Only just over two weeks left of Tate Britain's exhibition of life painting. It's worth a visit.

Why would anyone prefer childish simplicity to a complex drawing that grapples with form, musculature, accumulated fat, the tension of the skin and the bones and joints beneath?

All Too Human celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships, and their surroundings in the most intimate of ways--and features breathtaking works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon alongside rarely seen pieces by contemporaries such as Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego. Despite vast differences in approach and style, the works included all capture the sensuous, immediate, and intense experience of life through the medium of paint. Published to accompany a major exhibition at Tate Britain in London, All Too Human not only demonstrates how this spirit was passed down by artists of the previous generation, such as Walter Sickert and David Bomberg, but also explores how contemporary artists continue to express the complex intangible realities of life in paint today.

The gripping and dramatic show “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” merits its title: it is “all too human” in the tender, painful works that form its core. But “a century of painting life” promises something wider—does it smack of marketing, a lure to bring people in? In fact, the heart of the show is narrower and more interesting, illustrating the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Paula Rego redefined realism.