I made it to Tate Britain's All Too Human:Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life exhibition the weekend it closed and I was bloody glad I did. What an excellent show. An inspired concept, a veritable smorgasbord (smorgasbords are always veritable) of 20c British art (London art even), and a light handed but even curation that managed to tell a story that covered how, in the last century, the leading lights of British figurative art responded to the rise of abstraction, photography, and Cubism and how they reacted to the huge political upheavals of their time.
When I say British I mean it in the inclusive sense, not the narrow-minded post-Brexit blood and soil sense. There are artists here who were born, or grew up, in Germany, Portugal, India, and Belarus. The fact they chose to base themselves in the UK says to me a lot about what the UK was and hopefully will remain to be once we've got through this crisis. An inclusive place that offers home and hope to people from all over the world and a place that is all the better for assimilating different cultures, different ideas, and, most of all, different people.
It's also a country with a solid appreciation of tits, cocks, bums, fannies, the lot. Obviously it's not unique in that but All Too Human does give us a good chance to examine the way the finest of British 20c artists rendered them - and the rest of the human form. Francis Bacon claimed that he'd like his pictures to "look like a human being had passed between them like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence", Lucian Freud wished for his portraits "to be of the people, not like them", and Frank Auerbach, feeling there were enough pictures in the world already, went so far as to say that he was "hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species".
F.N. Souza - Nude Holding Breasts (1960)
But to find out how they got to that line of thinking we have to return to the start of the last century and the art of Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Chaim Soutine, and David Bomberg. Each of whom, in subtly different ways, laid down the precedents that future generations would riff and improvise on to astonishing effect.
In 1905 Sickert began a series of dimly-lit nudes set in his rented studio, typically full of cheap, careworn beds and carpets. Both the model and the bed almost blur into each other and Sickert's use of foreshortening brings us, the viewer, into the scene in a way that makes us feel complicit, voyeuristic even.
Walter Sickert - Camden Town Nude (1905)
Chaim Soutine - The Butcher Stall (c.1919)
Chaim Soutine - Polish Woman (c.1922)
Minsk born Soutine's works are distorted in the vein of late Post-impressionism and coloured as if by a Fauve like Matisse. It's not just The Butcher Stall that looks bloody and viscous, the face of Soutine's Polish Woman appears gaunt and haunted, as if looking back, or forward, to the horrors of her time.
Bomberg, like Auerbach and Kossoff after him, started to view the architecture of the city in much the same way as the architecture of the body. His Toledo from the Alcazar is a scarred, almost abstracted, vista of a city at the same time foreign and familiar, much like another's body. He's responding to developments in abstract art but keeping his work figurative.
David Bomberg - Toledo from the Alcazar (1929)
Stanley Spencer - Patricia Preece (1933)
If Bomberg worked this duality delicately then Francis Bacon threw a bomb into the channel between the two schools, waited for the explosion, and then returned to the charred remains to see what he'd created. Normally something monumental, something aching with the visceral reality of inhabiting a body, and something that became so singular in the art world that even now you couldn't mistake a work by Bacon for a work by anybody else.
It's probably no coincidence that Figure in a Landscape was painted the year that World War II ended. The palette, the composition, the sheer darkness of it all speak of the pain that Europe had endured for the previous six years. Bacon's work, alongside Giacometti's isolated lopers, spoke of an existentialist crisis that had began to infuse the European soul. Even animals, dogs and baboons specifically, were not spared as Bacon austerely, bleakly, and piercingly flayed our human skins to show us our souls were just as bruised and bare as our bodies. Bacon claimed he wanted "to distort the thing far beyond the appearance but in the distortion to bring it back to the recording of an appearance".
Francis Bacon - Figure in a Landscape (1945)
Francis Bacon - Study for Figure VI (1956-7)
Francis Bacon - Dog (1952)
Alberto Giacometti - Woman of Venice IX (1956)
If Bacon was an obvious star of the show then Francis Newton Souza was, for me, the find. Born in India in 1924, Souza moved to London 25 years later where his art mixed Renaissance influences with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam. Eroticism and spirituality rubbed shoulders easily in Souza's works and I marvelled at how I'd never seen them, nor even heard of him before. Souza's room was a splash of colour in a show that otherwise, quite correctly, focused on the dark interiors of rooms as much as the dark interiors of our souls.
He didn't shy away from confronting issues of race in his work either. That Jesus is darker than those you might see in much Italian Renaissance art and 1957's Negro in Mourning was painted in response to race riots. Souza felt it to be one of his most important works, saying "it's close to the bone of man because it's about the colour of skin".
F.N. Souza - Jesus and Pilatus (c.1955-6)
F.N. Souza - Negro in Mourning (1957)
F.N. Souza - Two Saints in a Landscape (1961)
F.N. Souza - Crucifixion (1959)
F.N. Souza - Red Sun (1960)
F.N. Souza - Citadel (1961)
I was equally impressed with the cityscapes in Red Sun and Citadel, almost stained glass windows for a secular age, as I was with his religious scenes and his nudes. One of the nudes so impressed me she's ended up as the cover for this blog. I do think about these things!
F.N. Souza - Black Nude (1961)
Whilst both Bacon and Souza seemed to be reflecting on angst, sexuality, and identity in ways that exploded into colour or violence the works of William Coldstream and his students at the Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury seemed to take a more analytical, almost medical, yet not cold, approach to studying the human form.
Coldstream would intensely scrutinise his sitter, taking precise measurements, marking the relative location of key features on his canvas, but he mixed this with an empathetic approach that meant he spent many long hours working on each portrait feeling that this helped him to really get into the mind of his subject. It seems to have yielded results. In 1952/3's Seated Nude we can see, clearly, Coldstream's measuring marks, yet we're never in doubt of the sitter's humanity. Her body is neither idealised nor whatever the opposite of idealised is, it's just shown looking rather natural.
Coldstream's student, Leon Uglow, seems to have developed a slightly different take on his tutor's method but, again, it engenders similar results. None of these sitters are traditional beauties, the Venus de Milo they ain't, but their faults, their humanity, their proud, if sometimes failing, bodies are what give their beauty a power that a classical statue could never truly have. I came to wonder what their lives were like, what they were thinking about it while they sat (sometimes for up to sixty sittings) nude in front of Coldstream and Uglow. Probably "when can I go home?".
William Coldstream - Seated Nude (1952-3)
Euan Uglow - Woman with White Skirt (1953-4)
William Coldstream - Seated Nude (1973-4)
Lucian Freud - Girl with a Kitten (1947)
Coldstream's most famous student was surely Lucian Freud. Freud would go on to develop a turbo charged version of Coldstream's style with his portraits of Leigh Bowery et al but to begin with it was Coldstream's precision that Freud seemed to dwell upon. In Girl with a White Dog every element of the painting is given the same attention. The focus is as much on the dog, the sofa, the curtains even, as it is on Kathleen Garman's (Freud's first wife, soon to be divorced) exposed milky breast.
Lucian Freud - Girl with a White Dog (1950-1)
Euan Uglow - Still Life with Delft Vase (1959)
Euan Uglow - Georgia (1973)
While Coldstream was imparting his knowledge at Slade, Bomberg was across the river in Borough Polytechnic teaching day and night. Bomberg wasn't constrained, like Coldstream, by having to prepare students for national exams and was thus free to be, er, free. He was critical of tradition, calling it "hand to eye disease", and was committed to drawing outdoors. His students included Auerbach, Kossoff, Dorothy Mead, and Dennis Creffeld and though each of them would go on to develop their own specific style they all, in some way, harked back to Bomberg's insistence that one should paint not just what something looks like, but what it feels like.
This involved moving closer to abstraction than any other British figurative artists in this show, layering on the paint so thick the work almost becomes, in some cases actually did become, three dimensional, or scraping the paint away time and time again and reworking it over and over until it hits the right note. These were the only paintings in the show I heard visitors sneering at. Bad visitors.
David Bomberg - Vigilante (1955)
Frank Auerbach - Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962)
Dennis Creffield - Isle of dogs from Greenwich Observatory (1959)
Dorothy Mead - Reclining Figure (c.1954)
Leon Kossoff - Building Site, Victoria Street (1961)
Auerbach and Kossoff, as well as taking Bomberg's night classes in Borough, both studied at Saint Martin's School of Art as well as the Royal College but what they shared most was a deep fascination, awe even, with London. It's almost as if London is a lover and they return to paint her in different light, at different ages, and from different angels.
In this show alone we can see Kossoff's hymns (if you will) to building sites, swimming pools, and Nicholas Hawksmoor's magnificent Christ Church, Spitalfields. As with Auerbach's work (which mainly focused on a fairly small area around Mornington Crescent but also took in St Pancras and the cinemas of Leicester Square) the works are buzzy, angular, almost full of jazz, as they strive to convey the hustle and bustle of the city, the non-stop motion of a capital that is home to millions.
But even in their portraits there's something of the city. These aren't quiet pastoral people. These are the faces of urgent, anguished, or ecstatic Londoners. How on earth Auerbach or Kossoff managed to get them to sit still long enough to be painted almost beggars belief.
Frank Auerbach - Chimney in Mornington Crescent, Winter Morning (1991)
Frank Auerbach - St Pancras Steps (1978-9)
Frank Auerbach - Looking towards Mornington Crescent, Night (1972-3)
A particular favourite of mine is Kossoff's Children's Swimming Pool from 1971. You can almost hear the noise, smell the chlorine, feel the water splashing on to you as you look at it. It's busy, it's hectic, but it looks a lot of fun. It makes you want to be a kid again.
In contrast the Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction seems to be looking backwards at life. While the swimming pool represents youthful optimism the destruction of a once (presumably) familiar landmark has one ruefully considering one's own mortality. It's no wonder one work is full of blues and yellows and the other blacks and dark reds.
Leon Kossoff - Children's Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971)
Leon Kossoff - Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction, Summer 1974 (1974)
Leon Kossoff - Christ Church, Spitalfields, Morning (1990)
Leon Kossoff - Self Portrait II (1972)
As Auerbach and Kossoff were developing their own unique, if almost semiotic, styles, Lucian Freud was going from success to success. He'd abandoned the small brushes he'd used for his exacting portraits of wives, dogs, and kittens and taken up large, coarse ones instead, he'd kicked his chair aside to become a stand up painter, perhaps he'd been influenced by Jackson Pollock?, and he'd started painting from more irregular angles to give the bodies of his sitters more volume (later choosing larger models precisely for this reason).
Freud (when painting his own self-portrait in 1963, below) may've spared himself full body exposure but amongst his sitters it seems it was de rigueur to 'get it all out'. But it wasn't just their bodies Freud was interested in. His studio, too, became part of the work, Freud once commenting that he works from the people that interest him, that he cares about, and the rooms that he lives in and knows. His style may've moved on since that painting of his wife with her right tit hanging out but in considering each detail of the canvas to be equally vital he'd been utterly consistent and would remain so up until his death in 2011.
Lucian Freud - Man's Head (Self-Portrait I) (1963)
Lucian Freud - David and Eli (2003-4)
Lucian Freud - Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996)
Lucian Freud - Leigh Bowery (1991)
As a young juvenile I'd have probably sniggered at all the nudity, not least large adult nudity, in Freud's works but now I marvel at just how efficiently he's managed to capture the essence of his friends and companions in the medium of oil painting. What, as a young juvenile, I'd have made of Francis Bacon I really don't know. As a kid I was rarely exposed, nor chose to expose myself to, art so I didn't really know who he was until I was already interested, curious, and eager to learn about why artists do what they do.
If Freud captures, somehow, the essence of a sitter it seems as if Bacon drills down beneath that essence to find something even more primal, something potentially quite dangerous. Whereas Freud's sitters skin's may crack, their paunches may droop over their pubic regions, and they may sweat and bleed, Bacon's appear to be either on the point of death or salvation. The illusion of double exposures, contorted torsos, and blurred vision are enough to give the viewer a headache. But a good headache. Bacon can seem too much. I'm still only beginning to get him.
Francis Bacon - Three Figures and Portrait (1975)
Francis Bacon - Portrait (1962)
Francis Bacon - Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1964)
Two people who did 'get' Bacon were Michael Andrews and R.B. Kitaj. Both were huge admirers, not least of Bacon's ability to create images of intense fears and desires and both used techniques that he'd inspired to try to convey how people react in social or familial situations when we may be the most comfortable, or the most uncomfortable, in our skins.
Kitaj's Refugees of Cecil Court seemed to be trapped in their own individual hells unable to comfort or even connect with each other while, in Melanie and Me Swimming, Andrews presents an idyllic image of father and child bonding, albeit over some of the inkiest darkest water you'll ever see. I think I'll stick to Kossoff's nice safe looking swimming pool.
R.B. Kitaj - Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees) (1983-4)
Michael Andrews - Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-9)
Michael Andrews - The Deer Park (1962)
R.B. Kitaj - To Live in Peace (The Singers) (1973-4)
A quote on the wall as you enter the exhibition attributed to Paula Rego reads "the greatest problem all my life has been the inability to speak my mind - to speak the truth ... therefore the flight into storytelling. You paint to fight injustice".
It may sound, on the surface, a little pretentious, a tad up itself, but there's a lot of truth in it. Some of us are naturally conciliatory and speak our deepest truths in the form of music, the form of art, or, of couse, the form of blogs! Some of us, most of us, can't even be sure what our deepest truths are and in the work of the Lisbon born Rego there's certainly quite a bit of that. In the modern parlance, there's a lot to 'unpack'.
Paula Rego - The Company of Women (1997)
Paula Rego - Bride (1994)
Our old friends, desire and fear, are perhaps more sexually charged in a
Rego work than most others but this time they're, obvs, not coming from the
male gaze (though I'm writing from it, I can't help it, born that way). 1988's The Family has long confused me. WTF is going on? Painted in the final months of Rego's husband's life before he died of a degenerative disease, I learnt at this show that it's actually a painting of mother and daughter helping dad, now too ill to do it himself, to remove his clothes.
But the long shadows, the religious symbolism, the daughter pressing just a bit too hard in to her father's groin area, and the girl standing impassive at the window. It all looks a bit 'wrong'. It asks more questions than it provides answers and, as with people, I think that's the sign of an interesting painting.
Paula Rego - The Family (1988)
These three are also, by some margin, the youngest in the exhibition so it's hoped that they can point the way forward for the next generation of British portrait painters. Stereotypes about race, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity are all questioned.
Yiadom-Boakye completes her paintings in a day but still manages to capture some of the mystery of Rego and some of the ambiguity of Sickert. The fact her sitters are imagined doesn't really matter. Cecily Brown mixes up pornography, adverts, comic books, and all the detritus that makes up modern life. She even works on up to twenty works at any one time which, in our current always switched on lifestyles, seems to make some sort of crude sense. Figures and background blur into each other much as they do in the work of Freud or Soutine and the way she works the paint isn't a million miles from the styles pioneered by Auerbach and Kossoff. Jenny Saville, whose Reverse from 2002/3 has been chosen as the final illustration of this piece because it is the equal to anything in the show, takes a particular interest in wounded bodies (she did the cover for The Manic Street Preachers' Holy Bible album) but in the way she precisely and methodically replicates each detail, just look at the mirrored reflection in Reverse, there's something of Coldstream or Uglow.
I'm not saying these women are copying the men before them. I'm saying they're their rightful heirs. This was a wonderfully curated show, full of works that both beautifully and tragically, told the story of how our bodies have been painted but also how our bodies age, how our bodies are beautiful despite their faults, how our bodies appear to others, and perhaps how other's bodies appear to us. In the capable hands of artists like Yiadom-Boakye, Saville, and Brown the future looks pretty bright. For if there's one thing we'll surely never get bored of it's looking at each other's bodies - and our own. Now, I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye - Coterie of Questions (2015)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye - The Host Over a Barrel (2014)
Cecily Brown - Boy with a Cat (2015)
Cecily Brown - Teenage Wildlife (2003)
Jenny Saville - Reverse (2002-3)
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