Defining forces in modern figuration
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Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon both devoted themselves to the human subject, challenging, transforming and investigating the fundamental aspects of human existence. The Albertina places the two 20th-century giants side by side in an exhibition that considers their radical conceptions of the human figure. Approximately 70 artworks will show how both artists deconstructed and reimagined the body, with Picasso’s famous cubist fragmentations and Bacon’s hauntingly torqued forms giving visceral shape to emotional states such as anxiety, pain, fear and vulnerability. Both artists were steeped in the legacy of art history, but it was Picasso’s artworks that first inspired Bacon to take up painting, after Bacon encountered an exhibition of Picasso’s drawings at Galerie Paul Rosenberg in the summer of 1927. “Picasso opened the door to all these systems. I have tried to stick my foot in the door so that it does not close,” Bacon later said. “Picasso was one of that genius caste which includes Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and above all Velázquez.”
Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne,” 1967. Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, © The Estate of Francis Bacon / All rights reserved / Bildrecht, Vienna and DACS, London 2026
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