All Too Human - Tate Britain

All Too Human explores how artists in Britain have stretched the possibilities of paint in order to capture life around them.

The exhibition spans a century of art making, from the early twentieth century through to contemporary developments.

London forms the backdrop, where most of the artists lived, studied and exhibited. Some of them only ever painted from life, whether focusing on regular sifters, including relatives, friends and lovers, or the everyday landscapes they inhabited. Others selected and combined reference images from a variety of sources to create imagined scenes and suggest possible narratives. Whatever their approach, these artists moved beyond naturalistic representation, capturing the ways in which they are affected by their subjects.

Many of the artists in the exhibition have spoken of painting as an activity that cannot be properly expressed in words, existing beyond the limits of verbal language. Embracing the visual and tactile qualities of paint, these artists set out to explore what if is that makes us human.

This room brings together a selection of each artist's work from a particular moment in their career when they were each working directly from life or from their own drawings.

They painted scenes from their everyday lives and focused on individuals and places that were important to them. They painted surfaces in such a manner as to convey a sense of the material qualities of their subject. They were all, in their own way, seeking to portray as Sickert said, 'the sensation of a page torn from the book of life'.

Giacometti's sculptures of solitary beings and Bacon's figures became identified with existentialism, a philosophical theory that became popular in the postwar period. It was seen as the intellectual expression of anxiety about the fate of humanity in the nuclear age.

The gestural quality of Bacon's brushwork and the imprints left by Giacometti's hand record the artists' engagement with their materials. They epitomise the existential condition, with individuals being defined by their direct and subjective experience. Bacon also painted animals, such as dogs and baboons, portraying them as alone and distressed, consumed by the same struggle that he saw as central to human existence.

This room focuses on Souza's work from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, at a time when he lived in London.

The graphic power of Souza's lines produces simplified and bold images, while the thick oil paints applied liberally to the board or canvas, with swift strokes, give his work a sense of vitality and movement. Saints, businessmen and naked figures are some of his main characters, inhabiting a world shaped by loss and desire, as well as spirituality.

The erotic nature of his female nudes express the artist's view of male-female relationships, as complex and shaped by love, lust and abjection. Cityscapes, constructed from fragmented images and memories, are also important subjects and perhaps suggestive of Souza's cosmopolitan life and frequent travelling.

William Coldstream studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and returned there as Professor of Fine Art in 1949.

He developed a process in which he attempted to record reality through measurement, marking the relative location of key features on the canvas. His work was the result of intense scrutiny but also involved empathy, established as he attempted to record another person's presence through long hours spent painting them.

The way Bomberg taught in life drawing classes and his commitment to drawing outdoors attracted a number of young and eager art students, including Frank Auerbach, Dennis Creffield, Leon Kossoff and Dorothy Mead. After having attended Bomberg's classes, these artists went on to develop their own individual approaches to painting.

They maintained an emphasis on the rendering of the physical experience of a person or landscape, rather than just a recording of their appearance.

Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff both studied at Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art and attended evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic.

Despite this shared educational history, they went on to develop highly distinctive approaches, representative of different ways of looking and engaging with reality.

By the 1960s, Lucian Freud had moved away from his earlier artistic approach. Rather than using small brushes he began using bigger, coarser brushes and instead of painting while seated at close proximity to the sitter, he adopted a standing position. This shift in position resulted in high viewpoints that often emphasise the voluminous presence of a body and give a sense of psychological weight. Freud also began to paint full figures and naked portraits more regularly.

Francis Bacon's use of a variety of photographic sources in his work, from newspaper clippings to reproductions of paintings and sculptures, has been well documented.

He commissioned specific portraits from the photographer John Deakin and took aspects of them as a starting point for many of his paintings frorn the 1960s and 1970s.

This gallery focuses on Bacon and Deakin's mutual interest in portraiture. In Bacon's paintings, bodies swell, contort and reveal their internal organs. Their strong presence is accentuated by the contrast and tension between 1he colour and texture of the figure and the background.

Deakin's photographs adopt frontal compositions, intimate close-ups, double-exposure and unnatural poses.

As a result, his subjects' bodies seem to be subjected to invisible forces that move or constrain them. Placing Bacon and Deakin's work together highlights their ability to produce, through their different mediums, striking portraits that convey an intense experience of another person's physical and psychological presence.

Despite having highly different approaches to painting, Michael Andrews and R.B. Kitaj shared a deep admiration for the work of Francis Bacon. Particularly influential in their work was Bacon's use of a variety of photographic sources, combined to create images capable of expressing the artist's most intimate desires and concerns.

This room focuses on a selection of Andrews and Kitaj's work in which the two painters address their fascination with the dynamics of social relationships in compositions of groups of figures, including friends, relatives and close acquaintances. Andrews was primarily driven by existentialist concerns and a deep interest in the different ways people behave when interacting with others.

In contrast, Kitaj explored group or collective behaviour through broader social and political concerns. Much of his work includes references to the persecution and resulting displacement of Jewish communities and portrays individuals bound together by a shared personal history.

In the 1990s pastel became Rego's chosen medium. In her work, Rego addresses her desires and fears and confronts memories of personal events, dramatising and vividly depicting them.

Women's lives and stories have often been overlooked in art as a historically male-dominated activity. Rego places them at the centre of her work. Women are portrayed as undertaking a variety of activities, in a broad range of moods and temperaments, as victims, culprits, carers, passive observers and sexually-charged creatures.

As viewers, we are drawn into and become complicit in an unruly world shaped by patriarchal power.

The youngest artists in the exhibition maintain a constant dialogue with their predecessors. Through an engagement with its history, Celia Paul, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are knowledgeable about painting as an activity that has constantly evolved from and against its precedents.

Throughout their work, they investigate and stretch stereotypical views on femininity, masculinity, race and the many other categories that define and constrain our identity.