, stands on a platform imitating a sculpture's plinth, and teeters, poised to jump, feet arched, on the brink of an abyss, confronting blue-black nothingness.

"Michelangelo and Muybridge [the early photographer of movement]. . . mixed up in my mind together," Bacon said of this work, which was the Sainsburys' first Bacon acquisition, in 1953, after Lisa saw it by chance in a London gallery. The family called it "The Diver"; Lisa recalled of their guests that "people were wildly anti-Bacon. They would say, 'How can you live with this awful man, it has put me off my food'".

Shortly afterwards, at a party, Bacon mentioned a painting of a pope that had gone well that day. The Sainsburys asked to see it immediately, but on the way Bacon became less convinced; when they reached his studio he declared that he would destroy it. For an hour they dissuaded him, Robert calling it "the most wonderful face ever" - at which Bacon took a razor, cut out the figure and said "take it away".

"Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII)" (1955) hangs here with other "Popes". In "Study after Velazquez" (1953), the veiled pope emerges from behind vertical striations that seem to pass through his semi-transparent body; Bacon called this a "shuttering", distancing effect, appropriated from late Degas pastels. In the purple and gold "Pope I" (1951), the fragile, frightened pontiff, antithesis of Velazquez's concentration of pomp and power, is imprisoned in a silvery space frame. In "Study of a Head" (1952), a close-up screaming face draws attention to Bacon's conflation of his Velazquez source with the image of the shrieking woman, face slashed, shattered pince-nez forced into her eye, from the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

A still from the film is exhibited alongside the painting; there are also sumptuous Velazquez portraits, although not the original "Pope", currently star of the Grand Palais's terrific Velazquez show. "I've always thought this was the greatest painting in the world and I've had a crush on it and the magnificent colour of it," Bacon said. Out of its silky magnificence he drew existential horror, his hysterical popes speaking of authority gone awry, a world out of control.

Similarly, from the Crucifixion motifs - Titian and Alonso Cano here - dominating Old Master iconography, Bacon evolved his own bleak image of a non-believer's "Crucifixion" which is "just an act of man's behaviour". From Van Gogh and Soutine, both also here, he learnt expressive manipulation of heavily textured paint; from Picasso manipulation of form, because "the only way to make the human form central to art again lay in distorting it". Picasso's cubist "A Young Lady" (1909) hangs next to Bacon's portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne, her features thrillingly crumpled but still retaining a likeness.

Bacon's unique genius was to distil so many disparate elements into his own idiosyncratic, new language. "I'm like a grinding machine," he said, "I've looked at everything, and everything I've seen has gone in and been ground up very fine". This show marvellously unpicks those grounds, illuminates the thinking of one of the most complex of all artists, and marvellously links him to the great traditions of history.

'Francis Bacon and the Masters', Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, to July 26. scva.ac.uk/art-and-artists/exhibitions

Slideshow photographs: Tate/Estate of Francis Bacon; The State Hermitage Museum; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts/Estate of Francis Bacon/Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

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