A brief visit to the Tate Britain

Last Saturday I went to visit the Tate Britain. It owns a wide collection of British art from the 16th to the 20th Century, along with temporal exhibitions of different relevance. As this was my first time there, I went looking for Francis Bacon's masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which he considered his first real work of art. During my visit, I came across with the British art of different centuries, starting with the Renascence and followed by the Baroque. I have to say that few pictures appealed my attention, because British painting was far from those years' Italian masters like Raphael and Caravaggio later, and the Spanish ones, like El Greco or Velázquez and his contemporaries. Needless to say that the level shown in Venetian school and the Spanish territories is way higher than the British.

In the 19th Century is where J.M.W Turner developed his work. Starting with an academic style, he evolved into a more personal painting that broke with realism and started what later become the abstract painting. In my opinion, his watercolours are the most interesting works he has done, where you can see a very simple representation of reality with great colour fields, that remain you of some kind of wild nature. The whole Turner collection is well documented and explained.



Finally, I found my main target: Bacon's 1944 triptych. It's a three panel oil painting who shows some grey figures in awkward positions which he manages to control thanks to his ability with drawing and colour use. The orange background increases the power of the scene and supports the pain of the grey painted figures, very similar to Picasso's biomorphs of the 1930s. Bacon painted it based on pictures of Nazi generals and soldiers of the Second World War. The feeling of human pain after the war, the terror and the darkness is perfectly reported in this painting. The triptych display remains of religious paintings and adds a sense of God's oblivion with human kind, as well as the use of the word Crucifixion in his title, which Bacon explained as a moment of pain and the lowest for the human condition. Later in his life, in 1988, he did another version in a more depurated style, less raw than the first one. This painting marks the beginning of Bacon's works and many of his later creations maintain some of this topics.

In conclusion, I found the Tate Britain a very interesting place in order to learn a bit about British art. There were panels explaining the historic and the author's context, which make easy to understand the paintings and allows the viewer to learn about history while watching art, which is an important role for museums. It is also allowed to take photos of the works, unlike the National Gallery where you have to buy the postcard of your favourite work of art. I couldn't find any leaflet in the enter of the different lounges, or a bigger panel that sums up what the visitor is about to see. Also, it was difficult to see some of the works because of the covering glass and the light of the room. In addition, the area for the most contemporary works didn't have any interesting creations, despite the Chapman's brothers installation of African looking sculptures, which I found hilarious to say the least, although it's hard to believe that they deserve to be among the great British art, as well as some other works like a Sarah Lucas doll. I don't really know what criteria do the directors and curators follow to select the works, if it is the aesthetic quality, the historical relevance or sensationalism. Maybe I have to come back again, which I will, to check all this questions.