Sculptural forms

I've written before on this blog about how sometimes I visit exhibitions in the hope of learning to appreciate artists or movements that don't appeal to me. So it was with the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Tate exhibition failed to sway me. So it also is with Francis Bacon, a modern painter whose works I generally find unpleasant without being revealing or visually rewarding. Again the Tate show of his work in 2008 didn't succeed in changing my mind.

The only display that has made me think differently about Bacon in the past, in fact, is the permanent display of the Sainsbury Centre at UEA, where his small figure painting Study of a Nude (29) is put in a different light by being seen alongside small ethnographic or modern art sculptures. And this, perhaps is the key to appreciating Bacon, for me at least, as I came away greatly rewarded from a show currently at the Ashmolean in Oxford, which pairs him with sculptures and drawings by Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone.

This subtitle encapsulates perfectly the views of Moore and Bacon's work which the exhibition creates, emphasising both artists particularly sculptural and visceral representation of the human body, whether in paint, pencil, stone or bronze. Bacon's, paintings, we are encouraged to conclude, look at the body from the outside in, scouring down from the flesh, while Moore's build the body from the bones out. Both present a raw and searching response to the horrors of the world wars that both artists experienced, and the questioning of what could come next.

I found myself looking at Bacon's uncomfortable canvases differently in the context of Moore's work, appreciating the physical sense of contorted muscles that he so beautifully captures, tension rather than pain perhaps. The central room of the exhibition, has the feel of a religious space, or a 19th-century ethnographic display of totem poles, where Bacon's Triptych of the furies is set against Moore's Three Upright Motives I found I looked at Moore's sculptures differently as a result of these pairings, seeing more rawness and tension. Both emerge as striking commentators on the human body, and our responses to it.