Amid economic meltdown and on the eve of being sucked into a black hole, it was perhaps unusual to see a London exhibition opening featuring on the BBC's News at Ten. Then again, Tate Britain's centenary retrospective of Francis Bacon, which opens to the public tomorrow, has been widely anticipated as a major art highlight of the year.

Irish-born artist Bacon, widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, is known for his giant canvasses spilling out nightmarish visions and contorted bodies in their raw and fleshy glory. The Tate retrospective, arranged broadly chronologically, brings together approximately 70 of the most important paintings from the artist's turbulent life, including his portraits of Pope Innocent X and celebrated triptychs such as Three Studies for a Crucifixion. The exhibition will travel to the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York next year.

For Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writing in the Times, Bacon is "quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters … His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul." Campbell's high point of the five-star show is the "gallery dedicated to images of crucifixions, including three triptychs … In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, man is butchered like an animal on the cross of his life. The raw brutality of pain is overpowering."

She is less impressed, however, with a room devoted to archive material found in Bacon's studio. This collection of source material - including preparatory sketches, photographs of close friends, film stills and images of violence, animals, athletes and medical examinations - was revealed posthumously when Bacon's studio was painstakingly dismantled and relocated piece by piece to a Dublin gallery. It now sheds light on some of his working methods and dramatically dispels Bacon's self-mythologies about the spontaneous nature of his own work.

For Campbell-Johnston, it is "better to ignore those irritating wall texts and pass over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings do their work."

She also highlights a theme that troubles nearly all the critics: Bacon's monumental legacy and fame. There are almost "too many great paintings" on show, she writes. Overfamiliarity is also the subject of Fisun Güner's five-star review in Metro. The retrospective is "excellent" but Güner immediately highlights the "jaw-dropping" incongruity of Bacon's Van Gogh series of paintings made in north Africa in the late 1950s. Notably, Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI - a "riot of neon-bright streaks" - is used by the Tate on some of the exhibition memorabilia: "Perhaps they want to entice us with something less familiar, amid so much that is almost too intimately known," writes Güner.

The Independent's Tom Lubbock agrees: "[Bacon] now looks simply like an icon of general British culture. He's a familiar. You talk about Bacon as you talk about The Beatles or Monty Python."

Lubbock's review goes on to focus on the artist's shameless, showbiz approach to his art, calling him a "vulgar entertainer" whose art was rooted in shape-shifting theatricality: "The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It's a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring … Bacon is a magician, a quick-change artist."

The Guardian's art critic, Adrian Searle, admits to being an adolescent fan ("the grisly aspects of Bacon's art appeal to the teenage mind") but after looking at the artist for 40 years, he is still troubled by the "myth, rumour and anecdote about his life [that] have come to dominate discussion of his art".

Searle writes: "Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal ... Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. This retrospective … is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was". He concludes: "I still ask myself if he was the real deal."