'All Too Human' at Tate Britain

I braved the snow and cold to visit the new exhibition at Tate Britain, 'All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life'. The title sort of suggests it's all about life painting but it also included some paintings - not many - of painting the built environment, such as Auerbach's paintings of his North London stomping ground and works by some other artists. One of these paintings that stood out for me was 'Citadel' by FN Souza with it's strange jewel-like colours and dark background. But it was the life painting and portraits I wanted to see.

The focus was very much on the second half of the 20th Century which makes it a bit odd subtitling the exhibition as a 'century' of painting. The first room includes some works from earlier in the century, such as 'Polish Woman' by Chaim Soutine and two portraits of Patricia Preece (one clothed and one naked). We then rush forward to works produced after the Second World War and artists like Bacon Souza and William  Coldstream.

I was quite taken by Coldstream's 'Seated Nude' from 1952-53, by it's simplicity and accuracy. Look at that head and face, that is definitely a woman placed in a specific time with short hair, simply styled, and white body with some colour on arms and legs where they've been exposed to some sun. She is not idealised and, other than the hair style, could have been on the Number 19 bus this morning going to work. There were a couple of other nudes by Coldstream, including one of an older woman who was bare breasted but wearing a white skirt for some reason, but I liked the simplicity and honesty of this one. I wonder who she was?

There were a few paintings of the city by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and one that really sprang to life was Kossoff's 'Children's Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon 1971'. I'm the right age to have been in that massively overcrowded pool in 1971 and I could almost hear the shrieking and laughing of the kids jumping in and splashing each other, and the teacher or life guard shouting at a group of boys up to no good. I've been there. Of course, no sane person would allow so many people in the pool at once.

I'm not too keen on Bacon but I was very impressed with the selection of portraits by Lucian Freud. I haven't seen that much of his work before so it was good to see so many of his paintings at the same time, some head and shoulders, some full body, big and small works from odd angles. One of the first we see is an early self-portrait ('Man's Head (Self Portrait I)'from 1963) with slabs of contrasting colour and vigorous brush marks. Bright highlights and darker tones easily capturing the image in a surprisingly simple and effective portrait.

Another of Freud's paintings that caught my attention was his portrait of Frank Auerbach from 1975-76. Again, it's deceptively simple and shows the shape of the forehead and nose with simple, blunt strokes that brings the painting to life. He added a touch of green to the skin tone here, used a brush stroke there and voila! a real life person captured in paint. I stood in front of this painting for a while trying to work out how he'd constructed this portrait and made it so life-like. I suspect that some of the colour of his shirt has made it's way into his face (I would've done that too).

The room is filled with other paintings by Freud, including portraits of Leigh Bowery and of Sue Tilley (both, strangely, asleep) and a large painting of Freud's assistant and his dog, 'David and Eli'.

There's a room full of paintings by Paula Rego which are worth viewing and a rather striking self- portrait of Celia Paul called 'Painter and Model' from 2012. I'm not entirely sure why this painting attracted me, a slender woman with an extreme hair-cut wearing a smock covered in paint spatters. Maybe it's the sheer messiness of the painting, with squeezed tubes of paint at her feet and the dirty smock covering her from shoulders to feet. Or maybe it's the stillness of the painting that simply says, 'I'm here'.

The final room included a huge painting by Jenny Saville, at maybe 6'x6' square, simply of her face called 'Reverse' from 2002-03. The label beside the painting says that she 'collected' images of flesh wounds to try to match the skin colours and this painting just radiates that, with the deep red flesh tones around the mouth. I wasn't the only viewer to be fascinated by this painting with a few others while I was there looking at it then at others and returning to it. It's a very strange and powerful image. And big.

So there you have it, my take on another exhibition at Tate Britain. It's not one of their best but it's definitely worth viewing and I'll be going back, if only to examine those Lucian Freud portraits again.