More Art in London
6 December

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It's been a while since Ross and I last travelled to London together. Just over eighteen months ago, in fact.

On that occasion we took in Death in Venice, Daniel Radcliffe's West End debut in Equus and Antony Gormley's exhibition, Event Horizon, at the Hayward Gallery.

This time the accent was firmly on art. Ross wanted to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain and I was keen to see the Mark Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. What with the Gustav Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool and British Orientalist Painting at Tate Britain, we've had good value for money out of our Tate memberships this year.

What was also good about this trip was that we didn't race round trying to squeeze lots of things in. There were a few main events and a lot of eating and strolling in between.

The Francis Bacon exhibition was very powerful but I do think that most of what was being said on the audio tape and in the catalogue was misleading. I certainly felt that the greatness of his art lies in his draughtsmanship and in his absolute control over his palette of colours. Neither of these two things were given a decent mention.

Instead, we were told that he was self-taught as a painter (or at least that he didn't go to Art College) and that he lived a riotous life among the Bohemian Soho sect of the 1950s. We also learnt that he was an atheist and gave up religion in his teens.

None of this seemed to square with what I was seeing in the canvasses. Yes, I could agree that his work asks the question of how you continue with figurative painting after the advent of the camera. But that question had already been asked (and answered) some fifty years previously by Picasso and the like. And simply because you've given up on religions does not mean that you do not have a deep and abiding spiritual life.

No, I think that there's something else going on. I don't think that the paintings are intended as universal comments about living in a godless universe after the Second World War. I think that they are about one man's self-loathing of his homosexuality projected onto the world around him.

There were all sorts of things that were glossed over. Like his being educated by nuns. Like his falling out with his father in his mid-teens and leaving home. Like his busking his way around Europe and fetching up for a time in the Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and later on Paris. Basically to keep his body and soul together, I suspect that he sold the former to the highest bidder and traumatised the latter.

Being gay was illegal. That must have taken its toll on him. He lived a life of petty crime and misadventure and odd jobs here and there. Sex and violence and repression and loathing were all one to him so far as I can see. And that's what is there in the paintings. The screams could as easily be the extremes of sad-masochistic ecstasy as just plain terror.

A large number of his long-term partners committed suicide. Is that coincidence?

And the Soho set were a load of drunken sots sponging off friends and family alike - the fag end of Bertie Wooster's moneyed and leisured classes. It was mean and sordid and furtive. Anything else is retrospective, romanticised hogwash.

Oh, and Bacon didn't need to go to the butcher's to get his ideas on how human beings were just meat. He'd volunteered for Civil Defence during the Blitz and worked full-time in the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) rescue service. He didn't do it for long but, like my grandfather, he'd have seen a lot of flesh ripped apart - or at least enough to form the basis of his art and haunt his dreams.

So, powerful art, yes. Deeply troubled and deeply spiritual, yes. Something I can admire, just possibly. Something I like, no, I don't think so. Ultimately, there's just too much around the artworks which is negative in the extreme.

I really like the music of Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann and the Royal Opera production is spectacular in an old fashioned way which suits the piece. Certainly, neither Welsh National Opera nor Opera North could possibly tour a show such as this. And this sort of opulence is one of the reasons why you come to Covent Garden. Another is the high quality of the vocal performances. And here, really only two were world class.

I very much enjoyed the performance of Gidon Saks as Lindorf and all the baddies - he had been Mefistofele in Amsterdam four years ago. Graham Clark was exceptional in all of the quirky bit parts. Ekaterina Lekhina gave Olympia's coloratura a good run for its money. Christine Rice was a full throated Giulietta, quite a progression from her Rosina in The Barber of Seville at ENO back in 2001. Katie van Kooten was reasonable as Antonia - certainly better than her warbling Micaëla in ENO's web broadcast of Carmen. Kristine Jepson was fine as Nicklausse.

Antonio Pappano conducted well if not exceptionally. The chorus was very good.

And what about Hoffmann?

Well, there's the rub.

I'd booked at the last minute partially because of the work but mostly because of Rolando Villazón. I tried to get to hear him live in L'elisir d'amore last year. But he cancelled. He cancelled again for this performance. Our replacement, Zvetan Michailov, may have saved the show but he really wasn't very good. And especially when you set his performance against the other two I have witnessed - Julian Gavin in 1998 and Alfredo Kraus in 1991.

So, I'm going to give the event three stars. I'm glad that I saw the show. I enjoyed the performance. The seat I sat in cost more than I might normally have paid out for but gave an excellent view of the stage. I'm just glad that I hadn't built the whole trip around that man.

The following morning took us out to St Paul's and over the Millennium Bridge to Tate Modern for the Rothko exhibition. You know what you are going to get here. Enormous canvasses on which there is colour.

The problem for the curators is that once you have said that, there is little else to say. They are, starkly, what they are. They ask the question of what can paint do to inspire and move in the way that music does without any other point of reference?

Trying to find great significance in a sharp edge rather than a feathered edge or the inclusion/exclusion of a white border or the choice of colour gives you the clue that really only the works can speak for themselves.

I think that they are deeply spiritual works of art that demand that you spend time with them. For that reason a chapel seems to me to be their perfect home rather than a restaurant (which has to be the reason why he pulled out of the Seagram commission - in a restaurant they works would have become wallpaper).

I'm glad to have seen the show but I'm not minded to pursue an interest in Rothko any further.

And it was good to have seen shows by Bacon and Rothko back to back.

Things that link Bacon and Rothko...

• Both were at their most creative during the 1950s and 1960s.
• Neither were in the mainstream of artistic practice.
• Both continued to re-work the same set of ideas throughout their working lives.
• Both are themselves and inimitable - you can tell that a work is by Bacon or by Rothko immediately and at a distance.
• Both were alcoholics.
• Both were deeply disturbed.
• Neither was an easy person or a person at ease.
• Both lives were affected deeply by experiences of World War Two.
• The colour orange.

And there's a thesis to be written somewhere about the colour orange and the 1960s.