Exhibition of the week All Too Human

“Stop the presses: Tate Britain has just mounted an exhibition of figurative oil painting from the past 100 years,” said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. It’s shocking: a whole gallery given over to “actual paintings of recognisable things” – an art form regularly pronounced dead by the experts. All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life takes us from Walter Sickert’s scenes of London nightlife in the early 20th century, to Lynette Yiadom-boakye’s “evocative, dreamlike” contemporary paintings, by way of great artists such as Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego, Frank Auerbach and standout individual works, such as Euan Uglow’s “meticulous” Georgia (1973). At its heart is an impressive selection of work by the so-called School of London, a loose group of postwar painters whose number included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and R.B. Kitaj. This is a “dazzling” show, packed with the “true heroes of modern British art”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Here are “works of art that truly matter, in their humanity, courage, feeling, truth”.

At first glance, All Too Human looks very promising, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. The show opens with a marvellous gallery featuring “darkly brooding” Sickerts, “excoriatingly honest” Spencers and a pair of “lusciously painted” works by Chaïm Soutine. Yet despite the quality of many of the paintings on show, it sinks rapidly “downhill” thereafter. That’s putting it mildly, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. This is a “confusing display of boneheaded curation” that can’t even decide on a coherent theme. Worse, far too much space is devoted to the likes of the “stiff and mannered” Indian modernist F.N. Souza and the “hugely influential” but rather dry William Coldstream. Rarely have I been so “disappointed” by a blockbuster exhibition. There are some brilliant works here, said Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times. Of “outstanding interest” are a number of rarely seen pieces by Bacon. Study for a Portrait of P.L. (1962) is “an unsparing depiction of the artist’s lover” Peter Lacy, while Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1964) presents his friend as a vision of “existential anxiety”. Freud himself is also well represented with, for instance, a “tense” picture of his first wife, Kitty Garman, posing with a bull terrier. Nevertheless, there are some baffling omissions – where is David Hockney? – and pointless detours into “gender politics”: the contemporary section is women-only. This should have been a “landmark” exhibition and, “unmissable” though it is, it feels like a “squandered opportunity”.