Skin and nightmares at Tate Britain

As the grass turns a lifeless shade of green signalling the shortness of summer's lease, I'm beginning to feel guilty that I've only managed to catch two major art exhibitions this year. But what fantastic exhibitions. First there were the incredible Andreas Gursky photographs that I've already written about. And back in July, I spent a balmy summer afternoon taking in Tate Britain's All Too Human exhibition, a wonderfully curated collection of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon paintings, bolstered by the works of many of their contemporaries and some of the artists whom these two British giants went on to influence. 

The Freuds were the main draw and the handful of paintings on display were superb.  Little details jumped out at me: the gnarled end of the same black leather armchair appearing in two adjacent paintings, and the surprise at the small size of the famous portrait of Leigh Bowery.  Perhaps I was wrong-footed, in that you expect Bowery's big bulbous head to demand a more substantial canvas.  A melancholic thought washed over me as I gazed at this portrait. Were the two flecks of blemished skin the tell-tale signs of Kaposi's sarcoma? (Bowery would die from an AIDS related illness two years later and that form of skin cancer is associated with late-stage HIV.)  Later, I pursued this thought and learned that they were actual holes in his cheeks, piercings allowing the insertion of safety-pins which in turn secured large fake smiling lips to his mouth for performance art.  

Leigh Bowery, Lucian Freud (1991)

This cheered me up.  Although the fleshiness that dominates Freud's paintings could be described as having the deadened glow of the mortuary, his subjects always look utterly alive. But, like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, I find myself unsettled and feeling far too mortal when gazing at illness and death in a painting. 

Perhaps that's why I'm not yet entirely enamoured by the work of Francis Bacon. There's a pessimism to his paintings that makes my heart sink. Of course, I find it hard to avert my eyes, and if I'm honest I probably lingered in front of Triptych 1974-77 longer than any of the other paintings on display. The biographical detail that held me fast, was that the main subject of this work was Bacon's partner George Dyer, who had, just a few years previous to this painting, taken his own life. The distended and writhing figure of Dyer features in all three panels, and the distress and sense of menace is heightened by the presence of two sinister figures. Is this the afterlife that Bacon imagined for his lover? If so, it is a disturbing memento mori, one that is more of an excoriant than a balm to those battling grief.

Triptych 1974-77, Francis Bacon (1981)

Eventually I turned away and entered the next room and my eyes were immediately drawn to something familiar on the far wall. I approached and experienced a prickly sense of déjà vu. The artist was Leon Kossoff. I had never heard of him. But then I noted the title of the painting: Christ Church, Spitalfields, Morning. That explained it; I had spent my lunch-break at that very church just a few days before, reading Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, a book that features the church.  As for the painting, it's not unusual, and certainly not startling or innovative. And without having visited its subject a few days previously I would definitely have given it short shrift. But happenstance heightened the aesthetic appeal and I tarried.  

 Christ Church, Spitalfields, Morning - Leon Kossoff (1990)

That appeal grew the more that I looked at the shape of the familiar building, vaguely delineated and conjuring up a space that was out of time. The image could have illustrated a scene from anywhere in the three hundred year span of Ackroyd's novel. The banal thought that it would make a fabulous cover for the book also crossed my mind (curious that the blue and grey palette used on the cover of my copy of the book seemed just a semi-tone up from the Kossoff painting).

Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd

Christ Church, Spitalfields, is one of the seven churches featured in the book: in the real world designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor the architect; in Ackroyd's world designed by the fictional architect Nicholas Dyer, which then becomes the site of 18th and 20th Century murders, which (are you still following?) are then investigated by the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor. Combined with the novel's playfulness with temporality that tricky synopsis yells postmodernism.  But don't let that put you off. Ackroyd's book is a wonderful piece of literature, provocative and intriguing, and one that encourages you to hit the streets, taking in the actual churches and gathering up a real sense of their long and eventful history.  

Alongside the Kossoff paintings, were a selection of works by Frank Auerbach. I'm not a fan of those works of his that feature excessive impasto – they are thrown distinctly into the shade whenever you consider the incredible works of Anselm Kiefer – but I did enjoy his more conventional efforts, particularly St Pancras Steps. The steps featured in that painting are still visible on the corner of St Pancras station.

St Pancras Steps - Frank Auerbach (1979)

But it is the final two rooms that proved to be the most memorable. Female artists suddenly take the strain, and like Kossoff, one of those painters was completely new to me. Paula Rego, a Portuguese artist, gives us a stirring and mesmerising take on 18th Century satire. Her Betrothal Lessons: The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage a la Mode’  by Hogarth is brimming with the quirky details of a strange and clearly strained marriage. The peculiar details in these panels certainly flag up Tolstoy's contention that 'every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'  A woman has her hair done under one of those frizzing styling bowls, fleshy legs (a nod to Freud?) resting on a box as she stares with melancholy longing into a mirror. A parlour scene featuring a dog in the foreground and two androgynous looking women gossiping as some form of S&M takes place in the background. And my favourite, a green parakeet atop a chest of drawers looking towards a semi-naked couple indulging in some baby / mother fantasy. 

Betrothal Lessons: The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage a la Mode’ by Hogarth - Paula Rego (1999)

Rego's versatility, both with medium and subject, is demonstrated on the opposite wall in Island of the Lights from Pinocchio. A gaggle of children metamorphosing into donkeys is reminiscent of the satanic excesses of Hieronymus Bosch and the carnage of Picasso's Guernica. It's the sort of painting that would have fascinated me as a child; as an adult it scares me half to death.  

Island of the Lights from Pinocchio - Paula Rego (1996)

And then in the final room, and just to close on yet another disturbing image, the always striking Jenny Saville and a painting called Reverse. It's  astonishing. A huge canvas with a young girl lying on her side, her massive head turned painfully and pleadingly towards us. The caption hints that she has been burned, and the fiery reds around her mouth bear that out. It's not so much the cliche of eyes following you around the room; rather these are eyes that stay with you in your imagination for a very long time.

  

Reverse, Jenny Saville (2003)

In this final image there is a convergence of Freud's unflinching gaze - an unwillingness to flatter - and Bacon's dark psyche, choosing as his subject that which unsettles and sends us on our way with unquiet dreams. In many ways Jenny Saville's genius is the bastard daughter of Freud and Bacon. The realist's obsession with flesh combining with the madness and pain that can be inflicted, often by our own hand and imagination, on the human body. One only has to follow the path of the plastic surgeon's knife in many of Saville's paintings to see that. It's a startling and apt close to a wonderful act of curation. I came for the Freuds and left with so much more.