‘Picasso and Modern British Art’, a five-month exhibition which is on show at Tate Britain from February 12 next year, will explore the Málaga artist’s lifelong connections with Britain and his enormous impact on British modernism, in particular his influence on seven British artists, including Francis Bacon and David Hockney.
Tate Britain said the exhibition ‘will explore Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and demonstrating that the British engagement with Picasso and his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated’.
This major show will include over 150 works from private and public collections across the world, including over 60 paintings by Picasso. They will be exhibited chronologically, covering a period of 70 years, with pieces by Picasso alternating with pieces by Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney, demonstrating a direct response to his work.
For example, Francis Bacon’s ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ will be displayed with Picasso paintings based on figures on the beach at Dinard, which the Tate said first inspired Bacon to take up painting seriously. In addition, there will be the chance to see a number of Hockney homages to the Málaga artist. David Hockney became so enamoured with Picasso that he visited his 1960 exhibition at the Tate no fewer than eight times. Members of the royal family were also amongst the visitors.
The show includes his 1925 painting ‘The Three Dancers’, which the Tate acquired after the 1960 exhibition.
Amongst the other Picasso pieces on show will be ‘Head of a Man with Moustache’, the Cubist work which was seen in the UK before the First World War when Cubism first began to be known there through exhibitions by the post-Impressionist artist Roger Fry. ‘Man with a Clarinet’ and ‘Weeping Woman’, works which were acquired by two major British collectors of Picasso, Douglas Cooper and Roland Penrose, will also be on display.
The show also takes a look at Picasso’s time in London, the three months in 1919 that the artist spent there designing scenery and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballet Russes production of ‘The Three-Cornered Hat’. He worked from a studio in Floral Street in Covent Garden and was joined on his trip to London by his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, the Ballet Russes dancer who he had married the previous year.
Picasso was not widely known to the British public at this time, and it was immediately after the Second World War that he came to greater attention with an exhibition of his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1945; the pieces by the Málaga artist and Henri Matisse had been sent over by the French government as thanks for the liberation from the Nazis.
The exhibition provoked hostility amongst conservative British society. El País notes a comment made by Winston Churchill to the President of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings, in response to the exhibition, ‘Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street, would you join me in kicking his ….?’
The Tate show will also consider the significance of Picasso’s political status in Britain, with photographs of the 1938-39 Guernica tour and of his only other visit to the country to attend the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield.
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