Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain

Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain

13 February, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

Brilliant in places, Picasso and Modern British Art is too big for its own concept and far too wordy. Tom Jeffreys reviews.

There's a memorable moment in David Mitchell's number9dream when one of the characters suggests that the quality of a movie may be inversely proportional to the number of helicopters in it. The same, I've often thought, could be said about exhibitions, in relation to the quantity of text plastered all over the walls. In this respect, Picasso and Modern British Art is an absolute shocker. Every single work seems to be accompanied by at least two lengthy paragraphs of text, most of which is unutterably tedious and actively detracts from the art on show. Which is a shame, because once the curators stop babbling, this is actually an interesting, insightful exhibition.

The reason for all this text is simple: the exhibition's central tenet doesn't really make any sense until the 1930s, when Picasso's impact on British art was sufficiently significant to be worthy of note. And yet Tate Britain kicks off the narrative as early as 1901, leaving the best part of 30 years (and three gallery rooms) to fill up with second rate painters like the woeful Duncan Grant, the entertaining but very dated Wyndham Lewis, and acres and acres of wall text.

Aside from a select avant-garde like the Bloomsbury Group and the Vorticists, the British art world in all its conservative insularity took decades to begin to really take to Picasso. Which may be an interesting subject for a magazine article or a TV documentary, but doesn't give us much to look at. So instead the curators take up our time with excessive documentation about who bought what paintings from which galleries in which years. It's execrably dull, and unless exhibition sponsors RLM Finsbury are somehow doing the PR for the long-dead art-buying financiers who keep cropping up, it all makes very little sense.

I'd suggest rushing through the first four galleries, pausing only to admire the haughtily melancholic Girl in a Chemise (1905) and a boldly scratchy pencil portrait of Vladimir Polunin (1919). Take a very quick look at gallery four (if only to confirm once and for all that Ben Nicholson is an artist of derivative subservience), and then stroll slowly into gallery five. Ignore all the wall text, and simply relax in the presence of such variety. From rose-tinted society Impressionism to bright, vibrant Cubist riots, and the coyly enigmatic A Child with a Dove (1901), this is a room that affirms greatness.

From here, the exhibition begins to make much more sense, as the focus shifts to artists like Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland. With Europe plunging headlong into war, these three artists took Picasso's stylistic innovations and hurled them screeching into a black abyss. Moore's debt to Picasso is concisely established with a room exploring their shared appreciation for bulky curving sensuality. But it's his elegantly dangerous sculpture Three Points (1939-40) that is perhaps his best work here, quite masterfully placed opposite Picasso's world-famous Weeping Woman (1937). For me, this is the brittle, shattered, symbolically charged apex of this exhibition, so powerful because the works give away so little.  

Around this perfect little moment are some rare early works by Bacon (one of the exhibition's most surprising and enlightening sections), as well as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), a fitting inclusion as the curators reach for the heavy-hitters. Later, the barbed, thorny forms of Graham Sutherland extend the angst – the highlight being Devastation, 1940, a work of virtuoso warped perspective, whose fragmented heart mirrors that of Weeping Woman, and marks, you might say, the beginning of the end of Modernism.

For these four rooms, Picasso and Modern British Art is an insightful, bold and genuinely quite exciting exhibition. It's just a shame it starts terribly (and peters out a bit with Hockney's literal homages). With a more focused approach (and a scythe through the spiel) this could have been something special.

Picasso and Modern British Art is at Tate Britain form Wednesday 15th February until 15th July 2012.

Image credit: Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Mandolin 1924 © Succession Picasso / DACS 2011 © Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

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Tom Jeffreys