Flesh and Bone in Oxford

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has achieved national recognition for its exhibition titled Flesh and Bone, which contrasts the sculpture and drawings of Henry Moore with the paintaings of Francis Bacon.

Both lived through two wars and were intimately involved with them - but while Moore produced some amazing drawings of people sleeping in cortorted shapes in the bunkers and later transformed these into amazing sculptures, Bacon distorted solitary figures in large almost invisible cages. Despite similar abstract shapes, I was able to acknowledge a deep empathy in Moore's painting and to a lesser extent his sculptures, I only felt displaced anger in Bacon's grotesque paintings.

Perhaps there is a link to contrasting childhoods, where Moore was a loved child, growing up in southern England, and Bacon was a child in a harsh and critical family in Ireland. However, they are linked by their shared fascination with the human figure. For both men, art was about bones; ribs, forearms and eye sockets; and the contrast with surrounding flesh.