It is a beautiful afternoon as I stroll across the Millennium Bridge on the Thames to keep my date with Picasso. A red billboard emblazoned with Picasso’s famous ‘The Dream’ welcomes me to Tate Modern’s spacious interiors. Tate Modern, in association with Musée National Picasso-Paris, is having a special exhibition of Pablo Picasso, The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy. Also special because it is Tate’s very first exhibition on Picasso.
A landmark year in Picasso’s life, 1932, is the pivot around which the curators have planned the exhibition. It is a starting point to go back and forth and trace his artistic journey. More than 100 paintings, sculptures, sketches, photographs and quotes, along with the mundane, like a butcher’s bill, gives us a glimpse into the life of the legend. This collection from 1932 embodies a significant year in Picasso’s life, professionally and personally. Many of his works, arranged across several rooms, have been loaned to Tate Modern by private collections from all over the world.
Picasso’s vast body of work changed the dynamics of artistic creativity. “I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary,” said Picasso. Life and art were inexorably intertwined in his life, and his paintings are proof of that. Each month of 1932 has been chronicled in 10 rooms, with the paintings that reveal a new phase in his oeuvre. This is an artist in love and yet driven by fears and insecurities. Descriptive notes and an audio guide walk you through each of the works exhibited.
The opening piece of the exhibition is the rather terrifying ‘Woman with Dagger’, depicting a blood-splattered canvas that has a fanged woman with a knife and a chaotic tangle of legs. The women portraits continue with a jumble of eyes, breasts, nose... the audio guide helps decipher each canvas. Benches placed in some of the rooms give visitors an opportunity to sit and study his works at length. Picasso turned 50 in 1931, and he was living in Paris as a celebrated artist with his wife Olga Khokhlova. One learns that it was also a period when he was swamped with insecurities, and many critics wondered if Picasso was indeed reaching the end of his brilliant career. But he turned that turbulent period into an ecstatic outpouring of creativity when he came up with a series of paintings, sketches and sculptures that stunned the world. His affair with a much younger Marie-Therese Walter also resulted in famous paintings and portraits that celebrated her. Three of those works featuring Walter are exhibited at Tate. These have not been shown together since 1932, the year they were created. Painted in only five days, these are ‘Nude, Green Leaves and Bust’, ‘Nude in a Black Armchair’ and ‘The Mirror’.
According to Director of Exhibitions at Tate Modern and curator of the exhibition, Achim Borchardt-Hume, “The monumental March Nudes are an undisputed highlight of what has rightly been called Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’. To see them reunited in one room will be a high point in Tate Modern’s exhibition history and an experience not to be missed.”
The March Nudes are arranged together in one room. The explosion of energy on the canvas is unmissable and so is the sexuality, eroticism and sensuousness of the colours, the brush strokes and the painting itself.
As in a place of worship, we look at them in silence, perhaps kneeling in our hearts at the altar of high art. There are gasps of understanding, as we catch the significance of some of the cleverly done paintings that move from exultation and ecstasy to darkness and despair and angst and anxiety. Some of the rooms have been devoted to Picasso’s earlier works, sculptures and drawings, including sketches and lines drawn over one another, giving an idea of how the artist might have worked.
One of the visitors to Tate, C Balagopal, an art collector, author and entrepreneur, says: “Looking around the exhibits and the viewers, I cannot help think that art is also about the resonance a work has with a viewer. I see varying expressions and emotions flit across the faces of those present, ranging from puzzlement, astonishment, pleasure, embarrassment, and occasionally, even understanding!” Balagopal then quotes Picasso who said, “ To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”
The exhibition concludes on September 9.
The writer was in London at the invitation of Airbnb