Two artists, two generations and one shared subject: the human being. The ALBERTINA Vienna brings Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon together in a major exhibition, revealing how admiration evolved into an artistic struggle of extraordinary intensity.
What remains of the human being once we stop considering their outward appearance an immutable truth? When a face falls apart, a body twists and beauty no longer has to mean harmony?
Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon found very different answers. Yet their work repeatedly leads us to the same place: the human being in all their contradictions. Desire and fear, violence and vulnerability, body and psyche.
The exhibition „Picasso – Bacon. What It Feels Like to Be Human“, on view at the ALBERTINA Vienna from September 18, 2026 to January 31, 2027, brings two of the 20th century’s most important figurative painters into direct confrontation. Around 70 key works from international museums and private collections reveal just how closely their artistic worlds are connected – despite the fact that theirs was never a relationship between equals.
The Overwhelming Predecessor
For Francis Bacon, much began with Picasso. Encountering his work inspired Bacon to become a painter himself. Picasso became a role model – and inevitably the figure from whom Bacon eventually had to emancipate himself.
Their relationship can be read as an artistic generational conflict. Picasso had dismantled the human figure, fractured perspective and liberated the body from the obligation to reproduce visible reality. Bacon could not ignore that revolution. He had to begin where Picasso had already been – and attempt to go further.
His ambition was considerable: Bacon wanted to become for the second half of the 20th century what Picasso had been for its first – a chronicler of his time and, above all, of the human beings living through it.
Picasso, meanwhile, remained artistically uninfluenced by Bacon, although he followed the younger painter’s career with interest. That alone makes their juxtaposition fascinating. What emerges is not a conventional dialogue between master and disciple, but a conversation between two bodies of work that never needed to be conducted in person.
The Body as a Battleground
For both artists, the human body becomes material. It is fragmented, distorted, reconstructed and liberated from anatomical certainty. Yet these distortions do not take us further away from the human being. Quite the opposite: precisely where physical resemblance begins to disappear, something internal seems to become visible.
Picasso’s bodies can exist from several perspectives at once; Bacon’s figures appear to vibrate beneath the surface of their own existence. Faces become movements, mouths become screams, bodies become states of being.
Themes such as crucifixion, bullfighting, the nude and the “tears of Eros” recur throughout both artists’ visual worlds. Pain and desire often exist remarkably close to one another. The body is no longer simply a shell, but the arena in which the experience of being alive is played out.
Perhaps this is the fundamental connection between Picasso and Bacon: both distrust the intact surface.
Beauty After Beauty
Today, we encounter human bodies more frequently than ever as optimised images. Faces are smoothed, proportions adjusted and digital surfaces perfected. Against this backdrop, Picasso and Bacon feel unexpectedly contemporary.
Their paintings reject the idea that a human being only becomes interesting through perfection. They search for truth not in symmetry or flawlessness, but in rupture, displacement and ambiguity.
Their art is not necessarily comfortable. But perhaps art does not need to be.
Ultimately, „Picasso – Bacon. What It Feels Like to Be Human“ is less about two monumental names in art history than about a question that has lost none of its urgency: What does a human being look like when the intention is to reveal more than their surface?
Picasso and Bacon offer no definitive answer. They dismantle the human being in order to get closer to them.
And perhaps therein lies their peculiar form of humanism.
Picasso – Bacon. What It Feels Like to Be Human
September 18, 2026 – January 31, 2027
ALBERTINA Vienna
