Though Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, two juggernauts of 20th century Western art, were coupled stylistically early in their careers, they have been misrelated retrospectively. ‘Flesh & Bone’ is their first joint show in 50 years, selected by Martin Harrison, editor of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné, and Richard Calvocoressi, Director of The Henry Moore Foundation.
The exhibition makes a point of showing both artists’ talents for mediums they are not especially renowned in. Moore, for instance was an exceptionally good draftsman who would draw his figures relentlessly before sculpting them. His 1940 war drawings, in particular, provoke an uneasy reaction when exhibited alongside Bacon’s most haunting works – the ghostly grey-white tones of William Blake’s life mask in Study for Portrait II, for example.
Within Bacon’s celebrated painting style, on the other hand, his fascination with sculpture is easily apparent. In 1971 he wrote, ‘I think I would be able to do the figures in a really different way by painting them as a transposition of how I was going to do them in the sculptures’, and his technique is as close to sculpture as painting can be. In his studies of women, for example, he delineates leg in such a way that shadow is created merely by the lack of paint on the underside of the brush, where on the top colour is thick and full.
Both Bacon and Moore were fascinated by the human form throughout their careers and it was from here that their most ground-breaking work stemmed. Bacon bought wholesale into Moore’s belief that “I don’t think we shall, or should, ever get far away from the thing that all sculpture is based on: the human body”.
The curators are careful to distinguish between the effects of this shared interest on both. Whereas Bacon’s works depict ‘the disintegrating and dissolving form’, Moore works “from the inside out, pushing anatomical structure to the surface”. Bacon’s textural, thick-thigh-ed figures and swollen, butcher-slab limbs provoke an even harsher reaction when set against Moore’s gaping vastness and smooth undulations.
And yet both depict fractiously kinetic forms, enthralled by the disarming emptiness of gaping mouths and sudden, distorted holes in the face and body. The loneliness of Bacon’s single figures, wrapping their bodies around themselves in the black night is echoed in Moore’s serene, otherworldly head sculptures.
The information which intersperses the exhibition draws biographical comparisons to better explain these similarities. Bacon and Moore were both born before the First World War, with Moore serving in the trenches and both living in London during the Blitz. Francis Warner, a tutor in English literature at St Peter’s College, Oxford, suggested that both artists aimed to restore the body “to a kind of dignified, animal resignation” in the face of much human suffering.
The artists set beside one another certainly create astounding parallels. For one who has never seen a Moore and Bacon beside one another, it is an eye-opening insight into an unconventional treatment of the human body in art. The exhibition is at once stomach-churningly visceral and disturbingly unearthly; a selection of emotions rarely combined.
Bacon/Moore:Flesh and Bone will be showing at the Ashmolean until January 19th. Student tickets £6.
