Tate’s Theatre Picasso fluffs its lines

We all have those friends, probably from school or sixth form, whom we feel obligated to meet every six to nine months for a “catch up” but know full well it will be cursory and banal; something you should do for old time’s sake but, when the time comes, don’t really want to. Going to Tate these days feels a little like this. The trouble is, just like that old school friend, there was a time when you really did like Tate, but it’s hard to remember why. Even so, every half a year you trudge back and talk yourself into believing that this time it might be different.

I went to see the ‘Theatre Picasso’ exhibition at Tate Modern on a listless Friday afternoon: an intermedial show dedicated to Picasso and “performance”. I was two minutes early for my scheduled ticketed slot so was made to wait in a queue. Maybe the schedule was ruthlessly enforced because the show was so popular, I thought. It was opening week, after all. Maybe all the talk about Tate’s diving visitor numbers was just a sly propaganda campaign by the National Gallery, who are now parking their tanks on Tate’s forecourt by creating a new £375M wing for 20th-century painting. The exacerbated invigilator, who performs his lines for probably the thousandth time that day, warns me not to “step on or off the stage.” How thrilling and dangerous. I might get hurt. Alas, when it’s my turn to enter, I realise it’s scheduled because the exhibition is so small (just about two and a half rooms) and it’s a stretch to say there is even a stage. The curators have just turned the dimmer switch down and erected a drably functional elevated platform which separates you from the final room. Given that the subject of the show is one of the most radical set designers of the modernist period, who transformed his chaotic cubist perspectives from two to three-dimensions and threw them onto the Théâtre du Châtelet’s stage, this feels like a missed opportunity.

The thin show is comprised almost entirely of works from Tate’s collection (and so should really be on show in the permanent display for free, in a properly designated display on Picasso’s legacy or European modernism), a slow stop-motion film of Picasso’s drawings which feel painfully pedestrian as the main event, a smattering of fascinating archival photographs which are nearly impossible to see because the room is so dark, and a wall-mounted book which you’re not allowed to read. If there was anything else, I didn’t see it because the room was so full of other visitors awkwardly shuffling around, presumably loitering because they think they must have missed something.

Picasso’s first foray into set design and costumes was Parade in 1917, an avant-garde ballet produced by impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with music by Erik Satie and a scenario by Jean Cocteau, in which Picasso created massive cardboard constructions for costumes (such as giant cubist “managers”). While working on Parade, he met Olga Khokhlova, a sexy-as-hell Russian ballerina with the Ballets Russes, who is depicted (I think, at least) in the centrepiece of the Tate show, The Three Dancers. “While I was painting this picture, an old friend of mine, Ramon Pichot, died and I have always felt that it should be called The Death of Pichot rather than The Three Dancers”, Picasso reflected. Tate’s online caption for the painting, which was brought into the collection by Picasso’s friend, the surrealist collector Roland Penrose, in 1965, corroborates this view while also suggesting that the three figures represent a sordid love triangle. I have always thought it possible that there aren’t three different dancers here at all, but the same dancer in different moments of her life with the artist. I see it as a kind of “dance to the music of time” where Olga moves, in Picasso’s mind, from graceful ballerina and object of his desire to disfigured monster in marriage. Whatever way we look at it, it’s an extraordinary painting: brutal, angular, and simmering with violence and sex. Make no bones about it, Tate has an astounding collection of works by Picasso and it’s a pleasure to see them all here.

Nevertheless, a study of Picasso’s engagement with the theatre of his day has been almost entirely jettisoned for loose framings around “performance” and “performativity” by trans performer Wu Tsang and the “intersectional” writer Enrique Fuenteblanca. Looking at Picasso’s The Weeping Woman (1937), the haunting depiction of an inconsolable Dora Maar lamenting the aerial bombardment of Guernica by Hitler’s air force in the Spanish Civil War, does not make you think of performance at all. It’s raw and anguished, an elegy for a lost cause damned to fascist power. ‘Theatre Picasso’ has stripped its subject of history and fluffed up its artist with blusher. Without history, it’s an awkward through-line to make sense of the complexities of Picasso’s work in the national collection.

I love Picasso. I’ve seen dozens of his exhibitions. I don’t feel the need to endlessly moralise his life, and don’t think this is the primary role of curators. In Barcelona in 2018, I went to a show which looked at his work and kitchens. It was fantastic. A deft curator can do a successful Picasso show on pretty much any subject. Part of my trouble with ‘Theatre Picasso’ is that the idea behind it is rich and exciting and brilliant. It’s the kind of show that the Tate has been willed to put on for a decade. The problem is, from a curatorial perspective, they have tried to squash Picasso through the familiar conveyor belt of making an exhibition an “immersive experience” but without any feeling. Waldemar Januszczak for The Times has called it “Tate Modern’s best show in years”. Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian, celebrates ‘Theatre Picasso’ with five stars. I get that they are relieved Tate has returned to first principles and to one of the “three greats” of European modernism, but have they actually seen the show?

Evidently, though, I love Picasso more than the Tate because the curators seem half ashamed to be showing him in the first place. “To exhibit Picasso today is also to confront his legacy, including its contradictions”, reads one wall text. What are those contradictions? What do they have to do with the work? When the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby staged the widely panned ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023, at least she made an argument: Picasso was “Pablo-matic”, a play on the most overworked word in critical discourse today, because he was a misogynist. There isn’t even an argument posed in ‘Theatre Picasso’, just vague statements that seem designed to make you – or Tate, more likely – acknowledge guilt for an undisclosed crime. The wall text continues: “Picasso’s work draws out complex questions about borrowing from other cultures, for example, or about invention and originality. These questions in turn, give us valuable tools to think about ourselves and how we organise contemporary institutions.” While these words may well have been written by AI (what about that stray comma?), let’s assume that they were not. Questions alone don’t provide tools. It is Tate’s job to organise itself, not ours. It’s also Tate’s job to provide its visitors with real information, and to really excite them with the historical or biographical importance of their temporary exhibitions. Trite statements like “Picasso’s presence in museums around the world attests to his central role in shaping modern and contemporary art” does not do that. These are empty words which could be applied to a whole legion of artists.

Old friends should be honest. Unlike some critics, I don’t take delight in Tate’s current malaise and identity crisis or see it as the inevitable end of a cultural Blairite vision of Britain which has died with a whimper under Starmer. I want an ambitious public museum for modern art, an institution which takes its role seriously, respects its audiences, and does great things. Tate is obviously not doing that right now, despite what the critics of legacy media say. When it does, the British public will want to spend time together.