Poetic spirit

Here are two exhibitions which remind us of the richness of art, the many approaches and lines of inquiry which became available to the artist in the 20th century. Picasso, that protean genius, managed to encapsulate most of these revolutionary developments in one career and one gargantuan personality. Aubrey Williams, no slacker or shrinking violet himself, was a founder member of the Caribbean Artists Movement in the London of the 1960s, and a painter best known for his lyrical abstractions. To move from one show to the other is to experience not just a range of formal interests and preoccupations, but an emotional gamut, too. If Picasso seems to be the consummate conjuror, distracting his audience with tricks of dazzling virtuosity, Williams goes for the aesthetic jugular, attempting to find a pictorial equivalent for (or at least express his response to) the music of Shostakovich. Which painter moves you more may not be a simple matter of artistic ranking so much as the result of a temperamental alliance or sympathy vote.

Helly Nahmad is a commercial dealer who manages regularly to mount exhibitions which would grace any museum. His latest tour de force concentrates on the six-year period (1955–61) when Picasso lived in the Art Nouveau villa La Californie with a view of the sea at Cannes. It was here that he responded to the death of his old comrade and sparring partner Matisse (in 1954), and produced as a result a group of paintings which pay tribute to his friend’s palette and subjects. Picasso claimed ‘he left his odalisques to me as a legacy’, an assertion that can best be tested by examining the versions here of Delacroix’s ‘Femmes d’Algers’, in which he takes on not only Matisse but also art history.