Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are among artists featured in a show looking at 100 years of the human figure in British art. Curator Elena Crippa takes the title from Friedrich Nietzche’s line, ‘Everywhere he looked… what he saw was not only far from divine but all-too-human’.
For post-War artists in bomb shattered London this was all too true. Their expression of this new reality can be seen in Bacon’s 1945 Figure in a Landscape – a tortured half human figure in a hellish landscape that foretells the later tropes the painter explored. But while this painting is the starting pistol for the show, the rooms move back to the early and often interconnected influencers: David Bomberg who taught Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff who taught Michael Andrews, Paula Rego, Chaim Soutine and Walter Sickert.
Until August 27th at Tate Britain, London, UK www.tate.org.uk
