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Picasso and Modern British Art

Until 15 Jul 12

David Hockney, Paint Trolley, 1985

london. An exhibition at Tate Britain examining the impact of Picasso on British artists and collectors brings together significant art historical items, such as a group of works from around 1933 by Francis Bacon, which consists of six works on paper and two oils from private collections and foundations.

“This is possibly the most complete representation of that moment in Bacon’s career,” says Chris Stephens, the show’s curator, who adds that Picasso’s late 1920s images of figures on the beach at Dinard, northern France, prompted Bacon to give up interior design and turn to canvas.

A 1985 photocollage by David Hockney of his trolley stacked with a set of Picasso catalogues raisonnés provides new insight into the Yorkshire-born artist’s techniques and thematic concerns.

Hockney is said to have visited the Tate’s 1960 Picasso exhibition eight times, the show proving revelatory for two reasons.

“Hockney subsequently learnt that an artist does not have to adhere to a single style. In addition, he recognised cubism as marking the most fundamental shift in representation since the Renaissance,” Stephens says.

Hockney’s engagement with cubism, explosively kick-started by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, is reflected in his 1980s work, such as his set designs for the ballet “Parade”, 1916-17, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Picasso’s influence on other British modernist artists, such as Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, is explored with each figure drawing upon different aspects of Picasso’s technique and themes.

“Sutherland fused a British landscape tradition with French modernism, typified by Picasso. His post-war religious paintings consciously recalled Guernica [1937],” says Stephens.

Nicholson was drawn to Picasso’s cubist works of the late 1910s, which include hard-edged overlapping planes along with more decorative elements.

Stephens says: “The latter became a feature of Nicholson’s works with different depths of space flattened out in his work of the early 1930s.” Grant and Lewis are linked by their enthusiasm for Picasso’s early, “primitive” style based on African art.

“Grant visited Paris in around 1907 when he saw some of Picasso’s pieces in Gertrude and Leo Stein’s apartment.

He then adopted some of the characteristics of Picasso’s African-influenced style. Later, after he had met Picasso in 1912, he started making his own collages,” Stephens says.

This analysis of British artists dovetails with a strand focusing on Picasso’s growing profile in the UK, highlighting how key collectors, such as Douglas Cooper, Roland Penrose and Hugh Willoughby, acquired important works in the 1920s and 1930s.

Other key events that helped establish Picasso’s celebrity status in the UK include the 1945-46 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which juxtaposed Picasso’s 1940s pieces with works by Matisse.

Audiences were generally aghast at Picasso’s work “perhaps because they appear to have a dark side. They are tough pictures and there was an appetite for something gentler post war,” Stephens says.

The exhibition is due to travel to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (4 August-4 November). n G.H. Categories: Picasso and Modern British Art

Venue details

Tate Britain

Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, United Kingdom
+44 (0)20 7887 8888
www.tate.org.uk/britain

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