The Picasso effect

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) cast a very long shadow over the 20th century, not least in England. Although he did not visit this country often, he apparently had a high regard for it, despite his somewhat sketchy knowledge of its contemporary painters. He once complained, ‘Why, when I ask about modern artists in England, am I always told about Duncan Grant?’ This remark is usually taken as a slight to Grant, though the two knew each other and maintained friendly relations. In Tate Britain’s exhibition Picasso and Modern British Art (until 15 July) Grant is triumphantly vindicated — one of the show’s pleasant surprises — and we are reminded that he was indeed an artist of considerable stature before he subsided into the late long years of whimsical decoration.

Grant is one of the featured English artists along with Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. Each of the British contingent is allotted a room, while Picasso’s work is hung among and between them, like a thread through the maze or a touchpaper leading to explosions of various magnitudes. It’s a large exhibition of over 150 works, of which more than a third are by Picasso, yet it doesn’t feel too big. The organisers have tried to gather works by Picasso that were once (or still are) in British collections, and so might have been familiar to our artists, though I suspect that more were known through reproductions in the leading French art magazines. But however his influence was disseminated, it was soon recognised in all quarters.

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The exhibition opens with examples of Picasso’s early work (Blue and Rose periods and a couple of Cubist things) and then moves on to Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis, who doesn’t fare particularly well, though there’s a lovely watercolour drawing, ‘Archimedes Reconnoitring the Fleet’, 1922.