A groundbreaking exhibition at London's Tate Modern is celebrating the revolutionary artistic genius of Pablo Picasso through an immersive theatrical presentation that captures the Spanish master's profound impact on modern art. "Theatre Picasso" offers visitors a unique journey through the artist's creative universe, showcasing how he systematically dismantled and reconstructed artistic conventions throughout his 91-year life.
The exhibition's centerpiece, "The Acrobat" from 1930, perfectly demonstrates Picasso's transformative effect on art. Loaned by the Musée Picasso in Paris, this remarkable painting presents a gender-ambiguous figure contorted into an impossible puzzle. The body defies anatomical logic with a leg sprouting above the anus, a head with closed eyes bulging where genitals might be, one leg standing on the ground balanced by an arm whose hand functions as a foot, while the other arm, fist clenched, curves like a tail. This work exemplifies how Picasso turned art inside out and upside down, twisting it beyond recognition while making it more compelling, human, and passionate than ever before.
Born into a Europe dominated by realistic sculptures and perspective paintings, Picasso systematically destroyed these artistic conventions, reassembled them, and then smashed them again repeatedly throughout his career. The Tate Modern exhibition attempts to present this creative destruction through an unconventional approach. Rather than following chronological order or providing historical context, "Theatre Picasso" breaks up the artist's work just as he fragmented what he observed, creating a riotous celebration of his genius despite some initial concerns about gender and artistic borrowing that ultimately fade into the background.
The exhibition's innovative presentation includes fascinating multimedia elements, such as a piece of film shot by Man Ray showing Picasso in a wig portraying Carmen – a holiday movie created shortly after he painted his masterpiece Guernica. This playful footage is juxtaposed with much later provocative works, including "The Kiss," where a man and woman engage in an intensely physical embrace, practically devouring each other as they attempt to merge completely. These works demonstrate how Picasso's art sought to consume the entire physical world, making viewers feel the fleshy wetness in their own mouths as he rejected traditional realism to make people taste authentic reality.
Picasso's unflinching approach to depicting the human form becomes particularly evident in his treatment of nude subjects. His 1968 painting "Nude Woman with Necklace" receives prominent display on a spotlit wall, accompanied by commentary addressing his possessive depictions of women. In this blue-green tinted work, viewers can simultaneously see the model's vulva and anus as she fingers a necklace against her breasts. However, this critique somewhat misses the mark, as Picasso was in his late eighties when he created this piece, and its rawness and anger reflect his confrontation with mortality as much as sexuality. There's profound pathos in his determination to surpass Dylan Thomas and rage against the dying of desire.
Death emerges as a persistent theme throughout the latter portion of the exhibition. Picasso's 1952 painting "Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle" serves as a memento mori that paradoxically makes viewers grateful to be alive. Created with the sharp lines of a drawing, the canvas is fragmented into white, gray, and black disharmonious shapes, with the skull outlined in harsh sections possessing crystalline force that compels viewers to see and feel what the artist observed on his table – fresh from the butcher and beginning to attract flies.
The theme of mortality continues in a nearby 1960 drawing executed in wet, flowing black ink depicting a corrida or bullfight. The scene shows a mounted figure who has thrust his lance into a mighty bull that lowers its head in what appears to be willing self-sacrifice. The exhibition's theatrical staging, with works displayed in dark, stage-like spaces on theater flats with spotlights and mood music, effectively illuminates Picasso's deep Spanish identity. From his unlikely drag performance as Carmen to this heartbreaking bullfight scene, the country he left as a young artist haunts both the show and his artistic consciousness.
Picasso's political engagement becomes powerfully evident in his 1937 comic strip "The Dream and Lie of Franco," where the fascist leader of the Spanish Civil War appears as an obscene Don Quixote. Franco is depicted with eyes on phallic stalks protruding from a face resembling a hairy pig's rear end as he confronts a mighty bull representing Spanish workers. As the depicted violence intensifies, a woman flees a burning house carrying her dead baby – a timeless, devastating image of war's horror.
Nearby hangs Tate's own "Weeping Woman," the magnificent 1937 painting Picasso created alongside Guernica. Viewers can see Luftwaffe bombers reflected in the woman's eyes, but what becomes apparent when viewing the original is how Picasso added a stroke of blue over one plane, softening what might have been too harsh. This reveals how the tough-guy artist courageously approached the edge of sentimentality in this powerful work. As the woman weeps, her hair flows like a river of hope while a bee feeds on her tears, suggesting that some good must emerge from horror.
Despite confronting war's brutality and death's inevitability, Picasso emerges as a far more hopeful artist than such postwar figurative painters as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, or Frank Auerbach. Whether he can even be classified as figurative remains questionable, given that he invented abstraction and collage alongside Georges Braque. In his early Cubist works, there is no sex or death – only an eye fascinated by reality's small details in which it discovers infinities.
The exhibition brings visitors back to fundamentals through works like "Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle" from 1913, where the simple dots representing grapes contain profound beauty and mystery. It is precisely because Picasso loved life's small good things so deeply that he could face modernity's horrors without falling into despair. "Theatre Picasso" runs at Tate Modern from September 17 through April 12, offering visitors a comprehensive welcome to the artist's theatrical celebration of life itself.
