Picasso & Modern British Art at Tate Britain

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust

Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most influential artistic figure of the 20th century and Tate Britain is this year exploring the effect he had on art in the UK.

Its methodology is to consider the stimulus Picasso provided to seven British artists: Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. As a parallel theme it also considers how the Spanish artist was received by British collectors.

The show is entitled Picasso & Modern British Art, a title that was chosen for specific reasons, says its curator, Chris Stephens.

‘Picasso grew up in an Anglophile household – his father was known as El Ingles, because of his interest in all things English,’ he says. ‘He actually intended to come to London in 1901, but stopped off in Paris and never looked back. In the end he only came to London twice, in 1919 and 1950.’

Nevertheless, Picasso’s influence in Britain can hardly be overestimated, adds Stephens.

‘What we wanted to show was the way in which artists responded to Picasso’s art. We’ve tried to look at artists of different generations who were good enough not to follow slavishly Picasso’s innovations. It was not a passive process, Picasso’s constant reinvention of himself and his art effected different generations of British artists.’

Guitars: not a rarity among Picasso’s works

Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by a scene-setting room, complete with early examples of Picasso’s work. Among these is his Girl in a Chemise from 1905 – depicting the slender form of Madeleine, a married model who the artist got pregnant in the same year.

The exhibition then progresses to the art of Grant and Lewis.

The latter, the leading light of the Vorticist movement, was to lose faith in Picasso and his close associates in the years following World War I, criticising their work as a ‘cultivated and snobbish game’.

The room, though, is dominated by Lewis’ A Reading of Ovid (Tyros), painted in 1920-21, at a time when the artist was publicly expressing his doubts in his one-time mentor.

There is a definite hint of Picasso to the work, however, with two red-faced, almost crab-like, critics leering over a saucy passage in a book by the Roman poet; their sharp noses and chins redolent of classical theatre masks.

The following room considers Picasso’s 1919 sojourn in England, in particular on his work on the scenery and costumes for Serge Diaghilev’s production of the Three Cornered Hat.

His drawings for this production and two restored costumes are on show and are fascinating both for their vibrancy and Goya-esque execution. 

Nearby is a drawing of Lydia Lopokova, one of Diaghilev’s dancers who was to marry John Maynard Keynes and a good friend of Picasso’s wife Olga Khokhlova, who she insisted was present whenever she posed for the artist – no doubt mindful of what had happened to some of his previous models.

The Three Dancers (1925)

Perhaps the most intriguing room, though, is that which focuses on the collectors who bought Picasso’s works in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose. 

Here, some of the exhibition’s most obviously recognisable paintings are to be seen – such as Nude Woman in a Red Armchair which features on much of the publicity for the show, the strangely crude Portrait of Lee Miller as l’Arlesienne, and Nude, Green Leaves and Bust – which last year became the most expensive art work ever sold at auction at a cost of £66m.

The last time the Tate put on a major Picasso retrospective, in 1960, it attracted more than half a million visitors, perhaps the most an exhibition at the gallery has ever managed. The 2012 version will no doubt also be extremely popular.

Picasso & Modern British Art is at Tate Britain until 15 July 2012.

www.tate.org.uk