An ambitious and enjoyable new perspective on post-war British art
All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life
Tate Britain
The raw, expressive figure painting of the so-called School of London – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach et al – remains one of the dominant and most popular strains in British art, despite the competing claims of abstraction and conceptualism and the rise of the YBAS. The fact that the artists were all larger-than-life alpha males (who happened to be white) has tended to be seen as part of this quasi-movement’s romantic appeal – until now.
This ambitious exhibition sets out to give a broader view of this potent strain in British art, relating the key figures to a whole century’s worth of artistic developments, from Walter Richard Sickert to Jenny Saville. More controversially, it attempts to expand the School’s spiritual demographic to include women and artists from more diverse ethnic backgrounds – all London-based. While the show was conceived long before the Weinstein revelations, the “Me Too” cultural landscape has made it feel peculiarly relevant.
It opens with early-20th-century precursors of the School of London. Sickert’s gloomily sensual Nuit d’été
(c 1906) introduces the bohemian, garret-studio ambience that pervades the group’s work, while David Bomberg’s powerful expressionistic portraits and landscapes are clearly the starting point for his students Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.
A roomful of dark, early Bacons (which tend to be the best Bacons) leads to the first of the show’s “discoveries”: the London-based Indian mystical expressionist FN Souza. If the sudden appearance of a knowingly primitive, magic-realist sensibility feels anomalous amid the prevailing drabs and khakis of the School of London, the best of Souza’s works, such as the voodoo-flavoured Crucifixion, 1959, shares a kind of haggard spiritual kinship with Bacon – a sense of torment, common to the post-war period, that goes deeper than style. But linking Freud’s essentially surrealist early work with the austere, quasi-mathematical observational painting of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow, on the grounds that both are meticulously detailed, feels a tenuous link too far.
Bomberg’s atmospheric wartime cityscape Evening in the City of London, 1944, connects beautifully with two major studies of post-war redevelopment by his former pupils: Kossoff ’s Building Site, Victoria Street, 1961, and Auerbach’s Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, 1962: magnificent, expressive splurges of oil paint in which the two friends appear to be competing in getting as much of the stuff on canvas as possible.
While I’ve always been sceptical of the way Freud seems to reduce all human life to the same limited range of thickly impasted textures and earthy colours, he is well served in the centrepiece of the show. The chosen works (not, thankfully, just the expected ones from the Tate collection) demonstrate his range, from a tiny, intensely focused portrait of his elderly mother to the larger than life-size female nude Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-6).
However, the show’s attempt to present the Portuguese-born painter Paula Rego as a sort of female fellow traveller of the School of London – a woman-genius to counterbalance Freud, if you like – doesn’t work. Where the School is preoccupied with the expressive power of paint, generally focused through intense scrutiny of a person or landscape, Rego’s impulse is essentially illustrative: she tells stories.
For all its anomalies, however, this is a thought-provoking and very enjoyable show, an elegantly partisan history that forces you to question received
From tomorrow until Aug 27; 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk