What Do We Mean by Human?

Francis Bacon, Study for a Figure (“Fury”), ca. 1944, Öl und Pastell auf Faserplatte, 94 × 74 cm, Privatsammlung. © The Estate of Francis Bacon / All rights reserved / Bildrecht, Wien und DACS, London 2026.

Even before setting foot in this exhibition, I find myself unsettled by its title. Not because Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon have nothing to do with one another – quite the contrary – but because What It Feels Like to Be Human promises an answer before the paintings have been allowed to pose their questions. It is a grand, almost unassailable phrase. Who would deny that two painters who cut apart, twisted, opened up, and reassembled the human body were concerned with the condition of being human? Yet it is precisely this apparent self-evidence that should make us suspicious. “The human” has rarely been a neutral category in art history. It is body and gender, power and powerlessness, perpetrator and victim, desiring subject and available model. When the Albertina brings together some seventy works by two defining figures of the twentieth century, the issue is therefore not merely which similarities become visible. It is also which differences must recede in order for that shared narrative to hold.

The historical premise is well known, and it is anything but symmetrical. Bacon encountered Picasso’s work in Paris in 1927, and the biomorphic figures Picasso produced in the late 1920s in particular opened up for him a sense of what painting might still become. Picasso was not simply one influence among many. He became the origin, adversary, and measure of an artistic existence. As the Albertina itself stresses, Bacon wanted to become for the second half of the twentieth century what Picasso had been for the first: a chronicler of humanity in all its dividedness. Picasso, by contrast, did not need Bacon in order to become Picasso. He noticed Bacon’s ascent and followed his career, but the movement ran essentially in one direction. The exhibition now turns this dependency into an encounter and a historical genealogy into a dialogue. That is legitimate; every two-artist exhibition is a retrospective construction. But for precisely that reason, we must ask whom the construction serves.

The Bacon Specialist’s Gaze

The intellectual prehistory of the project offers a clue. The accompanying catalogue is edited by Ralph Gleis, Director General of the Albertina, and Michael Peppiatt. Peppiatt is not simply another Bacon scholar. He met the painter in 1963, remained his friend for some three decades, and wrote Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, a standard biography. His curatorial work has likewise returned repeatedly to Bacon: Francis Bacon: The Sacred and the Profane, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Caravaggio/Bacon, Bacon/Giacometti, and, most recently, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast. On his own website, Peppiatt explicitly describes the Vienna project as an exhibition he has been preparing to compare and contrast Picasso and Bacon. This is not an objection to his expertise; it is a reason to take that expertise seriously. Proximity produces insight, but it also establishes a vantage point.

Peppiatt’s previous projects reveal a distinct method. Bacon does not appear in isolation but is inscribed into a larger history of the European figure through confrontation: beside Caravaggio, beside Giacometti, between the sacred and the profane, between human and animal. Picasso now assumes that position. The method thereby reaches what may be its most ambitious, but also its most hazardous, comparison. For Picasso is not merely a counterpart against whom Bacon can be seen more sharply. He is the historical force field from which Bacon first emerged and against which he had to assert himself. If the comparison is conceived predominantly from the Bacon specialist’s point of view, Picasso risks being reduced to a monumental precursor: a reservoir of motifs that achieve their existential intensification in Bacon. Bacon’s work would then appear as the later, darker, and psychologically truer fulfilment of a problem opened by Picasso. This is precisely where the exhibition must resist – not Bacon, but its own dramaturgy.

Ralph Gleis brings a different body of experience. His exhibitions range from Hans Makart and the Vienna World’s Fair to Caillebotte, Belgian Symbolism, the Berlin Secessions, Gauguin, and Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau cycle. They reveal an interest in historical constellations, social frameworks, and the capacity of new juxtapositions to unsettle established narratives. Such a perspective might protect the project from becoming an exclusively Baconian reading. At the same time, the spectacular pairing of two famous names belongs to the established repertoire of major museum programming. Scholarly argument and institutional marketability are not mutually exclusive; they often reinforce one another. All the more reason not to mistake the prominence of the participants for the cogency of the comparison.

Similar Wounds, Different Violence

The Albertina identifies crucifixions, screams, bullfights, nudes, and the “Tears of Eros” as shared motifs. It speaks of bodies pulled apart, put back together, and reinvented with unprecedented ferocity. This is vivid and will undoubtedly facilitate powerful adjacencies in the galleries. But iconography is not yet anthropology. Two distorted faces may look similar while being sustained by fundamentally different conceptions of the human.

In Picasso, the transformation of the body is initially an expression of almost unlimited pictorial sovereignty. He takes it apart because he wants to see anew; he displaces it because no single view will suffice; he turns it into sign, prey, lover, monster, or stage. In his strongest works, this freedom is creative and destructive at once. It can absorb political catastrophe, as it does in the orbit of Guernica, but it can equally arise from desire, possession, or playful cruelty. Picasso’s figure is not merely wounded: it is mastered by the painter. Any contemporary discussion of these bodies must therefore resist treating every deformation as an automatic act of empathy. At times it reveals vulnerability; at others, it reveals the power of the one inflicting the wound.

Bacon’s body is subjected to a different pressure. Rather than being constructed from multiple viewpoints, it is arrested in the process of slipping away. Photographs, film stills, medical images, and reproductions of Old Masters stand between model and canvas. The figure sits, crouches, or writhes within a space that promises protection while producing captivity. Cage, platform, curtain, and geometric enclosure make visible that this body does not freely command its own appearance. Bacon is by no means a passive witness: he manipulates, smears, and exposes the image to a carefully engineered accident. Yet his violence reaches the figure differently. Picasso often demonstrates what the painter can do to the body. Bacon asks what remains of the body when its form, dignity, and even its face can no longer be relied upon.

The distinction is historical. Picasso works through the inventions of the avant-garde, through war, fascism, and personal mythology, while retaining the position of an artist whose authority seems almost inexhaustible. Bacon begins where that authority has already been damaged: after the century’s mass exterminations, in competition with photography and film, and under the knowledge that the human body can at any moment become anonymous meat. Both paint cruelty, but not the same cruelty. In Picasso it may be an operation performed by form; in Bacon, form itself becomes the site where cruelty occurs.

This is also why the subtitle is problematic. What It Feels Like to Be Human transfers the comparison into the realm of feeling. It sounds immediate, accessible, almost therapeutic. At the same time, it universalises experiences whose historical, sexual, and political conditions are not interchangeable. Bacon, who lived his homosexuality when it was criminalised and socially persecuted, developed an imagery of desire in which intimacy and danger can scarcely be separated. Picasso’s erotic images, by contrast, often arise from a position of masculine command whose biographical and ethical dimension can no longer be kept outside the work. To unite both under a general feeling of humanness may produce insight; it may equally dissolve disparities of power into existential pathos.

The Test Begins in the Gallery

This is not yet a critique of the exhibition, because an exhibition cannot be reduced to its announcement. What matters is how the works actually meet: whether Picasso’s pictures merely supply the sources from which Bacon draws his motifs, or whether they are allowed to preserve their own contradictions; whether Bacon’s personal and historical experience remains specific, or is smoothed into a universally intelligible symbol of modern anxiety; whether crucifixion as a shared form is deemed sufficient, or whether the exhibition asks what sacredness, violence, and sacrifice mean in each body of work. A juxtaposition becomes illuminating only when it does more than produce resemblance – when it can withstand incompatibility.

The announced selection suggests that the Albertina may indeed be seeking this tension. Picasso’s Mother and Child (Study after Guernica), his bathers, and his animal heads meet Bacon’s Furies, seated figures, portraits, and self-portraits. The encounter could reveal not a straight line of influence but a displacement: from the dissected body to imperilled flesh, from formal freedom to existential enclosure, from the sovereign gaze to an image suspicious of its own power to seize. Yet that possibility will not realise itself. It depends upon selection, rhythm, labels, and space – upon those curatorial decisions that museums often present as neutral mediation, although they are what create the argument in the first place.

I will therefore not enter this exhibition expecting to discover two kindred geniuses. Their kinship has already been asserted; it is the premise of the undertaking and also its most convenient element. More interesting will be the points at which it breaks down. Perhaps we will see that Bacon owes Picasso a great deal without being explicable through him. Perhaps Picasso will appear beside Bacon not more modern, but more alien. And perhaps the true achievement of the encounter will lie in reading its humanist title against the paintings: not learning what it feels like to be human, but recognising that even this question has never been answered by all bodies under the same conditions.

The Albertina should therefore be judged not merely by how impressively it brings together two great names. It must demonstrate whether it truly takes seriously the difference between influence and dialogue, motif and experience, deformed form and wounded body. If Picasso serves only as Bacon’s prehistory, the result may be brilliantly illustrated, but intellectually closed before the tour begins. If, on the other hand, the exhibition withstands the asymmetry, it may achieve something rare: not a contest over who painted the greater cruelty, but a precise inquiry into who, in these images, commands the human body – and who remains at its mercy.

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