A landmark exhibition at Tate Britain
next year will celebrate how artists have captured the intense
experience of life in paint. All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Lifewill showcase around 100 works by some of the most celebrated modern British artists, with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon
at its heart. It will reveal how their art captures personal and
immediate experiences and events, distilling raw sensations through
their use of paint, as Freud said: ‘I want the paint to work as flesh
does’. Bringing together major works by Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
and many others, this exhibition will make poignant connections across
generations of artists and tell an expanded story of figurative painting
in the 20th century.
Groups of
major and rarely seen works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon will give
visitors a chance to immerse themselves in the rich sensuality and
intimacy of these two modern masters. Key paintings spanning Freud’s
career will explore his studio as both context and subject of his work
and will show how his unflinchingly honest depictions of models became
more sculptural and visceral over time, in works such as Frank Auerbach 1975-6 and Sleeping by the Lion Carpet 1996.
In contrast to Freud’s practice of working from life, the exhibition
will look at Bacon’s relationship with photographer John Deakin, whose
portraits of friends and lovers were often the starting point for
Bacon’s work, including Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne 1966. Earlier works by Bacon like Study after Velazquez 1950 will be shown alongside a sculpture by Giacometti, both artists having explored the enduring presence of isolated figures.
Looking
to earlier generations, the exhibition will show how this spirit in
painting had been pursued by artists like Walter Sickert and Chaïm Soutine – key precedents for portraying an intimate, subjective and tangible reality. The teaching of William Coldstream at the Slade School of Fine Art and David Bomberg
at the Borough Polytechnic also proved hugely influential. Employing
Freud as a fellow tutor, Coldstream encouraged the likes of Michael
Andrews and Euan Uglow
to fix the visible world on canvas through intense observation, while
Bomberg’s vision led students like Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Dorothy Mead
to pursue a more tactile, embodied experience of life. This
generation’s work encompassed a wide variety of subjects, from
Auerbach’s and Kossoff’s enduring fascination with London’s streets and
public spaces to F.N. Souza’s
spiritual and symbolic figures, and from Coldstream’s and Freud’s focus
on the body in isolation to Michael Andrews’s and R.B. Kitaj’s interest
in group scenes and storytelling.
The
exhibition will also shed light on the role of women artists in the
traditionally male-dominated field of figurative painting. Paula Rego
explores the condition of women in society and the roles they play over
the course of their lives, while always referring to autobiographical
events, as in The Family 1988. Her work underwent a particularly
profound change in the late 1980s and 1990s when she returned to working
from life. The exhibition will also celebrate a younger generation of
painters who continue to pursue the tangible reality of life in their
work. Contemporary artists like Cecily Brown,
Celia Paul, Jenny Saville and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye work in dialogue
with this tradition while also taking the painting of figures in new
directions.
Bacon portrait of Freud to be shown for the first time since 1965
A large-scale painting by Francis Bacon of his friend Lucian Freud is to be shown in Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition All Too Humanin
February 2018. The work was only seen in public shortly after it was
completed – firstly in London in 1964 and then in Hamburg and Stockholm
in 1965. It has since remained in private hands and has not been
exhibited for over half a century.
Bacon and Freud had a deep and
complex friendship, and were often viewed as artistic rivals. They first
met in the mid-1940s and were inseparable for years, seeing each other
almost daily in Soho’s bars and clubs as well as visiting each other’s
studios and occasionally sitting for portraits. The portrait that will
be shown at Tate Britain next year is an angst-ridden image of the human
figure, bare chested and curled into the corner of a dark room beneath a
single lightbulb. The painting stands over six feet high and was
originally part of a triptych which Bacon then split into separate
works. It was first unveiled in 1964 at the group exhibition Aspects of XX Century Art held
at Bacon’s gallery Marlborough Fine Art. It then travelled from the
Kunstverein Hamburg to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the
following year as part of a solo show of Bacon’s work, but has not been
seen in public since.
The work will be one of several key Bacon paintings on loan to Tate Britain for the exhibition All Too Human.
These will include an important portrait of Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy
made in 1962, the year of Lacey’s death, and not seen in the UK since.
It shows him seated with a scowling expression and is the first time
Bacon portrayed the nude body with its internal organs on display,
seemingly bursting through the surface of its skin. An extraordinary
Bacon triptych from 1974-77, on loan from a private collection, will
also be exhibited for the first time in a UK public gallery in over 30
years. A final homage to George Dyer, the great love of Bacon’s life, it
shows a contorted body beneath a black umbrella on a cold stretch of
beach.
Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain said:
This
will be an unmissable opportunity to see some truly extraordinary
paintings, many of which have not been seen for decades. With this
exhibition we want to show how British figurative painters found new and
powerful ways to capture life on canvas throughout the 20th century,
and Bacon’s portraits are some of the greatest examples of that
endeavour.
It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.The exhibitions will tour to the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest later in 2018.
Alberto
Giacometti,
1901-1966
Woman of
Venice IX
1956
Bronze
1130 x 165 x
346 mm , Tate
Chaïm
Soutine, 1893-
1943
Landscape
at Céret
c.1920-1
Oil paint on
canvas
559 x 838 mm ,
Tate
David Bomberg
The
Artist's Wife and Baby
1937
Oil paint on
canvas
766 x 562 mm ,
Tate: Presented by Dinora Davies-Rees, the artist's
step-daughter,
and her daughter Juliet Lamont through the
Contemporary
