PICASSO AND MODERN BRITISH ART: THE TATE BRITAIN EXHIBITION 15 FEB - 15 JULY 2012

Picasso and Modern British Art: the Tate Britain exhibition held 15 February – 15 July 2012

This is a brief summary of the free guide to the exhibition ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’ that was held at Tate Britain from 15 February to 15 July 2012.

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881: he died in 1973.

Picasso and Modern British Art

Picasso’s works were first shown in Britain in 1910, and then in 1912.  Picasso had few supporters in Britain.  Those who favoured his works were associated with the Bloomsbury Group: Roger Fry and Clive Bell were to the fore in this.

Duncan Grant (1885 – 1979) was the British artist whose work was most clearly influenced by Picasso in the period before World War One.  Grant had been in Paris before the Great War and he maintained contact with Picasso until Picasso’s death.

Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957) lived in Paris from 1902 until 1908 .  In 1914 he initiated a new art movement – Vorticism – and defined it as being a reaction against Picasso’s studio-bound inertia.  Wyndham Lewis’ ‘aggressive, cynical figures first appeared at the Leicester Galleries in London in April 1921, only weeks after Picasso’s first post-war exhibition in London’.

In the summer of 1919 Picasso resided in London with Serge Diaghilev and his Russian Ballet: he designed sets and costumes for the ballet ‘The Three Cornered Hat’ which premiered at the Alhambra, Leicester Square on 22 July.

Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982) first saw Picasso’s work in Paris in the early 1920s.  In the early 1930s he painted in a Cubist style which tended more towards Braque than Picasso, and he and Barbara Hepworth visited Picasso in Paris.  Nicholson’s works subsequently tended more towards Mondrian’s non-representational style.

Exhibitions of Picasso’s works were held in London in 1921, 1931 and 1932. 

The sculptor Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) was inspired by Picasso after about 1924.  The magazine Cahiers d’Art reproduced illustrations of Picasso’s works, and these were stimulating for Moore.  Moore’s increasing abstraction in the 1930s seems to have been influenced by Picasso.

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) stated that he abandoned interior design and took up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work in Paris in the late 1920s.  At the time that he produced his ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ in 1944, Bacon sought to destroy all his previous work.  Surviving works of Bacon from before 1944 show that he was influenced by illustrations of Picasso’s paintings of figures on a beach.  Until Bacon’s death the only 20^th Century artist he would consider was Picasso.

In 1938 Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ of 1937 was sent on tour to London, Oxford, Leeds and Manchester.  ‘It left an indelible mark on artists who saw it in Britain and in reproduction’.

Graham Sutherland (1903 – 1980) is recorded as having acknowledged his debt to ‘Guernica’: ‘by a kind of paraphrase of appearances things could be made to look more vital and real’.  Immediately before World War Two Sutherland produced works with a ‘tortured and anxious appearance’ that were based on natural objects.  Sutherland recorded bomb damage during the war and he used ‘Guernica’ as a reference point.  In his religious paintings after the war he also drew on ‘Guernica’ and on Grunewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’.  In the late 1940s Sutherland continued to be influenced by Picasso: he moved to the south of France and became acquainted with Picasso.

In the 1940s and 1950s Picasso was a controversial figure in Britain.  He had become established as a widely recognised artist but he attracted criticism as well.  In 1960 the largest retrospective exhibition of Picasso’s works to date in Britain was held at the Tate Gallery. 

David Hockney (born 1937) has long been inspired by Picasso.  He made several visits to the 1960 retrospective show at the Tate Gallery where he learned that an artist may work in more than one style.

In 1965 Roland Penrose persuaded Picasso to sell ‘The Three Dancers’ of 1925 to the Tate Gallery.  This was the first time that Picasso had sold directly to a public museum.  ‘The Three Dancers’ and ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ were regarded by Picasso as his two greatest works.