By James Brewer
(Almost) all you ever wanted to know about Pablo Picasso is to behold in a new exhibition at Tate Modern. The show is billed as Theatre Picasso to celebrate his lifelong fascination with dancers, entertainers and the experimental, but offers the keys to swathes of his CV: to his genial but problematic personality, his surrealist idiosyncrasies, and his debt to African native craft. Not to mention his brutal misogyny which drove some of the women in his life to the edge.
The everything-at-once exhibition invites visitors to enter what it calls Theatre Picasso – on both sides of the footlights. The basis for the exercise is the centenary of Picasso’s enigmatic painting The Three Dancers, one of the jewels of Tate’s collection. Such a conceit reminds us that exhibition-making is itself performance.
The show brings together 50 works by perhaps the most influential figure of 20th century art, emphasising how he integrated in his practice a devotion to theatricality. It may also bring to a new pitch the controversies over the innuendos of many images.
Picasso was fascinated by the boundless capacity of performers for transformation, and he approached painting as a dramatic act. Central to this was showily constructing his public persona or what we now call brand – a mythology which portrayed him as both a creative genius and an outsider.
Leaping out here from the start, his involvement with the stage plunges into the tensions between popular culture and the avant-garde, making for a volatility which accompanied him throughout his life and shapes his legacy.
The exhibition is staged by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, with the collaboration of Lucie Rebeyrol, co-founder of the architecture and design practice Roll. They set up camp envisioning the allotted space as a theatre, a stage for arraying works by the ever-inventive Picasso from Tate’s collection and from European loans.
Conundrums beset The Three Dancers – is the dance in question the risqué Can Can or is it the Charleston? The latter references the “flapper girls,” dancers who flapped their arms and strutted like birds, and who were blamed for a supposed decline in moral standards. Or is it a representation of ballet? Picasso was involved with the Ballet Russes, the daring dance corps that integrated performance with the visual arts. With the painting unfinished, he made a trip with his ballerina wife, Olga Khokhlova, to Monte Carlo to visit the radical company. Returning to Paris, he reworked the scene into a more frenzied tempo. The tableau might have echoed a savage dance of death as in traditional medieval engravings – or the figures can be seen as approximating maenads, female followers of the Greek god Dionysus who was associated with divine possession and manic rites.
Most critics have interpreted the scene as a grieving response to the death of two close friends of Picasso who were involved in a love triangle. The Catalan painter Ramon Pichot who died in 1925 is possibly the dancer on the right, his wife Germaine Gargallo being on the left, with in the centre her boyfriend Carlos Casagemas, as something akin to a flamenco dancer. In Picasso’s youth, the heart-broken Casagemas had shot himself after failing to kill Germaine. Another theory open to debate posits that The Three Dancers is an expression of Picasso’s growing unhappiness with his wife.
Tate says the dancers evoke both joy and deep longing. “Picasso seamlessly moves between popular and formalised modern gestures, uniting high and low culture, perhaps in articulation of his own condition as a bohemian artist in Paris,” gauge the curators. “In doing so he connects a personal tragedy to an archive of longing implicit in popular forms such as flamenco, which is often associated with marginalised and diasporic communities.”
The composition of yellow, red, pink, and blacks in large format (215.3 x 142.2 cm) signalled Picasso’s departure from a neoclassical aesthetic towards a more expressive mode nearing surrealism, with disturbing, distorted depictions of the female form conveying cruel emotions. He kept the canvas of the dancers in his personal collection, and it was on show in the US before being returned to him in 1958. It has been with Tate since 1965.
Picasso was taught how to paint stage scenery by Vladimir Polunin, chief scenographer of Ballet Russes and collaborator with other companies including Sadlers Wells. In the current exhibition are included a set design sketch for the ballet Pulcinella 1920, one for Cuadro Flamenco 1921, the set of Parade for the Ballets Russes at the Empire, Leicester Square, London c 1919, and a model of the set for Parade.
Photos include Vera Petrova as Venus and Boris Lissanevitch as Apollo in Mercure by the Ballet Russes at the Princes Theatre, London, with set and costume designed by Picasso, in 1927. This is an exhibition print of Scottish photographer Alexander Stewart known as Sasha (1892-1953).
Tate has gathered quirky interludes of theatricality, such as 29 seconds of film shot by the photographer Man Ray of Picasso in a wig as Carmen vigorously puffing on a cigarette – a fun holiday movie made just after he painted the intensely serious Guernica, his 1937 masterpiece now on display at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Picasso loved spending summers on the Mediterranean, buying in 1955 a 19th century villa overlooking Cannes with views of Golfe Juan and Antibes. He loved the small beach of La Garoupe in Antibes which in 1959 inspired the great director Henri-George Clouzot to make a film of the painter at work, Le Mystère Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso. For 1 hour 18 minutes it documents Picasso in his studio creating 18 drawings and paintings, with themes as in earlier years, including the painter and his model, a sleeping female nude, still life, goat, bullfight, and a faun. At rapid pace, he reworked it all back to a beach scene, with bathers and with men and women practising water sports. The format has been interpreted as homage to the memory of Henri Matisse who died in 1954, particularly the paper cut-outs from the last decade of the life of his great friend and rival. (That seems too to explain a palpable absence in The Studio, which was painted just after the death of Matisse.)
Clouzot’s film, which is a great hit with visitors to the Tate exhibition, allows us to follow every step of Picasso’s artistic process. It is for sure a performance – the painting is “alive” because the artist shows his working behind transparent canvases and inks that penetrate the paper. This sleight of hand reveals the supremacy of his technical mastery and his frequent shifts of focus – dare one say it, if anything more so than The Three Dancers. The film’s unique perspective earned it the Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival.
In sharp contrast, nearby is a selection of “obscene” sketches made from 1968 to 1971 in theatres and brothels. In this way, performance introduces subject matter otherwise considered taboo. Architectural frameworks are used for slants and distensions that upset many. Picasso toyed with the lewd in both intimate and political ways, notably in his prints, The Dream and Lie of Franco , where he mocks Spain’s dictator. These works include images of horses in distress, something Picasso would use again in Guernica.
He changes the angle of his spotlight time and again. His portraits of his lovers and models reflect constant stylistic, volatile transformations. He had an unsettling view of those with whom he was romantically involved.
Girl in a Chemise from around 1905, which originated as an image of a boy acrobat, has been identified as a model named Madeleine who had an abortion with the approval of Picasso.
Later, when his marriage to Olga fell apart, he painted increasingly grotesque and fragmented images of her. Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Marie-Thérèse Walter (the last-named he met when she was 17) were sources of artistic inspiration but subjected to emotional manipulation, cruelty, and objectification.
In Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, he gives the impression that the bright red chair is almost part of the physical presence of Marie-Thérèse. Picasso made many paintings of Dora, but she said of them: “All of his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
He met Dora, a surrealist photographer in her own right, when she was taking photos to promote a film. She had masochistic tendencies which fascinated him, and he frequently showed her as a tormented figure as in La Femme qui pleure (Weeping Woman), which experts say was intended to refer to the suffering caused by the Spanish civil war but signified his alleged physical abuse of Maar.
Other aspects of violence excited Picasso. This was often expressed through striking imagery, with bullfighting a frequent theme – such as in the wool and silk tapestry Minotaur 1935, displayed in the UK for the first time, on loan from Musée Picasso, Antibes. His first torero painting had been at age eight after his father took him to a corrida. Bullfight Scene, 1960, from Tate’s collection is on show.
As he looked for inspiration towards the itinerant and the downtrodden, he depicted circus performers, flamenco dancers, and artist’s models. Of this genre are Horse with a Youth in Blue 1905-6 and the contorted Acrobat 1930 lent by Musée national Picasso-Paris.
A constant is the collision of opposites. His concepts of perspective and modelling were influenced by visits when young to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. Was his adaptation of non-Western, particularly African, art, cultural exploitation? He went on to sympathise with oppressed peoples, being a friend of the poet and politician Aimé Césaire from Martinique who was a founder of the Négritude movement in Paris challenging colonialism and celebrating Black identity. In 1949 Picasso contributed etchings to a book by Césaire of 10 poems, Lost Body.
How to approach the Picasso story? We can be swept along by the roller coaster of his creation of era-defining idioms, but without averting our gaze from his glaring faults.
The Tate curatorial team for the show is Rosalie Doubal, senior curator, international art (performance & participation); Natalia Sidlina, curator, international art, and Andrew de Brún, assistant curator, international art.
Theatre Picasso is presented in Tate Modern’s George Economou Gallery, in partnership with international law firm White & Case, and supported by the Huo Family Foundation. Athens-born George Economou, founder of DryShips, the TMS Group, and owner of Cardiff Marine, has an art collection that has been estimated at $250m including works by Picasso. Some of that is on display in his private museum in Athens, and he is a non-executive trustee of the Tate Foundation and one of Tate’s most generous benefactors. Interviewed in June 2025 for TradeWinds, he explained that he started buying Greek art in 1986, later broadening his portfolio with postwar and contemporary masterworks. Such is his passion for collecting that “if I’m travelling, in the last 10 or 12 years it’s been 90% for art or personal reasons, and only 10% for business,” he told the maritime publication.
Image captions:
The Three Dancers, 1925. By Pablo Picasso. Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.
Weeping Woman, 1937. Installation view of Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes).
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932. By Pablo Picasso. Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2025.
Girl in a Chemise, c 1905. By Pablo Picasso. Tate. Bequeathed by C Frank Stoop 1933. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.
Tapestry Le Minotaure, 1935, made after a work by Pablo Picasso dated 1928. Wool and silk tapestry, woven in Aubusson. Donated by Marie Cuttoli in 1950. Musée Picasso, Antibes (photo credit) © François Fernandez © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.
Woman with a Mantilla: Carmen (facsimile). From the illustrated book Le Carmen des Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, 1949, published 1964.
Vera Petrova as Venus and Boris Lissanevitch as Apollo in Mercure by the Ballet Russes at the Princes Theatre, London, with set and costume designed by Pablo Picasso. 1927. Photograph Sasha (1892-1953) (Alexander Stewart). Exhibition print.
The Studio, 1955. By Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas. Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.
Theatre Picasso is at Tate Modern until April 12, 2026.
