Published: 16 February, 2012
by JOHN EVANS

This new show is a “kind of replay of our own story,” says Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis. “Picasso was the litmus test for modern art,” she says, recalling the controversies and battles about the artist’s work since the first examples were exhibited in London in 1910.

The politics and intrigue surrounding the perception of, and reaction to, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), through to the present, is alluded to in the show and examined in detail in the Tate’s fine catalogue which accompanies it.

What’s physically on offer, arranged more or less chronologically in a dozen rooms, are works examining, for the first, time his relationship to British art. Of 150 in all 60 are his.

Curtis says: “The role of the artist in helping a larger audience understand Picasso is central to the story… Individual artists appreciated Picasso well before his significance was more widely understood.”

First there are paintings acquired and shown by collectors and institutions.

Second there is examination of Picasso’s influence on British modernism and impact on fellow artists, juxtaposing his work with that of seven others: Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Duncan Grant (1885-1978), Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), Henry Moore (1898-1986), Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and David Hockney (b1937).

The Spaniard’s influence is not seen as a passive process and the Tate’s chosen seven British artists are good enough to underline the vitality and variations of the stimulus of different styles, whether sculpture or painting, collage or cubism.

So for Hockney, who made several visits to the major Tate show in 1960 and produced tribute works at his death, Picasso’s versatility itself is important. His constantly reinventing himself showed that eclecticism can be a positive thing for an artist.

For Bacon, a 1920s Picasso show in Paris was the catalyst that led him to paint rather than pursue interior design.

Some of Nicholson’s work, like Picasso’s, emphasised the surface of a painting “…and asserted its role as a decorative object independent of the objects depicted”.

Two paintings from 1901 just after Picasso had reached Paris are notable. The Tate’s Flowers was the first to enter a public collection in Britain.

And Blue Roofs, Paris, bequeathed to the Ashmolean by a Bolton mill-owner, was the first in a public collection outside London.

The Bloomsbury set, especially Roger Fry and Clive Bell, were early champions, together with prominent collectors such as Roland Penrose.

They were up against strong opposition from the likes of Evelyn Waugh, GK Chesterton, Sir Alfred Munnings and Winston Churchill.

John Maynard Keynes (who had been Grant’s lover) was a supporter and a 1919 pencil portrait of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, who was later to marry the economist, is on show.

It was drawn during Picasso’s first trip to Britain with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe and the artist’s costume and set designs are here too.

His second and final visit, in 1950, was as a Communist delegate to a peace conference in Sheffield, but it was cancelled.

He spent time at his friend Penrose’s Sussex farm instead.

In addition to the Tate’s Picassos, loan highlights include: Reading at a Table and Woman Dressing her Hair (both from New York), The Source (Stockholm), and a number of studies for Guernica (Madrid).

• Picasso & Modern British Art, until July 15, at Tate Britain, Millbank SW1, £14, concs available, 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk

• Pictured above Pablo Picasso, Reading at a Table 1934, on loan from Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Florene M Schoenborn, in honour of William S Lieberman, 1995. The subject is the artist’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter