Image: Pablo Picasso: Dora Maar, 1940 64 × 46 cm, Oil on paper (© Succession Picasso / Bildrecht, Vienna 2026, © Foto: bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB, Museum Berggruen/ Jens Ziehe)
Around 70 works from international museums and private collections are brought together to explore their shared focus on the human figure.
This major show undertakes what it describes as an ‘exciting juxtaposition’ of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, calling them the 20th century’s two most important figurative painters; Bacon was inspired to become a painter by Picasso’s works, competed with him throughout his life, and eventually strove to surpass him. The exhibition frames Bacon as wanting to be the late 20th-century version of what Picasso was to the first half of the century: a chronicler of being human in all of its tornness.
Crucifixions, screams, bullfights, nudes and the Tears of Eros are among the shared themes through which the exhibition says both artists revealed the drama of life itself. The exhibition says that both artists placed human existence at the core of their pictorial worlds, depicting the human figure as pulled apart, thrown back together and reinvented with an unprecedented savagery.
Although Picasso was never influenced by Bacon, the exhibition notes that he followed Bacon’s career very closely.
