Students were presented with four different paintings and asked which painting they liked best. Using the data below: What is the Critical Value? Artist Frequency Picasso 25 Dali 41 Miro 13 Modrian 19 Solution Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, until 10 December Stanley Spencer: Painting Paradise Reading Museum, Town Hall, Blagrave Street, Reading, until 22 April 2007 Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Francis Bacon (1909-92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements may be said to embody diametric opposites - the heaven on earth of Spencer\'s beloved Cookham, and the \'hell is others\' Grand Guignol of Bacon. Distinguished by a taste for physical deformity and duress, Bacon\'s art is obsessed with brute facts. Spencer - who memorably wrote in his notebooks: \'If I am called upon to worship. . . then I will begin with the lavatory seat\' - had an equally earthy approach to the human animal, but saw him as capable of redemption. An emphatically religious man - if rather broad in his personal interpretation of Christianity - Spencer sought \'redemption from ugliness, meaninglessness\' through his art. If Bacon greeted the world with \'exhilarated despair\', Spencer was perhaps more optimistic. Certainly his art is. In their different ways both artists revitalised the realist tradition and offered fresh ways of seeing the world. The writer and curator Michael Peppiatt, doyen of Bacon studies, is responsible for the latest focus on the master of the macabre, and has settled upon the 1950s as quintessential to Bacon\'s art: \'the most fertile single decade of his career\' in which he \'located his great themes\'. Peppiatt the biographer (author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 1996) describes it as \'the period when he was at his wildest and most tormented\', when the artist was suffering \'the confusion of extreme pleasure and extreme pain\'. Art, as it has so often done before, offered catharsis. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble, but it can give rise to powerful artistic expression, and in this case it undoubtedly did. The Norwich exhibition demonstrates that. It becomes more and more difficult to organise a top-quality Bacon exhibition as demand for his work around the world increases. (This display, for instance, is in direct competition with a general Bacon retrospective at Dusseldorf. ) Peppiatt must be congratulated for achieving a remarkable selection which effectively balances the necessary well-known images with unfamiliar paintings. Bacon himself established the canonical picture selection with his overseeing of the 1985 Tate retrospective. Intriguingly, Peppiatt now offers us alternatives. Thus in the first room of this elegant installation are such unusual works as Figure with Monkey and Elephant Fording a River, both from private collections, .

1. Students were presented with four different paintings and asked which painting they liked best.
Using the data below: What is the Critical Value? Artist Frequency Picasso 25 Dali 41
Miro 13 Modrian 19
Solution
Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, until 10 December Stanley Spencer: Painting Paradise
Reading Museum, Town Hall, Blagrave Street, Reading, until 22 April 2007 Stanley Spencer
(1891-1959) and Francis Bacon (1909-92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in
common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements
may be said to embody diametric opposites - the heaven on earth of Spencer's beloved
Cookham, and the 'hell is others' Grand Guignol of Bacon. Distinguished by a taste for
physical deformity and duress, Bacon's art is obsessed with brute facts. Spencer - who
memorably wrote in his notebooks: 'If I am called upon to worship. . . then I will begin with the
lavatory seat' - had an equally earthy approach to the human animal, but saw him as capable of
redemption. An emphatically religious man - if rather broad in his personal interpretation of
Christianity - Spencer sought 'redemption from ugliness, meaninglessness' through his art. If
Bacon greeted the world with 'exhilarated despair', Spencer was perhaps more optimistic.
Certainly his art is. In their different ways both artists revitalised the realist tradition and offered
fresh ways of seeing the world. The writer and curator Michael Peppiatt, doyen of Bacon
studies, is responsible for the latest focus on the master of the macabre, and has settled upon the
1950s as quintessential to Bacon's art: 'the most fertile single decade of his career' in which he
'located his great themes'. Peppiatt the biographer (author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an
Enigma, 1996) describes it as 'the period when he was at his wildest and most tormented', when
the artist was suffering 'the confusion of extreme pleasure and extreme pain'. Art, as it has so
often done before, offered catharsis. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble, but it can give rise
to powerful artistic expression, and in this case it undoubtedly did. The Norwich exhibition
demonstrates that. It becomes more and more difficult to organise a top-quality Bacon
exhibition as demand for his work around the world increases. (This display, for instance, is in
direct competition with a general Bacon retrospective at Dusseldorf. ) Peppiatt must be
congratulated for achieving a remarkable selection which effectively balances the necessary
well-known images with unfamiliar paintings. Bacon himself established the canonical picture
selection with his overseeing of the 1985 Tate retrospective. Intriguingly, Peppiatt now offers us
alternatives. Thus in the first room of this elegant installation are such unusual works as Figure
with Monkey and Elephant Fording a River, both from private collections, anim