Who still dares to stage a Picasso show these days? Or a Francis Bacon one? Not because the two artists' paintings would cause offense today—though some of them certainly once did—but because securing adequate loans has simply become too hard. What museum is willing to part with such precious works, so popular with its own visitors? And what borrowing institution could cover the costs, transport and insurance above all?
Then again, the potential payoff is tempting. Picasso and Bacon are household names, familiar not just to art lovers but to tourists passing through. In Vienna, those tourists stop at the Albertina. It once called itself a graphic arts collection but long ago outgrew its confinement to paper; under its long-serving director Klaus Albrecht Schröder, it became a "real" art museum with painting, sculpture, and photography.
Now Ralph Gleis, who came from Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, runs the place, and for him a pure painting show at the Albertina is a matter of course—without a single sheet of graphic work. The current exhibition goes by the title "Picasso - Bacon. What It Feels Like to Be Human," and it isn't one of those all-too-familiar "X in dialogue with Y" concepts whose makers hope a spark will somehow jump across.
You just have to dare
The Vienna show does, however, rest on an ambitious idea. Its aim, in the words of museum director Ralph Gleis, is "the analysis of the artistic means by which Picasso and Bacon, each in his own specific way, revolutionized the depiction of the human body."
That takes nerve. And thanks to generous loans, many from private collections, the result really is an exhibition that lives up to its lofty ambition—or at least traces the younger artist's gaze on the elder. What links the two is not an exchange but an elective affinity. Picasso was always so sure of himself that he never sought comparison. Bacon, for his part, shied away from any possible closeness. The two never met.
Born in 1881, Pablo Picasso was exactly a generation older than Francis Bacon, born in 1909. When Bacon, still searching for his calling, first saw drawings by Picasso in Paris in 1927, they made a lasting impression on him. That impression deepened a few years later, when he visited a larger anniversary exhibition of Picasso's work in London.
"The style of Mr. Picasso"
Self-taught, Bacon had been scraping by in London with odd jobs. Gradually he became an artist and had his first exhibitions, yet critics kept linking him to "the later style of Mr. Picasso," as one reviewer wrote in 1937.
Almost nothing survives from this period of Bacon's career. The artist destroyed his early work as thoroughly as he could. So the Vienna exhibition has to make a leap: it shows Picasso's works from the 1920s as Bacon's inspiration, and only picks up Bacon himself with paintings made after the war.
Yet while Picasso hurried from one stylistic phase to the next, treating his former Cubism as nothing more than a virtuoso tool for taking bodies and objects apart and putting them back together, Bacon's path ran almost in a straight line. Early on, he painted portraits of figures enclosed in a barely hinted-at yet painfully palpable grid—an imaginary box against which they scream soundlessly, mouths wide open, as in Study for a Portrait, 1949. Even the laugh in Seated Figure, 1955, is no expression of joy but a sneer.
No joie de vivre to be found
And so it goes on, always tracing the human figure. Picasso's works left no direct imprint on Bacon; what did was his depiction of human life as such. Surprisingly, Bacon was shaped above all by Picasso's cheerful beach scenes from the late 1920s. It was precisely these pictures, Bacon later said, that had shown him "what it feels like to be human."
The Vienna show borrowed the quote for its title. Yet Bacon's paintings radiate nothing like that same joie de vivre. That surely has something to do with his turbulent love life, scarred by the deaths of several of his lovers.
Still, the work can't be reduced to biography. The artistic problem remains: how to depict human beings in all their transience. The smeared paint that increasingly became Bacon's trademark resists fixing any single position of head or body. More and more, Bacon took on the role of an overseer, before whom bodies writhe on tables as if in an operating theater, lit by a bare light bulb. Whether this also reflects an awareness of the interrogation and torture methods so pervasive in the 20th century is a question the exhibition—and its curator Michael Peppiatt, Bacon's longtime friend and interpreter—never asks.
Being human doesn't feel all that good
Bacon's figures are existential. Seeing so many of them side by side in large formats in Vienna is nearly breathtaking—all the more so as the mature Bacon of the 1970s and 1980s seems never to have dipped in quality. Every painting here exudes an aura of finality. In the creatures Bacon depicts, humanity is distilled. If you take his pictures seriously, being human doesn't feel all that good.
If Picasso hasn't come up for several sentences now, that mirrors the exhibition. Its Picasso half falls off sharply. Early works—above all the large-format Mother with Dead Child, from the orbit of the epochal Guernica painted for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair—mark an artistic peak that the loans from later years neither reach nor even aim for.
Interestingly, Bacon later played down the influence of Guernica in particular. Yet his rare early work Fury, 1944, shows a downright disturbing condensation of the motif of the screaming woman.
A new, archaic conception
In his very last works, made before and around 1970, Picasso displays a zest for and celebration of life that must have been foreign to Bacon his whole life. When these paintings went on view at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1971, critics reacted with bewilderment. Bacon, too, once remarked that Picasso shouldn't have "released" many of his late paintings. Still, Picasso lingers in Bacon's work less as a model than as a kind of shadow.
And yet, at least in Reclining Nude, 1971, on loan to Vienna, the modern master showed once more how the deconstruction of the human body can give rise to a conception both new and archaic. Picasso died in 1973, Bacon 19 years later, both of them highly active to the end—and both in full command of their artistic powers.
Still, the Vienna exhibition makes it very clear that the two went separate ways early on. It shows both the possibilities and the limits of artistic comparison. In Vienna, Bacon leaves by far the stronger impression; you only wish more of Picasso's strong paintings had made it in.