In the year of the Diamond Jubilee, and the Olympics in London, it is a daring feat to programme anything, especially if it is about waves of change and continuity. Tate Britain's curation of Picasso and Modern British Art cracks the code. Yes, it is about the quantum mechanics of one artist's inspiration from world art, and how it radicalised the imagination and works of British artists.
As a must see this summer in London, what won my attention was the striking impact of Picasso on three particular perspectives — British artists; critical movements; and a unique cultural moment. It is curated by Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) and Head of Displays, Tate Britain, and assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator.
The exhibition invites the viewer to 12 cubic spaces on the ground level. The impact of Picasso's work on seven major British Artists is punctuated with his presence in Britain: 1910-14; 1919; 1937-39; 1945-60. This shapes our viewing of his layers of artistic intervention and chronology responding to politics, poverty, war, and social change.
Picasso's works were first exhibited in Britain in November 1910 by critic Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in London.
Picasso's politics of using daily materials, the work man's lunch, as inspiration and reflected in the objects of Still Life — 1912 is not solely a metaphor, it is a work that is manifest in the construction of “crude” materials around the studio, and what symbolises a workman's lunch — sausage, cheese cut with a knife made from a strip of pine from the studio and sawed by a knife, by hand.
Jackie Heuman suggests: “Picasso conflates the iconography of a working-class lunch with that of bourgeois home decoration using a piece of tasselled fringe. The tassels are tied twice forming a small onion shape and are referred to as “onion” tassels: Picasso might have been aware of and enjoyed this visual food pun.”
Essence on canvas
It is a wave rippling from Frugal Meal (1904) and Head of a Man (1912) connected by the particles of poverty and the three dimensional effect of cubism; deconstruction and revelation of an essence on canvas that radiates to make the whole.
Picasso's brand of cubism was the shock of the new for Duncan Grant and his Interior at Gordon Square 1914-15 is a gem of hand-painted papier colles of two first floor rooms through doorframes, sofa and interiors in blues and green with the ellipse of a yellow cushion as signet tribute to Picasso's Jars and Lemon 1907. The impact on Vorticist Wyndham Lewis who shared Picasso's tragic sense of human existence is evident in Workshop 1914 and Smiling woman ascending a staircase 1911.
However, Lewis's rebellion derived from cubism desired narrative, and to “blast” Picasso out of his tight and secret corners in the safety of the studio.
Ben Nicholson's 1933 ( Coin and musical instruments ) embraces Barbara Hepworth's sculptural profile in a coin that rolls its line along a canvas matted with slate and muted terracotta tones by scraping a score of lines scratching the paint's surface to the depth of the white canvas. Result — waves of silence and fluidity. Like Duncan Grant he had a persistent experimental relationship with Picasso's cubism. Of course there are scores of other greats whom I dare not mention for lack of column width; so here are my lean lines on the multiple dimensions of Picasso's influence.
The piercing colours of Weeping Woman 1937, facing the terrorised lines of Guernica 1937, continue to set the viewer churning as it symbolised in Herbert Read's reflection “disillusion, despair and destruction”.
David Hockney's multidimensional works from drawings to video and “Demonstrations of Versatility” combines a homage to Picasso's prolific work as a movement with cubism as stimulus, going beyond a single focus. Hockney places himself wittily as a model under the scrutiny of guru Picasso.
An absolute scene stealer is Picasso in Britain in 1919 — creating the set design and costume of Serge Diaghilev's Three-Cornered Hat for Ballet Russes. This is a rare and unique archive exhibited with drawings of costume and set, and photographs of the men who changed the look of visual and performing art.
Final cube
The theatre of Picasso's innovation with three dimensions in two is reserved for the final cube: The Three Dancers 1925, which was acquired directly from the artist for the Tate in London in 1965.
In A Life of Picasso 1907–1917: The Painter of Modern Life , J. Richardson observes: “When asked whether the constructions were sculptures or paintings, Picasso replied: “Now we are delivered from Painting and Sculpture, themselves already liberated from the imbecile tyranny of genres. It's neither one thing nor another.”
That for me is the resonating significance of Picasso — seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar, uncertainty from certitudes, heightening the extra daily from the everyday, by creating genius through surprise and dares us to respond in any way. Chris Stephen's curation takes the viewer on a wave-journey of Picasso's impact on British artists that reaches the core of the artist and his work, and it's relevance across time, and genre.
After July 2012 in Tate Britain, the exhibition will move to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
