Extraordinary Picasso as you’ve never seen him before
Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy Tate Modern
Picasso is one of those artists everyone feels they know. The landmark moments of the Spanish painter’s career, from the Blue Period and cubism to his still-controversial late works, will be familiar territory for most gallery goers, while his complex private life has been endlessly raked over.
I doubt, however, that you’ve experienced Picasso in quite the way you will in this extraordinary exhibition. Rather than trawl through his stylistic development, as one might in a conventional retrospective, the show, which originated at Paris’s Musée Picasso, cuts into his career at one pivotal moment, offering a month-by-month account of his so-called “year of wonders” – 1932.
As the exhibition opens, Picasso has just turned 50, and is conducting a passionate affair with the much younger Marie-thérèse Walter. Walter’s strong features and prominent roman nose dominate the exhibition from the first room: serene in the features of a white sculpture in Still Life at the Window, reduced to a single fluid, quasi-sculptural form in Seated Woman by a Window – a shape seen again in an actual sculpture, the extraordinarily forceful Head of a Woman, which stands beside it.
On the opposite wall, however, are more troubled, challenging images of the female form, typified by Woman with a Dagger, in which a monstrous, fanged female stabs a tiny prone man in the heart. While such images have been seen as expressing Picasso’s hateful relationship with his wife, the former ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, the show argues they relate in a more general way to Picasso’s interest in Surrealism and its preoccupation with violence and repressed desire.
While Picasso tends to be seen as a self-contained genius, indifferent to artistic trends, the exhibition reveals him as twitchily alert to his position in the hierarchy of cutting edge art, and determined to prove his continuing relevance at a time when younger artists – inspired by Surrealism – believed painting to be dead.
There’s a strongly Surrealist feel to two portraits of women in armchairs, their faces, arms and curves reduced to floating, rocklike forms. But Picasso’s signature approach during 1932 involves abstracting the human form into flat areas of colour with a bright, heraldic immediacy, in which the sitter’s features – invariably Walter’s – remain clearly recognisable.
Walter looks out at us from Reading, her body a jumble of breasts, belt and looping arms, her face flattened into a lunar sphere. But Picasso becomes increasingly obsessed with watching her asleep. In The Dream she’s dropped off in a chair, her blouse falling from her shoulder, but none of her clothes remain in the half dozen paintings that form the core of the exhibition, completed in 12 days in early March of this extraordinary year.
In Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which in 2010 became the third most expensive painting ever sold at auction, when it went for $106.5million (£76.7million). Mariethérèse’s body is reduced – or perhaps that should be elevated – to a slumped mass of prone flesh, with lips parted in erotic reverie.
Here, Picasso is painting not so much what his lover looks like, as the totality of their physical relationship: he’s looking at her dreaming of him, her pneumatic breasts, limbs and sex ordered as his body, as much as his eye, perceives them.
By the end of March, Picasso is treating the reclining female figure in a more overtly surreal manner: reduced to a black outline, overlain with a jagged, geometric human form. But he soon tires of this game, and is back on the recumbent Marie-thérèse, formalised into a single semi-abstract arrangement in Reclining Nude, with pointed curving limbs, inspired by a squid’s tentacles, the curators argue.
The opening of Picasso’s first retrospective exhibition in Paris in June gives the show an excuse to look at great moments from earlier in his career: a cracking cubist Seated Nude of 1910, for instance. With the global financial Depression at its height, the retrospective didn’t make the impact Picasso had hoped for. But far from changing direction, he carried on
The exhibition reveals him as twitchily alert to his position in the hierarchy of cutting-edge art
obsessively, reworking the form of the sleeping Marie-thérèse, rearranging the squirming mass of limbs in ever more tortuous permutations.
If the diversity of Picasso’s art has created the impression of an artist veering continually between subjects, styles and approaches, the revelation of this show is that, far from boring easily, once he’d fixed on a motif he was prepared to go on milking it ad infinitum. It’s a relief, then, to leave Walter’s dreaming features eventually for a room of works on paper with a very different scale and feel. The Clarinet Player, an exquisite brush and ink drawing with a faunlike figure playing beside a sleeping woman (sorry, you just can’t get away from them), brings a level of luxurious detail to a show in which much of the work verges on the stark. And 15 drawings of the crucifixion that deconstruct Matthias Grünewald’s harrowing Renaissance masterpiece The Isenheim Altarpiece are an astonishing tour de force of invention and technique.
While these latter works are believed to relate to Picasso’s anxiety about the rise of fascism, the show gives the impression of an artist who was almost entirely absorbed in his own internal emotional and visual world. By focusing on works from one short period, the show allows you to step into that world with an intensity I’ve encountered in few exhibitions on any artist. If Picasso’s ruthless monomania prevents the exhibition from being an entirely comfortable experience, comfort isn’t really what you want from the most challenging artist of the 20th century.
From tomorrow until Sept 9. Tickets: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk