REVIEW: '​ALL TOO HUMAN'
TATE BRITAIN, LONDON, 28.2.-27.8.18

ALL TOO (HU)MAN

 22 Artists feature in the much-anticipated Tate exhibition All Too Human, and only 6 of which are female.

Not the best proportion but I was willing to hold judgement until after I had experienced the exhibition fully. Being an artist myself who deals mainly with the body, and specifically my own, I was just dying to get a look at the beautiful renderings of the flesh, and with names like Bacon and Freud plastered everywhere advertising the show I was somewhat resigned to - although not happy with - the fact it would predominantly be a white mans show.

Regardless, I went in with high hopes. The first room we entered titled The Raw Facts of Life was a gentle welcome to what was to come, female bodies? Yes. Female artists? Of course, not.

I was then equally seduced by the fantastic Bacon’s and disappointed by the lack of Giacometti - although I’m not sure you can really name a room ‘Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti’ if there’s only one of the latter in there…

However, after 9 more rooms of the same old story my disappointment intensified as I noticed I had actually seen less female artists than I had seen Giacometti.

It was beginning to dawn on me that this was in fact not an exhibition on what makes us human, but in what makes men Man.

As I discussed this with the friends I was with, including my fellow She Performs curator Lynn, and hoped they had seen something I had missed. You know, you often see what you want to see, and I was praying my brain that had been buzzing with the injustices of the art world (and general world for that matter) had been mistaken and had actually missed the female artists works seamlessly integrated throughout the exhibition. But alas, other than one lone nude by Dorothy Mead, the show had been a landslide of white male painters dealing with their deep “existential condition”.

Onto room ten (out of eleven) and finally we have a female painter, Paula Rego. She gets an entire room to herself, lucky devil! And what a room it is, powerful and bold, and wait, the wall panel, are they kidding me?! “Women’s lives and stories have often been overlooked in art as a historically male-dominated activity”, as if they were somehow doing something to rectify this. This literally could have been a description of the exhibition, ‘Women’s lives and stories are overlooked in this exhibition, as painting is a male-dominated activity’. No, I refuse to believe that Tate didn’t see the irony in their statement.

As we discussed this within the gallery I was acutely aware of the looks we were receiving from Tate Britain’s middle-aged audience. Apologies for disrupting your exhibition viewing.

Then onto the icing on the cake. Room 11 – ‘identity, Self and Representation’, the biggest cliché in the book. Women can’t deal with the “existential condition” or “psychological weight”, they merely try to understand their “femininity”.

As if the male artists weren’t exploring their masculinity. As if femininity is a label rather than their very being, their very humanity. As if male is the baseline and femininity is a bolt on.

All Too Human my arse, more like All Too F***ing Man.
​
P.S. In Tate’s All Too Human giftshop: 16 books on Francis Bacon, 7 books in total of all the female artists in the show.

by Holly Daisy Broughton

Thumbnail image credits:
Paula Rego, Bride, 1994. ©Tate Britain and Paula Rego