All Too Human review – brutal, tender and bizarre, this is life, not art

Tate Britain, London
Here in this dazzling survey of modern figurative painting are works that truly matter, in their humanity, courage, feeling and truth.

I’d love to say it was David Bomberg’s arresting landscapes or Francis Bacon’s existentially challenged popes and apes that got me addicted to Tate Britain’s brilliant and brave new exhibition, but in truth it was a breast. In Lucian Freud’s early painting Girl With a White Dog (1950-51), his first wife, Kitty Garman, sits in a lime-green dressing gown with a dog resting its long snouty face on her lap. She has one breast exposed while the other is hidden under fluffy fabric. Somehow, as I looked, I felt the mystery of a beating heart, the pulse of her being, in the way she places her hand on her covered breast. Freud, it hit me, is an artist who – like Caravaggio – delivers the shock of the real, the disturbing sense that you are looking at life, not art.

Related: Frank Auerbach: a painter's painter of horrors and joy

Continue reading...