Picasso: Challenging the Past
National Gallery, London
LIKE a cubist painting, which ever way you look, Picasso somehow avoids being pinned down. Yet, no matter how much he moved from one style to another – from academic study to free play, from precision to wild experiment – Picasso consistently referred to the great art of the past as both a source of inspiration and as way of viewing the world.
This is certainly the theme of Picasso: Challenging the Past, an exhibition that brings together images that refer directly or indirectly to significant works of the past. Throughout his life, like many other artists, Picasso studied the way the old (and some modern) masters worked, concerned less with the techniques they used – although this may have seemed important – but more with the themes they took and their interpretation of what they saw. It is a rewarding perspective on the work of this mercurial artist.
Picasso: Challenging the Past is a slimmed down version of an exhibition first shown in Paris, where many of the great paintings Picasso drew on were shown alongside his work. Thankfully, I did not see this, because it seems too literal an approach in appearing to offer comparisons between the 20th century work of Picasso and that from earlier societies before, for example, photography had been invented.
At the National Gallery, tiny reproductions of the reference picture are shown where direct suggestion is useful. However, where the paintings are in the collection of the National Gallery, visitors are encouraged to investigate the permanent collection to look for themselves. Painting at a different time in a modern idiom, Picasso developed different visual languages, creating work that embodies modern concerns. As a youth, Picasso studied works in the Prado – at one point, carrying out a self-portrait, showing himself alongside Goya.
While there is no doubting Picasso’s ability to work formally and conventionally, such as in Olga, the tender, relaxed portrait of his first wife, he could also approach his subject from a more sculptural point of view. Seated Woman, for instance, is an expressionist response to the sitter in which she appears with inflated limbs and hands that suggest the monumentality of the character. Painted three years earlier than Olga, is this the same figure portrayed in completely different ways? Both are utterly engrossing.
With an eye on archetypal visual imagery, Picasso drew on work by, among others, Raphael, Poussin, Rembrandt, Murillo, Delacroix and Ingres. But of all the great artists, it was the Spanish painter Velázquez to whom Picasso returned to it many times, attracted by both his psychological interpretations and – exiled from his homeland by Franco’s fascist government – by his Spanish-ness. Fascinated by Las Meninas, Velázquez’s depiction of the Spanish court, Picasso represented it in over 40 variations, picturing the domestic scene, often in eerie blues and whites.
The work of the-post Impressionists was also scrutinised. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is transformed by Picasso into a relief-like image, while Renoir’s sensual nudes take on an epic strength in images such as The Bather.
Subtly and quietly, this exhibition, with more than 60 examples of his art, reveals a particular aspect of the artist’s work that furthers understanding of his achievements. While a more chronological approach would have been useful in tracing Picasso’s engagement with the great artists of the past, and a bigger space in which to exhibit these important works, Picasso: Challenging the Past offers yet a further insight into this mercurial painter.
Emmanuel Cooper
Picasso: Challenging the Past continues until June 7
