All too human: Bacon, Freud and a century of painting life

Abstract

Spanning a century, this beautifully illustrated history encompasses a diverse but related group of painters, mostly based in London, who focused on the depiction of the human figure and the everyday landscape they inhabited. Despite their great differences, these artists all shared a similarly intense and scrutinizing gaze, and remained loyal to their pursuit of using paint to capture intimate and powerful representations of reality. Focusing on painters active in the second half of the twentieth century (including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego, F.N. Souza and Euan Uglow) the book begins by looking at their predecessors, who set a new path for portraying an intimate, subjective and tangible reality artists such as Walter Richard Sickert, David Bomberg, Alberto Giacometti, Chaïm Soutine, Stanley Spencer and William Coldstream. It addresses the relationship between image-making, painting and photography, and also features works by contemporary artists such as Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, artists who paint figures in a manner that feels true to their personal experience of life.