Exhibition: Devastatingly Human
Jenny Uglow writes: ‘The gripping and dramatic show “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life†merits its title: it is “all too human†in the tender, painful works that form its core. But “a century of painting life†promises something wider—does it smack of marketing, a lure to bring people in? In fact, the heart of the show is narrower and more interesting, illustrating the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, and Paula Rego redefined realism.
In defiance of the dominant abstract trend, they teased and stretched the practice and impact of representational art. “What I want to do,†Francis Bacon said in 1966, “is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.†In this show, terms like “realism†and “human†take on new meaning and power.’
