Pablo Picasso. You might just have heard of him, since he is probably the most famous artist of the twentieth century. Picasso had a number of ‘great years’, years in which he made stylistic innovations which really did send ‘shockwaves through the art world’ and change the way that educated people see and think about art.
The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy has the simple idea of looking at one of Picasso’s Great Years in immense detail. It takes us month by month through Picasso’s life and output in 1932, ‘a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his “year of wonders”‘.
Pablo Picasso, rue La Boétie, 1933, Paris by Cecil Beaton © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s
The exhibition includes more than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper to give you a flavour of Picasso’s prolific and restlessly inventive character. It includes an unprecedented range of loans from collections around the world, including the Musée National Picasso-Paris, as well as many works from private collection, reuniting some of Picasso’s greatest works of art, many of which are rarely shown in public, for the first time in 86 years.
What was happening to Pablo Picasso in 1932
In 1932 Picasso turned 50. He was married (to Russian dancer, Olga Khokhlova) and had an 11-year-old son Paulo. Many galleries were vying with each other to stage a retrospective of his works, a competition won by the Galeries Georges Petit, which staged Picasso’s first major retrospective in June 1932.
Picasso was the most famous living artist. He bought a big farmhouse in Normandy, created a studio in the barn and toyed with having an outdoor swimming pool built. He owned a luxury apartment in Paris and was ferried around in a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza car.
Yet he was restless. He had been carrying on an affair with a sporty, outdoorsy 22-year-old blonde, Marie-Thérèse Walter. And the new flavour of the month in fashion-conscious Paris were the Surrealists, who in the 1920s had mostly been a literary movement, but whose visual experiments and confidence had been given a shot in the arm by the arrival of Salvador Dalí, who joined the group in the late 1929.
Some critics wondered whether Picasso was finished, a man of the past. He consciously set out to prove them wrong, with the result that 1932 marks an explosion of creativity and a restless set of experiments in oil painting, sculpture and drawing.
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
Pictures of women
When I (and the curators) say ‘experiment’ something must be emphasised right from the start: the exhibition showcases Picasso’s stunning creativity and includes a dozen or more quite wonderful works – but at the same time you can’t help noticing the monotony of subject matter. Women. Women are his subject. Or rather, single women. A woman in a chair. Sleeping woman. Woman reflected in a mirror.
Later in the show there are several women playing on a beach. Or a man saving a woman from drowning. Or women lying around while being serenaded by fauns. But at the imaginative core of the work is one woman.
You don’t get far into the exhibition before you’re being told that the woman in question is Marie-Thérèse, the mistress. She was blonde and she had the kind of nose which is an extension of the forehead without a dent or kink, a Roman nose it’s sometimes called.
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Private Collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
The obsessive repetition of the same woman, sleeping or sitting in a chair makes the visitor wonder whether there was some kind of a trade-off – that Picasso had to limit his subject matter to the tiny world of the studio, and his one, central muse figure – blanking out the entirety of the roaring, industrial, political, urban world of 1932, rejecting every visual thing in the universe except his blonde lover and a few studio props – in order to be imaginatively free to submit it to so many fantastic and brilliant variations.
Information
Each room is dedicated to a month or two, and the audioguide zeroes in on pictures often painted on a specific, named day.
The exhibition includes a huge amount of biographical information, a host of articles about what was going on in Paris at the time, about the fashionable popularity of Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytic theories, about the competition from the Surrealists and the launch of the Surrealist magazine Minotaur (first edition published June 1933 and devoted almost entirely to Picasso), about Picasso building the sculpture studio at his Normandy house, a detailed account of his comings and goings during the year, and the elaborate preparations for the retrospective exhibition.
So much so that it’s almost easy to lose sight of the art in the blizzard of explanations and timelines.
Reclining Nude (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Private Collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
Practicing curves
One way to approach them is via the room devoted to some of the black-and-white charcoal drawings on canvas which Picasso made throughout 1932. The commentary very usefully pointed out that the sweeping lines, the curves and arabesques of the charcoal lines, are like a preparation for the paintings. For in the paintings, the scholars tell us there was little if any preparation. Picasso rarely painted from life – he started from memory and imagination and created shapes and patterns by great sweeping curves of his hand.
The charcoal pictures show his hand and arm building up the technique of creating great sweeping curves first time, with no afterthought or adjustment, again and again depicting the kind of curve which, in the finished paintings, become a woman’s face or nose or arms or torso or bottom.
His habit was to mark out shapes and patterns in black paint and, once he was happy with the composition, to fill in the shape with colour, but quite happy to leave both elements (black lines and colour) unfinished, rasping the paint, letting undercolours or even blank canvas show through.
All of the paintings here benefited from looking at close up to see this technique up close. Colouring and setting varied a little, but the fundamental idea of the defining black line (almost, at times, the thick black line of a cartoon) is always paramount.
Wallpaper
It may sound trivial and the commentary didn’t mention it, but I was struck by the care with which he depicts the wallpaper behind the subjects.
The Mirror by Pablo Picasso (12 March 1932) Private Collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
The curator’s commentary dwells on the fact that these are paintings of a woman, and paintings of Picasso’s mistress. Either angle gives the opportunity for lengthy discussions of either his private life, or the long tradition of painting women in Western art. A woman near a mirror is bound to set off a small explosion of art theory referencing the long tradition of associating women with ‘vanity’.
Maybe. But when I look at this picture the first thing I notice is the dark blue patterned wallpaper and then the orange frame of the mirror, in other words the overall design of the composition, long before I notice the broad-nosed sleeping blonde with her ripe-apple boobs. And after processing her shape and curves, it is to the extraordinarily deep blue of the backdrop that my eyes returns.
In this concern for the decorative ancillaries to the main image a lot of these paintings reminded me of the purely decorative concerns of Picasso’s long-time frenemy, Henri Matisse.
The subject may be a female nude, it may be his hushed-up mistress, she may be passively sleeping and yet reflected, in a semi-surreal way, by the mirror. But the painting is also an arrangement of colours on a flat surface. It is a decorative object, whose subject you can almost ignore, if you will. It is first and foremost a big bright image and I think the viewer reacts immediately, either for or against the size and vibrancy of the colour and shape of the composition, long before you get round to thinking about the ‘issues’ of women and mirrors or marriage and mistresses.
Angles
Again, putting aside the subject matter for a moment, by the time I’d got to the end I realised Picasso had roughly three approaches or ‘styles’, at least in this year of 1932.
One is the curvy, ‘feminine’ style exemplified in the pictures shown above. But there was another, very different style – characterised by uncomfortable angles, distortions, harsh straight lines and geometric interactions. There are quite a few of them here and they feel completely different to the soft curvy sleeping blondes.
The most striking instances are a sequence of smaller works he made which are all variations on the idea of a woman sunbathing – but not a woman as you or I might conceive the subject.
Woman on the Beach (1932) by Pablo Picasso. The Penrose Collection © Succession Picasso / DACS London 2018
The commentary points out that the small circle in the middle is the woman’s anus. Apparently, Picasso’s usual gallerist refused to exhibit the series because he said he didn’t want a load of ‘arseholes’ in his shop. But I think this rather typical obsession with sex and the body on the part of critic and seller is missing the more obvious point – which is the entire conceptualisation of the human figure which has, in a work like this, become fantastically stylised.
In the strange combination of the zoomorphic (i.e. curved shapes) with harsh geometry (the set of triangles and the table leg-style legs) there’s a lot of the influence of Surrealism, maybe of Max Ernst, influencing Picasso’s own abstracting tendencies.
But Picasso never actually becomes abstract – his paintings are always of something, almost always of people, and overwhelmingly of young nubile women.
Henry Moore
The closest he comes to pure abstraction is in the works of his third style, which kept reminding me of the drawings and sculptures of Henry Moore. In both the styles identified above – curvy and angular – the image is essentially flat. There may be token references to chairs or wallpaper but they don’t really create a sense of depth.
In the works where he does go for a sense that the picture is a window into the world, the effect is strikingly odd, for there’s a thread throughout the work of pictures made up of blobs and odd, curved shaded shapes, which look like the products of a pot-maker or clay modeller who’s gone mad.
Seated Woman in a Red Armchair (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Musée national Picasso © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2018
Here the two balls in the middle, the curved object which seems to contain them, and the curving cowl up towards two tiny eyes in a blank monster’s face – all of them have shade and shadowing which give them the illusion of three dimensionality.
Can you see why I mention Henry Moore? They look like paintings of Henry Moore sculptures.
One room in the show is devoted to a rarely-seen sequence of thirteen drawings Picasso made based on the crucifixion section of the Isenheim Altarpiece by the German painter Matthias Grünewald.
The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece (circa 1512-15)
The commentary goes heavy on the religious subject matter, but what struck me was how Picasso recast almost all his versions by breaking down the human figure into a sequence of Henry Moore-style blobs and craws.
The Crucifixion (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Musée National Picasso © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
The approach may also, possibly, owe something to the Surrealists Hans Arp or Yves Tanguy. It was very much a style of the age. But on the evidence of all these works it does look as if, when Picasso thought of depth and perspective, everything turned into shaded, blobby shapes.
Sculpture and landscapes
There are many more themes and subjects. It is, ultimately a staggering and exhausting exhibition. How did he manage to think and see and create so many different things in one short year?
There is a series of surprisingly charming landscapes of the view from his Normandy house over the nearby village, Boisgeloup, which could almost be illustrations of a children’s book.
There is an entire room dedicated to classic works from earlier in Picasso’s career – including Blue Period, Rose Period and Cubist paintings – to give us a flavour of the major retrospective of June 1932. Picasso was very careful in which works he chose to include in it and, most strikingly, he mixed them all up, eschewing chronological order in order to create a solid wall of art, all of it as relevant as any other.
And another room has been carefully arranged to recreate something of the atmosphere of the rough and ready sculptor’s studio he created in a barn at his Normandy house, with one entire wall of the room covered in a massively blown-up photo of the studio with its decrepit barn doors, a sequence of b&w photos made of the artist at work on his sculptures by the classic photographer, Brassaï, and a handful of actual sculptures – big, semi-abstract heads. (Notice the Roman nose – I wonder who this could be a bust of?)
Bust of a Woman (1931) by Pablo Picasso. Musée National Picasso © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
The rescue
But the exhibition ends with a turn to a completely new subject, something you wouldn’t have predicted at all from all the sleepy blondes or blondes in armchairs from earlier in the show.
1932 ended traumatically for Pablo when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill after swimming in the river Marne. During the illness she lost most of her iconic blonde hair. The result in his art was a series of paintings, large and small, showing the rescue of a drowning woman by a man – all heavily stylised.
Some of the variations take on a dark overtone with the male presence not rescuing but threatening the drowning woman, and at least one of them is titled The Rape.
Or there are variations like this one in which a woman appears to be saving the drowner. And who is the third figure at bottom right – a passing swimmer or a siren reaching out to drown the unwary? (And note the scrappier use of colour – in the earlier sleeping woman pictures the colours tended to be uniform within each section demarcated by a solid black line- – in these last paintings the colours are more blotched and varied within each section.)
The Rescue (1932) by Pablo Picasso. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
Here, in the last room, the commentary leads off into a load of history, explaining that only a month or so later, in January 1933, Herr Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and it was only 3 years later that General Franco rebelled against the Republican government of Spain, triggering the brutal Spanish Civil War. And then World War Tow. And the Holocaust. And the atom bomb.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that terrifying things were just around the corner, but I think a) nobody in 1932 had an inkling that any of that was going to happen, and b) the curators are over-politicising a painter who went to great lengths not to reference the contemporary world in any way at all in his art. Guernica was still seven years off and even then it is a thing of primitive people and horse. Not many planes, trains and automobiles in Picasso’s entire oeuvre. In this respect – in terms of subject matter – he was a very unmodern, a surprisingly conservative, artist.
Anyway, I had never seen any of the works in this room before so, in some ways, found it the most rewarding room of the exhibition. The many variations on The Rescue, although mostly done in the big, cartoony, boldly coloured style of the previous rooms, were nonetheless haunting and powerful.
For reasons I can’t put into words I found one particular painting in this room especially hypnotic and upsetting.
The Rescue by Pablo Picasso (1933)
It’s at the most abstract end of his range. Probably the ‘figures’ are women, but they really seem more like creatures caught in some agonising death dance and suddenly turned to bronze, against a crude sea and an eerily realistic sky.
Picasso almost never painted landscapes, certainly not intending to make them ‘realistic’ depictions. This reproduction doesn’t convey the incongruity of setting such a completely abstract, modernistic, sculptured shape against that extreme rarity, a realistic Picasso sky.
I don’t know if I was more upset, or scared, or touched by it.
Sometimes it is good to just be in front of a work of art, undistracted by curatorial talk about mistresses and wives, breasts and anuses, analysis of the male gaze, and the theme of the mirror, and rivalry with other painters, and the vagaries of the Paris art market, and the looming European catastrophe, and all those other issues and stories.
To just stand in front of a work and be awed and puzzled and confused and absorbed and transported.
Videos
A brief, wordless overview of the exhibition.
A longer tour of the show by two art experts.
Related links
- Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy continues at Tate Modern until 9 September 2018
- Detailed room-by-room guide to the exhibition
Reviews of other Tate exhibitions
- All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
- Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
- Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
- Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
- Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
- Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
- Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
- Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
- The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
- David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
- Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
- Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
- Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
- Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
- Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
- Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
- Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
- Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
- Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
- Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
- Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
- The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
- Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
- Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
- Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
- Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
- Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
- Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
- Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
- British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
- Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
- Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
- Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
- Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
- Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
- Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
- Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
- Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
- Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
- John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)
George Walker
/ August 26, 2018Picasso was a randy old goat and a total fraud!
At 73 I am allowed to say what I think, what I’ve always thought.
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