Past imperfect

Wednesday, 4th March 2009

Picasso: Challenging the Past
National Gallery, until 7 June

The ostensible subject of this show is Picasso’s relationship with past art, and accordingly the visitor might expect to see great works of the past hung next to Picassos for purposes of comparison. This does not occur. The exhibition contains only some 60 paintings by Picasso, some of which indeed evince references to particular Old Masters, though others don’t, apart from showing the kind of sound knowledge of art history which used to be expected of artists, before the foppish ignorance of today became fashionable.

If it’s incongruous to find a key modernist in the National Gallery, that repository of the historical, the justification for this show is presumably its relevance to the National’s permanent collection. Sadly, the Picasso pictures most closely tied to Old Masters are based on Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’, which is in the Musée d’Orsay, Velásquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ in the Prado, and Delacroix’s ‘Women of Algiers’ in the Louvre. Nothing, you see, from the National Gallery. The idea that you can just pop upstairs from the Picasso show and see his models and inspirations in the permanent collection doesn’t really work.

However, Picasso is rarely boring, so I was expecting something of a visual treat. The reality was strangely unsatisfying. There are some extraordinary paintings on show, but I wish I was more moved by them. (There was nothing of the emotion I felt on entering the great Cézanne exhibition at the Tate in 1996.) I acknowledge the formidable intelligence, the ruthless urge to create, and admire, even love, some of the earlier works, but so many leave me cold. They seem to be about distress more than celebration, heartlessness and ingenuity rather than compassion. This could, of course, be an effect of natural light deprivation. Some paintings suffer worse than others under artificial light in the NG’s basement galleries. Picasso — always more of a draughtsman than a robust or natural colourist — perhaps suffers more than anticipated. All that green in his Manet variations, for instance. It doesn’t look good. Yet another reason for not hanging exhibitions in this bunker.

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