Exhibition of the week Picasso Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020-7321 6600, www.npg.org.uk). Until 5 February
Pablo Picasso is without doubt the “most controversial artist of all time”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. For much of his long career, he was seen as a man intent on “destroying the established categories of art”. In recent decades, however, it has become clear his objective was in fact to reinvent art, while paying homage to its existing traditions – notably portraiture. This new show at the National Portrait Gallery is the first “major” exploration of this “vital area” for two decades, and features some 80 paintings spanning his career, from “quirky juvenilia” to his final works. It skilfully demonstrates how Picasso developed “whole new approaches” to painting in response to individual sitters; and it features more than enough “marvellous things” to make it “one of the year’s must-see shows”. “You leave astonished at Picasso’s near-miraculous ability to make lines, colours and brush marks do absolutely anything he wanted.”
The show amply demonstrates that Picasso is an artist of “deep compassion and rich humanity”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. It begins with his teenage self-portraits, including an “exuberantly self-mocking” one from 1900 in which he poses in an 18th century wig, and ends with a drawing of his own skull staring back at him in a mirror, from 1972 – the year before his death. Yet there is “something almost apologetic” about the National Portrait Gallery’s approach: an entire room is devoted to his first wife, Olga, giving prominence to his “deadpan” classical portraits of her. Yet there is just one, “rather mild”, example of the “jagged, dehumanised, demonic” likenesses of Olga that he created when their marriage was falling apart. There are “huge gaps” in the exhibition: most unforgivably, it fails to show how he developed cubist portraiture. Picasso was a revolutionary, and this “tame” show “sells his radical genius short”.
The exhibition has some “wonderful moments”, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. There’s the “stage setting” SelfPortrait with Palette (1906), for instance; while the small gallery devoted to paintings of Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier shows how he translated her “distinctively delicate features” into “several different media and styles”. Yet too many pivotal works are “conspicuously absent” for the show to work as a definitive overview, and the many caricatures featured are “not eminently fascinating”. It’s “hard to be disappointed by the work of a genius”, but while this show periodically “fizzles and sparks”, it ends up as a “bit of a damp squib”.