I was just chatting with my family tonight about how I'm going to try to see at Picasso's Three Musicians at MOMA when I'm in NYC next week as it's currently on display there, and now I coincidentally find out Picasso is also currently enjoying his first show at London's National Gallery. The British exhibit is called Picasso: Challenging the Past and attempts to show how the painter grappled with the work of the masters that preceded him in art history. It's a potentially great concept, but Adrian Searle has some quibbles with the show's installation especially when compared to an exhibition with a similar theme he saw in Spain a few years back:
Picasso in London is a disappointment. Given the exhibition's subtitle
- Challenging the Past - one expects to find him in yet another
head-to-head, still life-to-still life, nude-to-nude series of
confrontations. This is exactly what Paris and the Prado managed. Here,
Picasso is alone in the basement: to see his predecessors, you must
climb the stairs or take a lift, and try and keep Picasso in mind as
you go looking for Degas's La Coiffure, Ingres's Madame Moitessier, or
the odd Sabine Woman or two. Few of the paintings that mattered to
Picasso, or that really provoked him, hang in the National Gallery in
the first place; the Picassos with the strongest links to the gallery's
collection (his reworkings of Manet's Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe, for
instance) haven't come to London, either. So you end up deciding you
are in the wrong museum in the wrong country at the wrong time, stuck
here with Picasso, and that the two of you had better make the best of
it.
To me many of the paintings stand on their own nevertheless, and you can see a selection in the gallery here. I do love his take on Manet, though his portrait of Lee Miller utterly confounds me. You'll have to click through to see what I'm talking about.