From 18 September 2026, the Albertina Museum Vienna brings together two of the most influential figurative painters of the 20th century in Picasso - Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human. Bringing together around 70 works from international museums and private collections, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore not only the striking affinities between Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, but the complex artistic relationship that connected them across generations.
For Bacon, Picasso was more than an admired predecessor. He was the artist against whom he measured his own ambitions. Bacon repeatedly recalled seeing a Picasso exhibition at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris in 1927 as an experience that awakened his desire to become a painter. Although he would initially pursue a career as an interior designer, Picasso's example remained a powerful presence as Bacon began to develop his own artistic language.
Picasso: The Father Figure
The influence was particularly strong in Bacon's early work. He was fascinated by Picasso's paintings of bathers made in Cannes and Dinard between 1927 and 1932, admiring the way Picasso transformed the human body into something simultaneously recognisable and strange. Bacon was drawn to their organic forms and distortions, which suggested a figure without simply describing one.
Picasso's influence can be felt with particular force in Bacon's Crucifixion of 1933, one of the earliest surviving examples of this dialogue. More than a decade later, Bacon's breakthrough Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) again revealed echoes of Picasso, from the elongated, biomorphic forms to the psychological intensity of the composition. Picasso's Guernica and his earlier figures at the seaside have both been identified as important points of reference.
Yet Bacon's relationship with Picasso was never simply one of imitation. The very strength of Picasso's influence became something Bacon needed to overcome. He wanted to establish an independent language of painting and, ultimately, to occupy for the second half of the 20th century the position Picasso had held for the first. The Albertina describes this as a lifelong struggle with a "father figure": Bacon admired Picasso profoundly, but also wanted to challenge and eventually surpass him.
From Influence to Independence
By the mid-1940s, Bacon's painting began to move decisively away from Picasso's direct influence. His work became increasingly painterly and concentrated on the human figure as a vehicle for psychological experience. Rather than reconstructing the body through Picasso's constantly shifting visual language, Bacon began to subject it to a more visceral process of distortion, compression and fragmentation.
This transformation was central to Bacon's development. His figures are rarely portraits in the conventional sense. They are manifestations of sensation: bodies caught between presence and disappearance, identity and dissolution. The sitter remains recognisable, yet is simultaneously subjected to an almost violent reimagining. Picasso, meanwhile, continued to reinvent the possibilities of the human figure throughout his long career. From Cubism and Surrealism to his late portraits and nudes, he treated the body as a continually changing visual language. His influence extended far beyond any particular style, opening the possibility that the figure could be broken apart and reconstructed according to emotion, memory, desire or imagination.
This shared commitment to reinvention is what makes the dialogue between the two artists so compelling. Neither was interested in simply reproducing appearance. Both sought something more elusive: a way of conveying what it feels like to inhabit a human body and to experience the world through it.
Two Visions of the Human Condition
The exhibition at the Albertina brings these two practices into direct conversation. Across around 70 works, recurring subjects emerge: crucifixions, screams, bullfights, nudes and the charged relationship between the body and desire. These motifs reveal an unexpected continuity between artists who otherwise developed highly distinctive visual languages.
For Picasso, distortion could be playful, erotic, confrontational or radically analytical. For Bacon, it was frequently darker and more psychologically charged. His figures appear isolated within shallow spaces, their bodies warped as though physical form itself were unable to contain the intensity of human experience. Yet beneath these differences lies a shared fascination with vulnerability and mortality.
The relationship was not entirely one-directional. Although Picasso did not derive his own artistic language from Bacon, he followed the younger artist's career closely. This is an important distinction: while Bacon spent much of his early career responding to Picasso, Picasso's interest in Bacon belonged to a later stage of their relationship, when Bacon had already established himself as an important figure in post-war painting. The Albertina consequently presents their relationship as reciprocal in attention, if not in influence.
Indeed, references to Picasso continued to surface in Bacon's work long after the older artist's direct influence had diminished. Bacon returned at various points to motifs associated with Picasso, including the image of a key turning in a door, while continuing to transform them through his own distinctive visual vocabulary.
What emerges, therefore, is not simply a story of influence, but one of artistic inheritance. Picasso opened possibilities that Bacon would spend decades absorbing, resisting and transforming. Bacon's achievement was not to become another Picasso, but to take what he had learned from him and push the possibilities of figurative painting into new and often unsettling territory.
At the Albertina Museum Vienna, Picasso - Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human brings this extraordinary artistic dialogue into focus. Seen together, their works reveal two artists separated by generation and temperament, yet united by an uncompromising belief in the expressive power of the human figure. Their paintings may differ radically in colour, atmosphere and technique, but both insist that the human body is never merely a body. It can be a site of desire, violence, memory, vulnerability and mortality - a means of asking what it means, ultimately, to be human.
Picasso - Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human is on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna from 18 September 2026 to 31 January 2027.
