£14m distinction ... Francis Bacon's Study for Portrait II. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA
Is Francis Bacon a great 20th-century artist, or not? The market says yes. The record £14m paid for Study for Portrait II (1956) at Christie's last night - almost double the previous top price for one of his works - is a ringing endorsement for a reputation that momentarily seemed to falter by the millennium.
Bacon died in 1992, but it was actually the more recent death of his critical and curatorial champion David Sylvester that took him out of the limelight. It is as if some museums can't imagine a Bacon show not curated by Sylvester. This must be the closest identification of a critic with a great artist since Turner and Ruskin.
In Britain the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art has been alone in putting on a large-scale Bacon show this century. But it was always unlikely we would forget about Bacon. Fifteen years after his death it is still shocking and difficult to come across one of his paintings in a collection - it pulls you up like almost no other art of the later 20th century.
Bacon was the first modern artist to abandon modernism; the painting of a Pope that has sold at Christie's belongs to a series in which he meditates not only on the anomie and anguish of contemporary life but also on Velazquez and portraiture. Bacon became an acute artist of the contemporary precisely by abandoning avant-garde ideals, but he never sank into conservatism or crowd-pleasing. Bacon's painterly flesh is monstrous but as Dr Frankenstein would say - "It lives! It lives!"
On the other hand, it's sad we have to rely on the art market to decide what is good. It suggests curators and critics are failing in their job. Once, quite recently, museums defined greatness and the market slowly got the message. Now it seems modern art museums are so lost in a relativistic addiction to cultural theory that recognising genius no longer even interests them. It has taken an artist to champion Bacon. The new respect for his preeminence this price reflects must owe a lot to Damien Hirst's vociferous praise. Hirst, so influenced by Bacon, has collected and written about him in a way that makes this dead painter accessible to younger collectors. So this is a result for Hirst, not to mention for the reputed seller, Sophia Loren.
