Past imperfect

Picasso: Challenging the Past
National Gallery, until 7 June

Room 3 offers a mixture of things: an early head in the flickering flame-like style of El Greco, a much later painting of the artist as a Musketeer (he’d been reading Dumas), and an exceptionally mocking portrait of Jaime Sabartes, Picasso’s right-hand man, portrayed here as a Spanish nobleman with rosebud lips and shattered spectacles. The next room you come to is confusingly called Room 6, so the visitor is presumably intended to cross this large space with eyes shut in order to dive into Rooms 4 and 5, containing more models and muses and a group of still-life paintings respectively. In 4, there’s a key Blue Period portrait, ‘Girl in a Chemise’ (c.1905), frail and interesting, very different from the bird-of-prey rapacity of the prostitute in ‘The Absinthe Drinker’ (1901), but the room is dominated by the restrained realism of ‘Portrait of Olga’ (1923), Picasso’s then wife, which makes reference to Ingres. The still-life paintings are a lovely group, showing the early influence of Cézanne and Picasso’s gift for the memento mori.

In the last room are several of his variations on well-known paintings. This should be the heart of the show, but to me it rings oddly hollow. There’s a terrible sense of aridity here, not the human richness I’d hoped for. As an astute commentator once wrote: ‘Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.’ How true is either proposition nowadays? Will Picasso’s magisterial distortions still beguile some and alienate others? Has the pulling power of the old magician diminished? He said: ‘I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.’ But has his time passed? I wonder how many people who don’t usually look at art or visit the National Gallery will take a trip to Trafalgar Square on the strength of this exhibition.