Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
ALL TOO HUMAN – BACON, FREUD AND A CENTURY OF PAINTING LIFE Tate Britain to 27th August
This is a most encouraging exhibition. It treats British post-war art seriously rather than as a backwater. And it makes a strong case for the validity and importance of the London School’s figurative painting after a generation to which Manhattan modernisms were the only valid art.
Better still, every one of the eighteen British or British-based artists included (together with two foreign inspirations, Giacometti and Soutine, and John Deakin’s photographs) are painters. Most of them benefited from a thorough training before art schools shied away from painting and drawing.
The organisers, headed by Elena Crippa, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Tate, are almost all female, and pride themselves on including six women painters on an equal footing with the men; but, and this is still more praiseworthy, they have done so without any sense of strain. Inevitably though, four of the six are the youngest, and they provide an ending to the show. It is to be hoped that it is not a true ending, and that there is a younger generation to follow them. Here Paula Rego is given most space, and rightly, as her works most embody the ‘idea that a woman’s voice should be authentic, distinct from, and not deferential to the male voice’.
In the introduction to the book of the show, Crippa writes, ‘ All Too Human is about painting and takes as its starting point specific and personal facts of life treated with an unsentimental approach that eschews clichés, the result of probity and sustained physical and intellectual engagement.’
The show opens with forerunners and inspirations: Sickert, who passed down the realism of Manet and Degas, and Spencer and Soutine. It then traces the influence of two teachers in particular, David Bomberg and William Coldstream. The ‘London School’ tag was coined by R B Kitaj in 1976. The then expatriate American wrote that ‘there are artistic personalities in this small island more unique and strong and, I think, more numerous than anywhere in the world outside America’s jostling vigour’, and this show backs him up.
There are strong links between the artists, especially in a network around Freud – Paula Rego’s handling of flesh is often close to his, while Celia Paul, a pupil and lover, sometimes seems to blend Freud with Gwen John – but these are all strong individuals.
The barbed friendship of Freud and Bacon is the core of the show, although showing them so closely together emphasises their many differences. One can easily understand their mutual admiration, but less so the jealous rivalry felt by Freud. ‘I’m not trying to make a copy of the person,’ said Freud. ‘I’m trying to relay something of who they really are as a physical and emotional presence. I want the paint to work as flesh does.’ Quite often Freud’s work has a Pre-raphaelite reality, especially Two Plants here. Bacon was a complete contrast, manipulating John Deakin’s photographs in a manner akin to multi-viewpoint Cubism.
Other pairings work well, notably Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. I felt that Souza was given too much emphasis, though, and I would like to have seen more of Dorothy Mead, represented by just the one Bomberg-inspired nude, and perhaps also more Michael Andrews.