All too Human at Tate Britain: an exploration of our most personal concerns, via a century of painting

Not so long ago it would have seemed hopelessly retrogressive for Tate Britain to put on an exhibition devoted to 100 years of British figurative painting. But given the current predominance of the painted human form in the work of so many of today’s leading artists it couldn't be more timely.

At the heart of All too Human are the grimacing, contorted figures of Francis Bacon and the scrupulously observed subjects of Lucian Freud, with the two coming together in a rarely seen Bacon portrait of Freud of 1964, which seems almost to levitate with pent-up energy.

Freud famously stated that “I want the paint to work as flesh does”, and the large gallery lined with the fleshy reality of his sitters such as the late Leigh Bowery or the magnificently abundant form of a slumbering Sue Tilley is worth the visit alone.

So too as are the two intensely charged earlier portraits of Freud’s first wife Kitty which were painted in the 1940s with a chilly forensic precision. In one she clutches a glassy-eyed kitten by the neck, in the other she bares a breast above the head of a bull terrier resting in her lap and in both she looks deeply unhappy.  

The female form is charted and plotted with austere mathematical precision by Slade Professor William Coldstream and his pupil Euan Uglow; while by contrast it is London in all its grimy glory that is whipped up in thick layers of impasto paint by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.

Gregarious social gatherings painted by Michael Andrews and Ron Kitaj confirm the whiteness and maleness of these painterly circles which Tate makes a somewhat tokenistic attempt to redress in a rather random-seeming room devoted to the spikey,  menacing works of Indian painter FN De Souza, who lived in London in the 1950s and 60s.

There is also a dearth of women artists. Until the magnificent penultimate room devoted to Paula Rego which is another of the show’s highlights, the only work by a woman is a solitary reclining nude by Dorothy Mead painted in 1954.

But in Rego’s dark unruly masquerades and psychologically-charged scenarios populated by women of all generations, from slyly glancing young girls to through to a pensive grandmother, female power reasserts itself with a vengeance.

The momentum continues as All too Human ends on an emphatically female note with the work of four contemporary artists – Celia Paul, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown – each of whom have the human form as their main focus, and who bring their explorations of figurative painting into the here and now.

Paul presents a self portrait that is poignant, internalized and reflective while Saville’s hugely enlarged face is confrontational, visceral and uncomfortably up-close.  

Sources art historical and contemporary feed into Cecily Brown’s erotic whipping-up of fragmented body parts. Yiadom-Boakye, meanwhile, conjures her enigmatic fictitious figures directly out of her imagination, proposing alternative narratives and pointing to future art histories and usually painting them in a single day.  

All Too Human might be rather a mixed bag with a number of glaring omissions – whither Gwen John, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, Rose Wylie, to name but a few? But nonetheless it stands as testament to the enduring power of paint to express a multitude of different lived experiences, emotions and agendas and to chime with the most contemporary of concerns.

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life is at Tate Britain until 27 August; tate.org.uk