How Britain fell for Picasso

Senior features writer

Saturday 28 July 2012

It is proof what an artistic backwater the UK was in the first half of the 20th century that Pablo Picasso visited only twice: in the summer of 1919, when he acted as set and costume designer to Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, and in November 1950 when he attended the Second World Congress Of The Defenders Of Peace, a conference in Sheffield organised by the Communist Party.

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Barry Didcock

In 1919 he went to lunch parties and soirees in theatreland and probably visited a few galleries. Sadly history doesn't record which artists caught his eye. We do know he toured the East End and had a suit made in Savile Row. A picture exists of him wearing it, complete with bowler hat. In 1950 he refused to attend the opening of a concurrent touring exhibition of his work in protest at the Labour government's intimidation of his fellow conference-goers, particularly the 51 Communists who had accompanied him from France but who were denied entrance to the country. He was, perhaps, also mindful of the broadside issued against him a year earlier by the outgoing president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings. In a speech broadcast live on radio, Munnings attacked Modernism in general and Picasso in particular for "corrupting" art. Legend has it Munnings was drunk at the time.

With just two visits 30 years apart, it's fair to say Picasso in Britain isn't much of a subject. There's a great deal more to the story of Picasso and Britain, though, and in Picasso And Modern British Art, which opens in Edinburgh next week after a five-month run in London, some of the country's most august curatorial minds do their best to tell it.Running chronologically through the greater part of the 20th century, and pitching scores of works by Picasso into the mix alongside painting and sculpture by artists such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Ben Nicholson and David Hockney, the exhibition shows the effect the Spaniard's gravitational pull came to have on these shores. Most British artists were energised by Picasso's art. A few, such as Wyndham Lewis, admired him but saw him as a negative influence and reacted against him. The Establishment, of course, hated him. But everyone had an opinion.This isn't just a story about British artists, either. British collectors and taste-makers are equally important, from Picasso's great champions Roger Fry and Roland Penrose to the unheralded Michael Sadler, principal of the resolutely red-brick Leeds University and owner of 1904's The Frugal Meal, the first work by Picasso to enter a public collection in Britain.It's also an exhibition about exhibitions. It's a fact we often overlook in an age when a smartphone app can deliver every aspect of Picasso's oeuvre into the palm of our hands, but there was a time when the only way to experience his paintings in close-up was to stand in front of them. Easier said than done in times of war, say, or if it was your lot to have been born at the wrong end of the country from the avant-garde London galleries that initially championed him. So the blockbuster exhibition, as we know it today, has long been a means of inspiration to young artists seeking what the critic Christopher Green calls "artistic father figures" who can guide them until they can shake off "the anxiety of influence".Green writes those words in the exhibition catalogue and with reference to Henry Moore, who scoured Parisian periodicals like Cahiers d'Art for Picasso reproductions in the 1920s and who finally met the artist in 1937 when he was at work on Guernica. But they're equally applicable to David Hockney, who in 1960 visited Picasso's epoch-making Tate retrospective at least eight times while a student in London. Picasso has had a deep and abiding influence on him ever since and included in this show are works like 1982's Cubist-inspired "joiner" Still-Life Blue Guitar, made up of 63 Polaroid photographs, and Artist And Model, a 1973 drawing showing a crop-haired Picasso in trademark Breton top sitting opposite a naked Hockney.Elsewhere in the catalogue, noted Picasso biographer John Richardson says Lucien Freud "worshipped" the artist and was energised as a teenager by having seen his work displayed at Paul Rosenberg and Jacques Helft's Bruton Street gallery in one of two shows they mounted there in 1937. And, we learn, it was in front of a Picasso work in Rosenberg's Paris gallery a decade earlier that a young Francis Bacon decided to become a painter. (It isn't noted here, but it's a worthwhile aside: when the touring Picasso-Matisse exhibition arrived in Glasgow in 1946 it had a similar effect on 16-year-old William Crozier, later a painter and friend of Bacon's.) Picasso, then, is the prism through which many of the big beasts of 20th-century British art must be viewed. Of course as a 21st-century blockbuster exhibition, Picasso And Modern British Art is also a chance to gawp at a hundred or so paintings that would bring eight-figure price-tags on the art market, from 1901's A Child With A Dove to later works such as Women Of Algiers and Las Meninas, both painted in the late 1950s.Eight paintings aren't making the trip north, but they've been replaced by five others as well as an additional section comprising watercolours, photos and books featuring original frontispiece drawings by the artist. Adding to the existing section on Aviemore-born Duncan Grant, who first met Picasso in Paris in 1912 and stayed in touch with him for decades afterwards, there's a selection of works by Scots Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.Pride of place, however, goes to Picasso's 1925 work The Three Dancers, considered by him to be one of his two greatest paintings alongside 1907's Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon. Fittingly, it closed the show during its London run and will do the same in Edinburgh. Bought by the Tate in 1965 in a deal negotiated by Roland Penrose it was the first time the Spaniard had sold directly to a museum and is taken as proof of the esteem in which he held British art and British art institutions by the end of his life.Britain, by this point, had "got" Picasso, too – even The Daily Mail, which ran a cartoon in July 1960 showing a man and a woman leaving the Tate exhibition looking like a Cubist representation of a City gent and his wife. "I must say," runs the caption, "his stuff seems to grow on one."Picasso And Modern British Art opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, August 4-November 4.

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How Britain fell for Picasso

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