Exhibition
Tate Modern’s superb new exhibition prompts Charles Darwent to reflect on Picasso’s breathtaking output during one extraordinary year
On June 16, 1932, an exhibition of the work of Pablo Picasso opened at the Galerie Georges Petit, behind the Madeleine church in Paris. In our own time, retrospectives of living artists have become commonplace; in 1932, they were exceedingly rare. For the 50-year-old Picasso, the sweetness of having a show at Petit—a venerable institution, credited with having launched the career of Auguste Rodin—was tempered by the annoyance of Henri Matisse having had a show there the year before.
Matisse was the Spaniard’s deadly rival. It was no time for false modesty, a fault to which, in any case, Picasso was not prone. Turning down the offer of retrospectives at the Prado and Museum of Modern Art in new York, he took his fight into the lion’s den, filling the Galerie Petit with six illustrated books, seven sculptures and 225 paintings—half as many again of the amount Matisse had shown in 1931. And where most of Matisse’s works had dated from a single decade, Picasso’s covered the entire 30 years of his career and were hung by theme rather than date. ‘To me there is no past or future in art,’ he sniffed. ‘If a work of art can not live always in the present, it must not be considered at all.’ There was no doubt in his mind that his own work met that criterion. As a final piece of artistic bravado, Picasso snubbed his own vernissage at Petit and spent the night of the 16th at the cinema.
The recreation of part of this Paris show marks the halfway point of ‘Picasso 1932—Love, Fame, Tragedy’. It is 16 years since the Tate’s magisterial ‘Matisse Picasso’ and the wait has been worth it. That 1932 was a leap year was well enough
for the Spaniard, for every one of its days counted. If the hang of his exhibition at Galerie Petit ignored mere time, the Tate’s does not—but this is microchronology, the show’s rooms being labelled ‘January and February’, ‘Early March’, ‘September and October’. Paintings are even dated by the single day on which they were made:
Young Woman with Mandolin
(January 10), Nude Woman in
a Red Armchair (July 27) and so on. The exhibition is a crucible in which blisters of genius boil to the surface and are immediately replaced by others still more incandescent.
Take Room 3, January and February. Here is Figures by
the Sea, made on the second day of the new year in oil paint and chalk. If that combination is unusual, then so, too, is the painting’s main image. In terms of Picasso’s oeuvre, it echoes works he had made a few years before—femme (1930), for example. But Figures by the Sea allows itself to look backwards only so that it can look forwards: whereas Femme was emphatically singular, Figures
by the Sea is candidly plural. Or rather, dual—two phallic-looking poles on which is impaled an anguished feminine form. By 1932, Picasso was five years into an affair with Mariethérèse Walter, 28 years his junior. It would be another three before his wife, Olga Khokhlova, discovered this and left him. It’s hard to see Figures by the Sea as anything other than a portrait of infidelity, with Picasso as the secret star of his own three-part drama.
Notably, the picture looks like sculpture and this, too, is typical of 1932, for Picasso that year was omnivorous. Paintings became sculptural, sculptures painterly: ‘I would love to paint like a blind man, who pictures an arse by the way it feels,’ the libidinous artist said. A summer trip to the South of France put him in mind of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece: by September, he was at work on a series of ink-on-paper Crucifixions, although these were interspersed with pagan drawings of a faun playing pipes to a nude.
Everything was up for grabs— colour might range in a week from the Matisse-like saturations of The Dream (January 24) to the sombre, Marat-in-hisbath palette of Seated Woman in a Red Armchair (January 27). On a wall in Room 4, Early March, are three large paintings made in the space of four days, here reunited for the first time: Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,
Nude in a Black Armchair and The Mirror. So rapid is the evolution of these, so urgent their mutation, that they seem to morph before your eyes.
All this begs the question: why 1932? Despite the show’s vaguely sensational title, Tate Modern’s curators are too subtle to say. Seeing art in terms of biography is a risky business. Picasso’s complex love-life and the demands of his Petit show may have energised him, or not. This is altogether a wonderful show and not to be missed. So don’t.
The EY Exhibition: ‘Picasso 1932—Love, Fame, Tragedy’ is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 until September 9. (020–7887 8888; www.tate. org.uk) Charles Darwent’s biography of Josef Albers will be published by Thames & Hudson on October 4
Next week: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life
‘This is altogether a wonderful show and not to be missed ’