Dazzling and sex-fuelled: Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy reviewed

Picasso collected papers. Not just sheets of the exotic handmade stuff — though he admitted being seduced by them — but any scrap that could inspire, support or become part of an image. He jettisoned muses like there were endless tomorrows but clung on to Métro tickets, postcards, restaurant bills, bottle labels. When the thrill of a muse was gone her creative possibilities were exhausted, but you never knew, with synthetic cubism, when that old Métro ticket might come in handy.

In a garret he would have had a hoarding problem. ‘Picasso throws nothing away,’ reported one lover. There was no filing system: a photograph in the exhibition shows a bulldog-clipped bunch of correspondence hanging from the ceiling at rue des Grands-Augustins. After his heirs were left to pick over the hoard, they dumped it on the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the principal lender to this Picasso and Paper exhibition at the Royal Academy; given the run of the Academy’s main galleries, the show barely scratches the collection’s surface.

The result is a delicious taster menu consisting mainly of hors d’oeuvres and amuse-gueules — if you had a bellyful of plats principaux in Tate Modern’s Picasso 1932, then this one’s for you.