Picasso at Tate – highlight of London’s exhibition year so far
The new exhibition at Tate Britian, Picasso and Modern British Art, is a triumph. In analysing Picasso’s complex relationship with the UK and his influence upon Modern British painters and sculptors, the Tate approach a well-trodden artistic oeuvre with a new, fresh perspective. The exhibition not only shows off some wonderful Picasso’s, including many lesser known works from the beginning of his career, but it also places the spotlight on some lesser known British artists such as the superb, prickly and moving work of Graham Sutherland, promoting them to the undisputed limelight enjoyed so regularly by Señor Picasso.
The story of Picasso’s relationship with the UK runs throughout the exhibition, both through the works on show and by way of useful curator commentary placed alongside the canvases. Who would have thought that the artist, so universally accepted as a leading genius of modern art, and whose paintings comprise the top three most expensive paintings ever sold at auction, should have once been so inexorably spurned by the British art institution? When his work was first exhibited here in 1910, one critic, GK Chesterton described one of Picasso’s cubist paintings thus: “a piece of paper on which Mr Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots”.
Picasso, Flowers (1901) - Tate's first conservative Picasso purchase
This sort of reaction was by no means unique, and with his few British fans stemming almost universally from groups of budding artists such as the Bloomsbury group with the exception of a few steadfast collectors, it was many years before one of Picasso’s works entered the public collections in Britain. In fact when Britain did at last buy a Picasso work, they made the purchase of probably the most innocuous and dull painting Picasso ever created – Flowers (1901) – which was purchased in 1933 by Tate.
Picasso’s popularity in England did increase in the inter-war period, with works entering the private collections of collectors such as Douglas Cooper, Roland Penrose and Hugh Willoughby, as well as the stir caused as the worldwide propaganda tour of Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, passed through the UK in 1938 in support of the Spanish Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Nonetheless, it was not until post-WW2, when, numbed to the horrors of war, a newly optimistic peace-time Britain was ready to truly accept and celebrate the talents of Pablo Picasso. Shortly after the end of the war in 1945, the Victoria and Albert museum held an exhibition of Matisse and Picasso, and in 1960, Tate held the largest exhibition of Picasso’s work to date, an exhibition which proved popular enough to attract some 500,000 visitors.
Picasso, The Three Dancers (1925)
It was only after this time that Picasso agreed to sell what he regarded to be one of his most important works to the Tate Gallery in Britian: The Three Dancers, a sale which was agreed in 1965. The work remains one of the masterpieces of Tate Modern’s collection.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising that Britain was slow to accept Picasso. Historically, the Brits have been a bit slow in adopting anything which causes a disturbance of the traditions which they have always held to be dear. Just look at House of Lords reform – the labour government tried to reform the upper house of Parliament in 1999, but clearly found the disturbance of tradition so ultimately unsettling that they have left the reforms only half completed to this day, a house of semi-herditory peers suspended in history. Even in his time, Turner’s later, more impressionist works proved to be somewhat controversial, even though, by the time the French Impressionists rose to the fore, Turner, cited as a huge influence for the likes of Monet, was held dear to the hearts of the British public. When Picasso came along, the Brits were only just swallowing the new craze of impressionist work coming over from France. Picasso’s cubism and misplaced faces proved a little too radical for most. It is for this reason that Britain, by contrast with the likes of MOMA in New York, holds comparatively few Picasso’s in its public collections (Perhaps this is why Britain is trying to make up for it’s past vacillation by so readily accepting crappy modern art work like Tracey Emin and Martin Creed (you know – lights on, lights off) into its folds? Yes, once again, Britain is out of touch it seems).
Picasso, Weeping Woman (26 October 1937)
Wyndham Lewis, A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
But despite all those years when Picasso was conspicuous by his absence in the UK’s public galleries, this did not do anything to prevent our budding young artists from being heavily influenced by his work. The second thread of Tate’s exhibition demonstrates how comprehensively Picasso influenced the works of British artists of the time. Duncan Grant, for example, saw many of Picasso’s works when he was in Paris mixing with the likes of Leo and Gertrude Stein. Grant quickly adopted the African-style works which predominated in Picasso’s work around the time of Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, as well as responding to the collages pioneered by Picasso and his Cubist colleague, Georges Braque. So too was Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, influenced by Picasso’s work, although he actually sought to criticise Picasso who he considered to be overly sentimental and putting the modern movement “under a cloud”. In fact Lewis’ painting A Reading of Ovid (1920-1) (one of my favourites from the exhibition, sought to criticise Picasso’s return to large curvaceous classical figures at that time (such as The Source, below).
Of other artists influenced by Picasso over the years, amongst them Ben Nicholson (whose first abstract works were notably cubist in style) and Francis Bacon (who readily adopted Picasso’s screaming figures from the Guernica era), one of the most strikingly influenced is British sculptor extraordinaire, Henry Moore. The exhibition proficiently sets up direct comparisons between many of Moore’s sculptural forms and drawings and Picasso’s work. For example in his 1936 Reclining Figure, you can see a direct reference to Picasso’s classical work, The Source. Meanwhile, Moore’s incredibly unsettling and violent work, Three Points (1939) appears to reflect the screaming mouths of Picasso’s Guernica figures, painted two years earlier.
Picasso, The Source (1921) and above, Henry Moore's Reclining Figure (1936)
Henry Moore, Three Points (1939-40)
Picasso's Screaming Horse (1937)
Probably my favourite of the British artists on show was Graham Sutherland, whose works had largely escaped my radar before I saw some of his works a few months back at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Sutherland, who acknowledged his debt to Picasso and in particular to Guernica as he set about painting a number of unsettling works during wartime Britian, particularly in his images of the bomb-damaged English cityscapes and his thorn-like figures, is probably best known for his Crucifixion which he was commissioned to paint for the church of St Matthew, Northampton. One such work related to the commission was included here – a blue-backed crucifixion which I just adored.
Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion (1946)
Some critics who have been to this exhibition had derided the British artists included in the show, pointing out that next to Picasso, their works fall by the wayside. I disagree. Of course it is clear that many artists owe a great debt to the superbly imaginative, constantly changing oeuvre of Picasso (me included), but this is what artists have always done throughout history – borrowing from one another – just like Picasso himself did when he worked relentlessly on reimagining Las Meninas by Velazquez as well as works by Manet and Delacroix. Nonetheless, all of the British works show an originality and vibrancy of their own, from the undisputed sculptural genius of Henry Moore, to the next level of cubism – photographic cubism, advocated by David Hockney. Of course the true star of this exhibition is Pablo Picasso, but then, that kind of is the point of the show.
Picasso and Modern British Art runs until 15 July 2012 – well worth a visit!
PS Other works I loved…
Picasso, Woman Dressing Her Hair (June 1940)
Picasso, Girl in a Chemise (c.1905)
Picasso, The Frugal Meal (1904)
Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) - the most expensive painting ever sold at auction
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- Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain (bedfordnetwork.wordpress.com)
- In pictures: Picasso at the Tate (bbc.co.uk)
The Daily Norm 
May 9
The madness continues: Rothko and Munch sales break new auction records (and steal yet more works from the public eye)
Your eyes do quite possibly deceive you. This is not a photo of haphazardly applied paint samples on my living room wall in the consideration of a new mediterranean-inspired coloured scheme. Oh no. It is a painting, originally entitled Orange, red, yellow by american artist Mark Rothko and not just any painting either. This striped bodge-job of a monotoned canvas has the honour of reaching the highest price ever fetched by a piece of contemporary art at auction when it sold at Christie’s auction house last night for $86.9million. And this sale comes only a week after a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s The Screan set a new world record for the highest price ever paid for an artwork (of its era) at auction at a price tag of some $119.9. Did I mention that half the world is in a recession?
Mark Rothko, Orange, Red and Yellow (1961)
That’s not where it ended either. With total takings of $388 million, last night’s Christie’s auction was the most lucrative in history. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels slightly ill about this. This hideous commercialisation of art works is the same force which drives contemporary artists of our age to be amplified and promoted as serious artists purely because a rich man has backed them despite their decided lack of talent. It’s a world which most artists would gawp at, appalled at the rich men lavishing their coin over an art work, not because of its merit, but because its artificially escalated price tag defines them as wealthy men with apparent cultural appreciation despite their probable inability to tell you a single historical fact about the artist they have just lavished millions on. After all, wasn’t it Rothko himself who, upon being awarded a commission to paint two major mural commissions for the Seagram’s luxury Four Seasons restaurant commented that he wanted to paint “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.” What then would he have thought about one of his works selling for such an absurd sum, and entering the collections of one of the richest men on the earth? He’d say the same thing no doubt: people can stand anything these days, especially when it gives them a bit of status amongst all their equally rich friends.
Edvard Munch, The Scream (pastel)
It’s not just about the price either. Munch’s Scream is thought to be making its way to the private collection of the Qatar royal family, and there it will join Cezanne’s Card Players sold to the Qatari royals for an equally absurd amount last year. What would Munch, whose painting represents a time of intense personal agony, or Cezanne, who spent his career agonising obsessively over finding a new way of representing the life of peasants and Provencial countryside, have thought about their works ending up in some dessert (and oil) surrounded palace in a part of the world where freedoms are suppressed, homosexuals are persecuted, and women are swathed in material, hidden from the view of men? Wasn’t the intention of the impressionists and post-impressionists and most artists for that matter to liberate through their art, to emphasise the lives of the ordinary people, be them whores or gays, women in the nude or men in emotional turmoil? I can almost hear Cezanne turning in his grave, no doubt somewhere near the Mont St Victoire, as I type.
Cezanne, The Card Players – bought by the Qatar Royal Family
Worst of all is that the destiny of the majority of these privately bought paintings is to be hidden away in vast private collections, locked away from public view, as the increased secularisation and privatisation of the world’s masterpieces continues. And as the prices are pushed up, so too is the opportunity for a public gallery, most of them cash strapped, to ever acquire one of these great art works again. While the occasional private purchaser is good enough to loan their acquisition to a public gallery for public view, such as Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold to a private bidder (thought to be a Russian oligarch) but currently on show at Tate Britain as part of its Picasso and Modern British Artists exhibition, most will never see the light of day again. Much like Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette, purchased by Ryoei Saito in 1990 and supposedly never heard of from that day onwards.
Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932)
It’s not like these paintings are stunning. Munch’s recently sold Scream was only a pastel study and not nearly as intense as the oil-painted original which thankfully remains on public view in Oslo. Rothko’s work on the other hand (for I hate to call it a “painting”) is a matter of personal taste, although I am sick of constantly being told that Rothko’s works are moving, incredibly important masterpieces worthy of my attention. Because they’re certainly no worthier of my attention than the blank canvases sat in my cupboard, and the only thing that moves me about them is why they are taking up valuable space in some of the most important contemporary art museums in the world. Anyway, I digress. No matter what my personal opinion is of Rothko, I recognise his place in art history, and once again I would prefer to see his works on public display for the contemplation of countless generations, than for the sole entertainment of a few Qatar Royals and a herd of camels.
Renoir, Bal du Moulin de la Galette
In an ideal world, legislation would be passed forcing public galleries to have first dibs when an important work comes up for sale, at a heavily reduced price of course. But sadly this is not how the world works. Everyone wants to make a profit, and no more so than the auction houses of London and New York who revel in their press-grabbing broken records in the same way that White Star Line encouraged a speedier Titanic voyage in order to make headlines with the ship’s early arrival in New York. And we all know how that story ended, don’t we.
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