Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern: familiar works reframed in an ‘adventurous’ way

The Three Dancers (1925): Picasso’s tribute to performers

(Image credit: Getty Images)

“It’s been a long time – several years – since an event as stimulating as this opened at Tate Modern,” said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It pulls off a difficult trick: reframing the work of Pablo Picasso in a “fresh” and “adventurous” way. These days, the Spaniard is unfashionable because of his attitudes towards women; “he’s generally the coconut and angry damsels throw the balls”. The Tate, in “a nimble bit of curation”, has asked the trans performer Wu Tsang and the writer Enrique Fuenteblanca to mount a display dedicated to his love of theatre, which invites us to reconsider his work as a series of performances. Its focus is not on the disappointing theatrical sets that Picasso designed, but on his love of play-acting in general: his “taste for dressing up and his appreciation of other people’s roleplaying”; on his penchant for painting performers such as flamenco dancers and matadors. It brings together some 45 works by the artist; in short, the Tate has found an interesting way of “showing us every Picasso it owns”.

The show is certainly unconventional, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Its design masquerades as the backstage of a theatre, complete with “spotlights, clattering music and surging voices”, “wings, ramps and footlights”; a screen shows a video of Picasso himself playing Carmen in a lace mantilla, while 16 “stupendous” images of “young lovers, pensive women and goatish old men” hang from mesh grids “like posters at Ikea”, and 1968’s “fierce and lustful” “Nude Woman With Necklace” bursts out of the theatrical darkness. It’s great to see so many works by the artist grouped together, but the show feels “muddled” and “sententious”. It completely swerves the question of Picasso’s cruelty to women, instead trying unconvincingly to make him “into our non-conforming contemporary”. It’s “contrived and contradictory”, and only confirms what we already knew: that Picasso “does not need to be updated for a new generation”.

The curators have made some terrible choices here, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The show’s most important work, “The Three Dancers” (1925), is hidden away behind a wall; and what little analysis of the works there is “feels blinkered and wrong-headed”. It’s heavy on “opaque academic jargon”, much of it relating to contemporary identity politics. But if you ignore the “brain-aching” theorising in the explanatory texts, it’s really quite impressive, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. The “quasi-fictional setting” makes you look at the paintings afresh, and it gives an impressive sense of Picasso’s “protean chopping and changing”, the way he repeatedly reconfigured the human figure while quoting from everything from Rembrandt to African sculpture. I’ll admit that I expected “to hate this exhibition”, but it entrances the eye “spectacularly”.