When Picasso was a boy wonder

Exhibitions are only as good as the loans that can be secured for them, as was seen at the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition recently. The exhibits at Burlington House were thin on the ground because in some cases promised loans were rescinded, and other items were simply not available. Whatever one thinks of that controversial figure Norman Rosenthal, for so many years exhibitions secretary at the RA, his ability to seek out and obtain loans amounted to genius, backed by two important characteristics: audacity and tenacity. When I first saw the Courtauld’s Picasso show, I immediately thought of a painting of the artist’s friend Casagemas on his deathbed, lit by a flickering candle. An intense and memorable image, it was painted in the period surveyed by this exhibition, and should, ideally, be on the walls at Somerset House. The fact that it’s not there has less to do with the wishes of the show’s curator, Dr Barnaby Wright, and more with the fact that the painting’s owner, the Picasso Museum in Paris, is currently closed and has sent its collection off on tour to raise revenue. Even the most assiduous curator can’t compete with a prior (and money-spinning) commitment of that sort.

But the painting I remembered so clearly is not really missed in this excellent exhibition, which has been so well selected that nearly every picture is a winner. I like the small concentrated shows at the Courtauld: they allow for a real sense of focus and commitment without exhausting the visitor, and the Picasso show is another of its  hits. The theme is 1901, the year the 19-year-old Picasso reached an early artistic maturity and started to sign his work with that distinctive signature. He had already visited Paris, before returning to Madrid, and it was while he was still in Spain that his close friend Carles Casagemas shot himself on 17 February.