A bunch of lads getting pissed in Soho isn’t unusual, it happens every day. But the boozed-up fellas in the photo as you walk into this gallery aren’t your average louts, they’re some of the most important British painters of the modern era: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, all chowing down, lighting up and getting the drinks in at Wheeler’s restaurant in 1963.
They were friends, drinking buddies and colleagues in art. The works in this exhibition show how they painted each other, themselves, their city and their world, carving four different paths through the artistic landscape of twentieth-century London art.
There are some stunning Bacons here. The triptych studies are gorgeous, especially the three visions of Henrietta Moraes as a mound of twisted flesh and jet-black hair. His image of Freud is all blurred, swirling chaos; John Hewett is pure abstract psychedelia. These little works are intimate, intense. The bigger works, including a splashy, splodgy reclining Freud, are more restrained, calmer.
If Bacon is all inner turmoil, heaving flesh and psychological intensity, then Freud is all skin, surface and full-frontal reality. His works are so much lighter and physically attractive than Bacon’s. He looms over his sitters, reducing them down to folds of skin and shellshocked eyes. His portrait of petty criminal Ted is an act of total domination, but his portrait of Moraes is all flat, light, foreboding sensuality.
Chowing down, lighting up and getting the drinks in
So Bacon is inner life, Freud is all surface, and then there’s Auerbach and his endless tonnage of gooped paint. His portrait of a woman and her kids is caught in a haze of thick static beige. Gerda Boehm is like a pile of cream waiting to sludge off the canvas. It’s like he’s trying so desperately to hold on to these people, these places and memories, that he’s buried them in paint.
And then there’s poor Michael Andrews, who just can’t compete with his mates, not even close. He paints evenings at the Colony Rooms and a portrait of a woman in front of some steps, but his faces are a mess: they feel rushed, unfinished, poorly executed. He just can’t stand up to the painterly prowess of Bacon, Freud and Auerbach. That said, his painting of him teaching his daughter to swim in ink-black water is fantastic, as is the ghostly nude portrait of his wife, but they really are the exceptions here.
How lucky was London to have these lads doing their thing here for so long though? Decades of friendship, drinking, partying, and a little bit of changing the course of art history chucked in for good measure. Incredible.
