{"id":158136,"date":"2025-09-21T00:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T00:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/158136\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T00:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T00:43:10","slug":"tate-moderns-theatre-picasso-contrived-confused-and-u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/158136\/","title":{"rendered":"Tate Modern\u2019s Theatre Picasso \u2013 contrived, confused and u…"},"content":{"rendered":"

You enter through the wings, all plywood struts and suspenseful darkness. Picasso himself makes a sudden appearance on screen. He is playing the role of Carmen in a lace mantilla, the twinkle in his eyes\u00a0exactly matched by the flare as\u00a0he lights a cigarette. What a\u00a0good\u00a0girl he makes.<\/p>\n

Round the corner, the main production is further deferred. Sixteen of his stupendous images of young lovers, pensive women and goatish old men are mounted on mesh grids like posters at I\ufeffkea. The sorrowful Girl in a Chemise, from the\u00a0end of the Blue Period, is jammed down one end with instructions to hold your phone to the QR code and learn how Picasso turned a boy into a girl, as if artists never changed their minds. But this goes to the curatorial claim that the artist was fascinated by \u201cnon-conforming bodies\u201d.<\/p>\n

Another corner and you are hit, in the darkness, by his fierce and lustful Nude Woman \ufeffWith \ufeffNecklace, from 1968, with all its graphic rhymes \u2013 nipples and eyes, jewels, naval and vulva. Picasso was\ufeff in his mid-80s when he went at this canvas, with its raw red and arsenical green palette, and had long since asserted that \u201cpainting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants\u201d. He was only performing its will\ufeff. That, at least, was one of his dramatic declarations \u2013\ufeff along with the warning that nobody could interpret his mind or\u00a0dreams through the work.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The \u2018fierce and lustful\u2019 Nude Woman With Necklace, 1968<\/p>\n

Theatre Picasso<\/a> is not a show about Picasso and theatre, heavens no \u2013 despite all the dutiful photographs of his stage sets, costume designs and paper puppets, his collaborations with Ballets Russes, even programmes for his awful play Desire Caught \ufeffBy the Tail. Nor is it about Picasso as performer, though more than an hour of Henri-Georges Clouzot\u2019s famous 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso \u2013 where \ufeffthe artist creates art in real time for the cameras\ufeff \u2013 is screened on a loop. No, it is apparently about Picasso and performativity, according to the opaque and jargon-clogged catalogue, which inevitably wants to\u00a0make \ufeffhim into our non-conforming contemporary.<\/p>\n

So it is partly concerned with presentation. A shot of Picasso\u2019s own display of his paintings propped on chairs (c\ufeff 1901) gets attention, though given the works sit below just as many mounted on\u00a0the wall,\ufeff it suggests \ufeffhe is \ufeffsimply trying to pack them in. Another of him wearing one of his \ufeffpapier-mache bull heads links straight to the constant theme of bullfighters, flamenco dancers and artists\u2019 models that runs through his art\ufeff and this show.<\/p>\n

Picasso\u2019s art muscles its way into\u00a0your mind with astonishing vigour. He does not need to be updated for a new generation<\/p>\n

For though the curators\ufeff \u2013 the artist Wu Tsang and the writer Enrique Fuenteblanca\ufeff\ufeff \u2013 may have all kinds of ideas about how to \u201cstage\u201d Picasso, they still have to show his actual works. Early \ufeffcubism, with fragments of Le Figaro intercut with bistro\ufeff table ellipses; prints of old blokes staring \u2013 like painters \u2013 at nubile \ufeffsex workers in brothels; the magnificent painting of his very young lover Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter, all arabesques and curlicues, holding her own bosomy beauty together. Two kissing profiles unite in her heart-shaped face, one glowing with\u00a0the bewitching lavender\ufeff blue of moonlight.<\/p>\n

Picasso\u2019s cruelty to women is problematic for any curator\ufeff; \ufeffwhole shows have been brilliantly devoted to this subject\ufeff as well as to his portraits, his relationship with the old masters or Matisse (in this very museum). But Theatre Picasso \ufeffswipes left in avoidance. So The Weeping Woman, from 1937, has nothing to do with Picasso, the Spanish \ufeffcivil \ufeffwar context, let alone the absolute outlandishness of the image itself, but merely the unrecognisable model: scan th\ufeffe code and you can learn \u201cSeven Things About Dora Maar\u201d.<\/p>\n

It might be argued that this muddled yet sententious presentation does not matter. And sure enough, for all the theatrical darkness, the spotlights, clattering music and surging voices, the wings, ramps and footlights, there are some perfectly conventional sections. The same old groupings occur \u2013 women, the studio, the model and the painter (as harlequin, bullfighter, minotaur). Every one of the 45 or so works, bar a tapestry, belongs\u00a0to Tate Modern (and exhibited \ufeffhere for \u00a315\ufeff); if only they were always shown together.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The sorrowful Girl in a Chemise, 1905, is \u2018jammed down one end\u2019 of the gallery with an accompanying QR code<\/p>\n

But what does matter is the way you come across a painting (or miss one altogether). \ufeffHere is a serious dilemma. The show manoeuvres you through corridors, wings and ant\ufeffechambers towards a ramp that leads down to a brightly lit gallery. This is supposed to represent the stalls. The idea is that viewers will suddenly find themselves in the audience, turn and look back at where they have come from and in so doing set eyes upon the stage, as it were, where The Three Dancers (hitherto invisible) is displayed.<\/p>\n

It is the centenary of that mysterious painting, with its trio of forever-linked figures in a raucous jostle of pink, blue and brown, the balcony behind them with its one open window. The figure on the right casts such a dark and eerie silhouette. The figure on the left has a deadly little head. It feels as if they are locked in this hectic\u00a0performance like the figures in Poussin\u2019s A Dance to the Music of Time \u2013 a terrible never-ending\u00a0roundelay.<\/p>\n

But presented like this, hidden \ufeffuntil the very end\ufeff, when you turn back and see it \u2013 or \ufeffdon\u2019t \u2013 the scene is like a jubilant, all-together-now, hands-in-the-air finale.<\/p>\n

Picasso\u2019s art muscles its way into\u00a0your mind with astonishing vigour. He does not need to be updated for a new generation. Theatre Picasso certainly shows just\u00a0how strong he looks against a black wall, but the best of this contrived and contradictory presentation, which turns out to be\u00a0surprisingly cramped, is of course\u00a0the art. Strike\u00a0the set.<\/p>\n

Theatre Picasso is at\u00a0Tate Modern, London, until\u00a012 April 2026<\/p>\n

Photographs by Succession Picasso\/DACS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You enter through the wings, all plywood struts and suspenseful darkness. Picasso himself makes a sudden appearance on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-158136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}