Here is a small selection from works on show in Picasso and Modern British Art. Select the OPEN links to read more about a work, and select the image to enlarge it.
about 1905
The girl in this painting has been identified as Madeleine (her surname is unknown); she appears in several other works of 1904-5. This painting marks the beginning of the transition from Picasso’s Blue to Rose period, in which, besides the change in palette, heavy impasto, strong contours and bold outlines give way to veils of painting, notable here in the rendering of the girl’s chemise.
1937
During 1937 Picasso became obsessed with the subject of the weeping woman, using it as a symbol of the grief and suffering of the Spanish Civil War. He returned to the theme several times, making a total of twenty-seven drawings and nine paintings and this oil painting is the last and most elaborate of the series. Weeping Woman had an enduring impact in Britain and featured in a series of major exhibitions.
1923
The Dutch stockbroker Frank Stoop helped establish Picasso’s profile in Britain. He acquired several works, including Seated Woman in a Chemise, and continued to collect at a time when few in Britain were interested even in Picasso’s more orthodox works. Importantly for the reception of Picasso's work in British institutions, Stoop and his wife Bertha bequeathed their collection to London’s National Gallery.
1914
Looking back later, Nicholson recalled a Cubist Picasso of around 1915 which he saw as the benchmark of quality in his own work. We do not know which painting that was, only that it had a ‘miraculous’ green. This work is typical of that late Cubist moment in Picasso’s career. It contains various elements which Nicholson would adopt at various times in the 1920s and early 1930s, in particular the interleaving planes and the use of decorative pattern independent of the picture’s subject matter.
1932
This work belongs to the sequence of portraits that Picasso made of Marie-Therese Walter. As in many of his portraits of her, Marie-Therese is shown as a series of sensuous curves, and even the scrolling arms of the chair have been heightened and exaggerated to reflect the rounded forms of her body. The face is a double, or metamorphic, image: the right side can also be seen as the face of a lover in profile.
1925
An enigmatic work that can be read as a play on a love triangle, Picasso considered The Three Dancers one of his two greatest paintings (with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). He thought it more of a ‘real painting’ than Guernica, describing it as ‘a painting in itself, without outside considerations’. This landmark painting was acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1965 and was the first work to be sold directly by the artist to a museum.
about 1944
Despite the religious associations of the title, Bacon referred to the figures in this triptych as the Eumenides, the Greek Furies. The panels exemplify the wide range of sources that Bacon drew upon, but the strange, anthropomorphic shapes recall the biomorphic figures that appeared in Picasso’s work of the late 1920s and 1930s. Bacon may have seen these works illustrated in publications such as Cahiers d’Art.
1984
Recalling his observation of the contrast between Picasso’s painted portrait of Marie-Thérèse’s mother, Mémé, and the photograph in which she seemed to have removed her heavy glasses, Hockney made a pair of portraits of his friend Christopher Isherwood. In one, the author appears with his glasses on; in this one, he is shown without. Hockney’s adoption of Picasso’s late-1930s style is a deliberate signal of allegiance.
about 1913
Duncan Grant recollected seeing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the artist’s studio and the central figure from this painting is echoed in Grant’s The Tub. Grant’s incorporation of Picasso’s art nègre style is shown in this painting of a female nude (probably Vanessa Bell) taking her bath. Her frontal pose, with her hands held above her head, also recalls that of Picasso’s Nude with Raised Arms whose distorted physical features she shares.
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