'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.

Two Tates and Four Exhibitions - The First Two

I went to Tate Britain to see the Frank Auerback exhibition but accidentally went into the strangely fascinating 'Artists & Empire' exhibition first. 'Empire' is a bit of a charged term these days but it's ripe to plunder for its artistic heritage, as this exhibition amply demonstrates. Yes there are maps showing one quarter of the world coloured red to show the expanse of Empire and yes, there are paintings of governors and others in their version of exotic 'native' costumes and yes, there are paintings illustrating the military might of Empire. But there is a lot more to the exhibition than that.

It's a mix of paintings, sculpture and some textiles and head-dresses and many of the paintings are by non-British artists, artists from around the world that painted scenes from the last big empire. And the paintings aren't just of the great and wealthy, there's a painting of the first former slave Black Barbadian freed woman and property owner who went on to own slaves herself, paintings of crowded cock-fights, of Indian princesses in their finery, of the army taking custody of the sons of enemy nobles as a guarantee of good behaviour, of sad scenes of lovers parting as the man boards a ship to do his duty in some far off place and of women hiding during the Indian mutiny.

Some of the painting stirred strange emotions, such as the scenes of fallen soldiers in some far off and little know war, the last dozen of a regiment surrounded by fallen comrades as the Afghan warriors charge and, reading the sign beside the painting which tells of a captain wrapping himself in the regiment's colours to die only to be left to live and subsequently released by the Afghans. These were real stories that barely trouble the history books but were known at the time. What must it have been like for these young lads to go off to fight in far-flung places when the world was much bigger than it is today, when distances were impossibly huge and they ended up fighting strange peoples at the word of their masters and, let's face it, it was all about money and power for the few at the top of the pile that never faced these dangers. Was it all about adventure or did they have little choice but to go and take the King's shilling?

There are also paintings of the subjects of Empire as well, such as an intense double portrait of two Sikh gentlemen in their turbans and uniform before they went to fight for the British in the trenches of  First World War France. They were captains who survived the war but what must it have been like for them? A sign elsewhere noted that one in six of the soldiers in the First World War were from the Empire but where is this history told and what happened to them, dying half a world away from where they grew up for an Empire that barely valued them other than as fodder. 

The exhibition ends with some more contemporary works to show how the former colonies have been able to reconcile their more recent histories and draw new artistic freedoms from it. It's odd to think that the Empire isn't that long gone and it was the First World War that was the beginning of the end and the  Indian partition finally ended it. Do I feel guilty about the Empire? It brought massive wealth to this country but my people were just as much servants of Empire as anyone else under its rule around the globe, working in the fields and down the mines. I suspect that if I'd been born 200 years ago and sought to escape poverty by adventuring abroad I would've 'gone native' under the Raj and lived as an eccentric. I still might do that.

The Frank Auerbach exhibition was a very different creature, showing his works from the 1950s onwards as his style and vision developed. I know nothing about Mr Auerback but I now know that he's had a studio at Mornington Crescent (just up from Camden in North London) for decades because he painted the area so frequently. And what vibrant paintings they are too - or at least some of them.

His paintings are thick with paint, laid on by a palette knife and chunky brushes, lots of layers and textures on the canvas. A few of them made me want to climb into that froth of paint and explore his colourful North London streets  No doubt it'll be far from the grey concrete and red brick reality of those streets.

I'm not entirely sure what he was trying to say - and is still trying to say - but I'd love to have a chat about it over a glass of wine some day and how I can find my way into his vision of Mornington Crescent ...