Faulty connections

In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art: Graham Sutherland was going to be the leading painter. ‘Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis Bacon sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.’ But how did it alter? What happened to figurative painting in London in the decades after Bacon exploded on to the scene? This is a question with which All Too Human at Tate Britain grapples.

It is an old problem. When in 1976 R.B. Kitaj proposed that there was an important group of figurative artists at work here, a ‘School of London’, he defined them as ‘a herd of loners’. Some, but not all, drank together and socially — at least until they fell out, which often occurred spectacularly if Bacon was at one of the parties. But artistically, for the most part, they were sui generis.

Consequently, the exhibition is full of odd couples and incompatible pairings. One half of a gallery is hung with pictures by Michael Andrews and the other with works by Kitaj himself. These are two idiosyncratic figures, both of whom are, in hall-of-fame terms, pending.

Kitaj’s reputation plummeted after a misconceived retrospective in 1994, and the disproportionately violent critical response that followed. Michael Andrews, in contrast to the abrasive and articulate Kitaj, tended to fly beneath the radar when he was alive, and was accorded a fine posthumous exhibition at Tate to which unfortunately almost nobody came. Only now is the idea dawning that he might have been a truly important figure. And so might Kitaj, after all.

It must have been tempting to put Andrews and Kitaj together. A text on the wall points out, correctly, that they both owed something to Bacon.