Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne.
In honour of that history, next year Tate Britain and the English National Ballet will collaborate on a Picasso exhibition, examining his influence on British artists and his relationship with the British public. Judging by the preview, which was held this morning in the studio Picasso used on Floral Street in Covent Garden, the show merits a visit. It will follow the form of the Tate’s wildly successful Turner and the Masters exhibition, where Turners hung next to Titians for the viewer to compare and contrast. Picasso will share space with works by David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis and Graham Sutherland. The curators intend to revive the fallen idols like Grant and Sutherland, as much as to venerate the luminaries.
The exhibition will depict how the British artistic establishment came to revere Picasso, a change visible in various biographies, letter collections and newspaper archives from 1900 to the present day.
Penrose’s biography, published in 1958, was the culmination of a 30 year crusade championing Picasso before a sceptical public and a reactionary artistic elite. Picasso was a controversial figure in Britain until that period. His paitings apparently sold so poorly in this country in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s that dealers said, “The British are not ready for Picasso”. And, of course, the British artistic avant garde suffered the same frustrations by dint of association. In 1949, for instance, outgoing Royal Academy President Sir Alfred Munnings told guests at the academy’s annual dinner (which was broadcast live on the BBC Home Service) that there was then a “foolish interruption in art, helped by foolish men.” He then said:
“…on my left I have our newly elected member of the Academy, Mr Winston Churchill, and I know that he is beside me because once he said to me, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his something, something?” And I said, “Yes sir! Yes, I would!”
The struggle against intransigence had begun well before Penrose, well before the first world war in fact. The first and second volumes of John Richardson’s biography of Picasso explain how members of the Bloomsbury Group extolled Picasso from the early 1900s, after learning of him through the patronage of American-author-in-Paris, Gertrude Stein. Artist and critic Roger Fry included Picasso’s work in both of his famous Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, which were held in London in 1910 and 1912. Picasso dominated exhibits at the latter show.
Picasso was then adopted by members of the group when he arrived in London with the Ballet Russes. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s correspondence recalls how the painter and curator Clive Bell took Picasso shopping in Savile Row to dress the dishevelled continental as an English gentleman; Picasso was said to favour the English bowler hat above all hats thereafter. There are photographs of Picasso transformed into an interwar dandy and they will appear in the Tate’s exhibition.
The Bloomsbury Group’s self-indulgent fascination with Picasso perhaps explains conservative artists’ antipathy towards him. Evelyn Waugh, for example, spread his contempt for “self-conscious Clive Bell” to Picasso. He wrote to Nancy Mitford after having seen the Picasso exhibition that showed at the V&A in 1945-6. Waugh, on fine form, wrote:
‘Darling Nancy,
Death is not certain; blindness and baldness are. Still it will save you from seeing Picasso…Picasso is the head of the counter-hons. I went to his disgusting exhibition to make
sure…Try not to die: it is the strong ones who go under earliest. Love, Evelyn. Death to Picasso head of the Counter Hons.’
He also wrote a formal letter to The Times, comparing Picasso’s art to the singing of a saloon crooner. He kept up this determined savagery until his death.
Eventually, though, the Waughs and the Munnings of the world were vanquished or lapsed out of fashion. In 1960, the Tate staged an enormous Picasso retrospective. Picasso’s eminence was such that the Duke of Edinburgh opened the show. Even The Listener, the Reithean BBC’s newspaper of record, proudly observed that Picasso’s paintings attracted ‘crowds that used to be associated with Chaplin films’. Those paintings will certainly do so again.
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