Picasso '32:Everything we love is about to die.

"Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we shall never forget it" - Michel Leiris.

Judging by his own quote, "the work that one does is a way of keeping a diary" it seems quite likely that Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, to give him his full name, would've felt some recognition on hearing the words of the French surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris that are stencilled above the door as you depart Tate Modern's Picasso 1932:Love, Fame, Tragedy exhibition.

Certainly we can see there was something driving the man almost universally regarded as the twentieth century's greatest artist, something pushing him forward. In 1932 Picasso was already extraordinarily wealthy, world famous, and highly regarded. He could have, in the year of his 51st birthday, taken his foot off the gas a bit. Instead he had such a productive year, even by his standards a 'year of wonders', that Tate Modern have decided to devote an entire show to it. Quite an expensive one, for sure, but it's Picasso. People will flock. They always do.

Picasso is so prolific, and so popular, there seems to be an almost endless amount of ways his works can be exhibited. Back in the early days of Tate Modern there was a retrospective devoted to his relationship with Henri Matisse and in 2016 the National Portrait Gallery focused, understandably bearing in mind that gallery's name, on his portraiture. This was certainly the first show I'd seen dedicated to one specific year in any artist's life but they'd chose the correct artist to do it with. If you're a relative newcomer to his work this approach may prove frustrating, it'd be educational to see how he arrived at this style, but if you're a confirmed fan already, such as I, there's a lot here for you.

Some absolutely wonderful stuff alongside the odd piece that's probably only of canonical interest. My very favourite thing in the whole show, and it was a close call, is Girl Before a Mirror. It's one of many of Picasso's much younger 'mistress', Marie-Therese Walter who, in 1932, was in the process of replacing the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khoklova in the artists's affection. There was, of course, some overlap. With Picasso there always was. He faded his women in and out like a DJ putting together a seamless mix. You'd think that'd affect his reputation but seemingly not. 

Girl Before a Mirror (1932)

Maybe the gifts he left us were too good for even his regular infidelity to sully his name. Certainly, Girl Before a Mirror is an absolute joy. The stripes, the bold use of colours, the almost Arabic motifs, it's as it he's managed to combine his own trademark, ever evolving, style with that of contemporaries like Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt while at the same time looking back to medieval statuary and Islamic sculpture.

Picasso gets a lot of credit for being ahead of his time, or setting the agenda, but as much as one eye looked out towards the broad horizon he always seemed to keep another looking back. The Sculptor has echoes of ancient Roman and Greek statues yet they're combined with ultra modern techniques, brilliant pinks, soft yellows and greens, and a drip of blood red in the lower right of the canvas that gives an otherwise sumptuous image a more visceral quality.

The Sculptor (1931)

Seated Woman by a Window (1932)

Despite his fame, despite his renown, and despite his wealth Picasso was beginning to be seen by many critics, a full lustrum before Guernica, as something of a yesterday's man. His chauffer driven cars and tailored suits not so much signs of success as indicators that he'd lost touch. The lowly Spanish migrant had become almost aristocratic and aristocrats do not great artists make.

The ambitious paintings he made at the time, and are on show at the Tate, were intended as much to silence his detractors as they were to quench his artistic thirst and, quite possibly, distract him from his marital woes. As the decade developed, of course, far bigger concerns would visit both Picasso and the world. If it's a coincidence that this show is being hosted at a time when the far right are raising their ugly heads above the parapet once again then it's a very timely one, a very necessary one.

The curators allow themselves to bend the rules a few times. There are works from late 1931 and from early 1933 and due to the fact that Picasso himself, handily, curated a retrospective of his works at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris that year they've even managed to sneak in a work of two from his cubist and blue periods. They juxtapose wonderfully, now as they must surely have done at the time, with his then current paintings and they also give us an indication of the road Picasso had travelled to get to this point.

Woman in a Red Armchair (1931)

Woman with Dagger (1931)

Woman with Dagger is described as "a surrealist nightmare of a woman killing her sexual rival" and although Picasso often equates sex with death and violence we'd be making a category error if we were to don cod-Freudian fedoras and deem Picasso to see violence and sex as the same thing. It seems more likely that Picasso saw sex in just about everything. If he could see sex in a chair or a rock why would he not see it in a dagger?

Often his portraits of nudes are as tender as they are eroticised. The Reading paintings show sensual portraits of strong, independent looking women even if the Woman in a Red Armchair series goes so far into abstraction there's a danger of objectification. In one example the 'woman' is simply a selection of geometrically diverse rocks and boulders. Works like these blur the lines between his paintings and his sculptures and help us to understand one of the less celebrated aspects of Picasso's work. We tend to think of him as a painter, not a sculptor.  

Head of a Woman (1932)

Figures by the Sea I (1932)

Reading (1932)

The Yellow Belt (1932)

Reading (1932)

Woman in a Red Armchair (1932)

Other works toy with the idea of the childlike, the naive. Fruit Bowl and Guitar, despite its muted tones, has an innocence you won't find in some of Picasso's darker output and The Yellow Belt looks like something from some award winning Czechoslovakian cartoon that children waiting for The Magic Roundabout or Ludwig would be fobbed off with in the seventies. Either that or some cad doing a piss take of Picasso. It's hard to believe it's by the artist himself even if the sitter appears to be posed against the same red leather backed chair that crops up time and time again in this exhibition.

Fruit Bowl and Guitar (1932)

Sleep (1932)

This chair, and Picasso's studio in which it was situated, was the ground zero for a kind of relaunching of his career. He'd been stung by the fact that his older works were selling for huge sums and he was desperate to show he still had it. Many of the portraits he made at the time showed women asleep or at rest yet of course sex and sexuality imbued and informed them. Ecstasy and hysteria combined as easily as beauty and terror or abandon and agony.

Blatantly, and oft-remarked upon, we can see Marie-Theresa's upper head forming the shape of a semi-tumescent, and conveniently, pink penis at the same time as the gap in her cupped hands suggest an open, welcoming, vagina. The disrobed left boob may draw you in but soon your attention is diverted to considerably more carnal concerns. He was a horny old bastard, that Pablo Picasso - but he was never called an asshole.

Rest (1932)

The Dream (1932)

Marie-Therese (1932)

Still Life with Tulips (1932)

He was called quite a lot of things though. Chief among them, it seems, being genius. But you could also call him a workaholic judging by the sheer amount of work he produced in just one year. Some of it utilised deep blues and greens to add a kind of sensual delight to his renderings of vases, flowers, and, as ever, naked ladies.

In June 1930 Picasso has bought an 18c chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, which, despite its lack of plumbing or heating, became a hangout for friends and family or a place for trysts with Marie-Theresa behind the back of those same friends and family and, most importantly, his wife Olga. A second floor room afforded views over to the nearby village of Gisors and to look at Picasso's strangely guileless vistas, one even has a rainbow, is to assess that his time there was both peaceful and fulfilled offering him both emotional sustenance, sexual satisfaction, and a relief from the very real worries of the world that were gathering around him and everybody else.

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932)

Bust, Bowl, and Palette (1932)

Boisgeloup (1932)

Boisgeloup (1932)

Marie-Therese Walter (1932)

To give a sense of the development of his art in this period the curators have, when possible, included not just the year or month the painting was made but the exact day or at least, if the painting took longer than a day, the day of its completion. They've also hung some Brassai photographs of the goings on at Boisgeloup to give us a feel for the time and the area.

These are all well and good but it's the paintings themselves that steer the boldest narrative path through both the year and the exhibition. Some felt Picasso's work was getting too dark and others such as his dealer Paul Rosenberg felt he was beginning to show too much, or at least the wrong kind of, flesh. "No, I refuse to have any arse-holes in my gallery" he remarked at the time. Luckily, the Tate did not operate that policy or I may have been turned away at the door.

Woman Lying in the Sun on the Beach (1932)

Girl in a Chemise (c.1905)

The aforementioned retrospective, a very rare event for a living artist at that time, came to Paris in June of 1932 after Picasso had declined offers from MoMA in New York and the Venice Biennale and Picasso, having seen Matisse in a similar position cede too much power to his dealers, was determined to oversee the hang and curation of the show himself. He took full control but kept his tongue firmly in his cheek. When he was asked how he'd curate the show he replied "badly".

It was a funny line but an untrue one. As if to show that his latest works were every bit the equal of his earlier paintings he hung them non-chronologically and undated. Gorgeous reflective pieces like the blue period's Girl in a Chemise stood shoulder to shoulder with textbook cubism like Seated Nude, broadly surrealist pieces like Three Dancers, a clear and loving portrait of Olga, and the riots of colour and nudity that were taking up the bulk of his time in 1932. Whilst this undoubtedly worked in his favour the inclusion of so many paintings of Marie-Therese helped the public to wise up to what was going on his love life. We all know someone who talks about another person just a little bit too much. It's a real giveaway!

Seated Nude (1909)



Olga in an Armchair (1917)

The Three Dancers (1925)

The Galeries Georges Petit had been founded in 1881 and had previously hosted exhibitions by artists as revered as Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix but it was the chance to emulate, or compete with, his great frenemy Matisse, as well as to try to mitigate the affects of the Great Depression on the thirties art market, that drove Picasso to agree to do this show. 

There was competition in the city at the time because Edouard Manet, nearly fifty years dead at the time, was having a major retrospective over at the Musee de l'Orangerie. Picasso had remarked, slightly cryptically on the back of an envelope, "when I see Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe I think about the pain to come". As Picasso's retrospective moved on to the Kunsthaus Zurich, elsewhere Europe was falling into the hands of demagogues and fascists. Hitler was less than two years away from becoming the fuhrer of Germany, Franco four from being the Spanish caudillo, while Mussolini was already a full decade into the leadership of Italy, the world's first fascist regime and one that would inspire, and aid, both Hitler and Franco in their authoritarian, and deadly, rule.

Reclining Nude (1932)

Femme Nue Coche (1932)

Flute Player and Seated Nude (1932)

Picasso didn't attend the opening of his own retrospective, he went to the cinema instead, and despite positive critical notices it did little to create an economic upturn in the art world of the day. Many of the collectors who attended the opening were soon to lose their fortunes as the decade became first economically, and then socially, ever more turbulent.

As the demagogues milked that turbulence, even chucking wood on an already raging bonfire of discontent and perceived injustices, Picasso seems to have developed a faster, more urgent, style as if in need to document how rapidly times were changing, just how much shit was about to hit the fan.

To give us a feel for this the curators have included a couple of rooms of drawings and smaller genre paintings that if they're far from the best, or the most popular, in the show are nevertheless both instructive and useful in telling the full story of what this most restless of artists was doing throughout this twelve month period.

There's a smattering of charcoal drawings, Femme Nue Coche (above) being my favourite, that are intended not as preparatory sketches but as finished works in their own right, there are a few beach scenes inspired by Marie-Therese's prowess as a swimmer (PP himself couldn't swim despite being born in the coastal city of Malaga), some crucifixions inspired by Matthias Grunewald's 16c Isenheim Altarpiece which was, and still is now, on show in Alsace, and, best of all, there are lots of satyric looking flautists who appear to be wooing unclothed women in the hope, promise even, of a night of athletic sexual abandon. Phwoar!

Flute Player and Seated Nude (1932)

Crucifixion (1932)

When the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung saw Picasso's work he came to the conclusion that Picasso was schizophrenic because his "pictures immediately reveal their alienation from feeling" which seems a bit harsh but I guess psychoanalysts gonna psychoanalyse innit?

I'd also say that the author of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which came out in '33 so perhaps Jung was partly inspired by Picasso and his own 'scathing' indictment of his work in the writing of it, called that one wrong. Picasso's work is full of feeling, overloaded with emotion at times. Those feelings may be conflicted, those emotions may often contradict each other several times in one painting, but to suggest they lack feeling seems a very odd position to take, at least from the perspective of somebody looking back from 2018.

As politics got darker so did Picasso's work. His paintings were no longer waving but drowning. His sitters, like mother Europe herself, were looking to be rescued before they submerged under the salty brine forever or were smashed remorselessly against the rocks of a continent cracking up under its self-made problems.

Sleeping Nude with Blonde Hair (1932)

The Rescue (1932)

The Rescue (1932)

For Picasso himself salvation arrived hand-in-hand with heartbreak when he split with Olga, had a daughter, Maya, with Marie-Therese, and moved to the south of France. Despite now being with his new love he still described the upheaval as the worst period of his life.

For Europe however the damage had only just begun. Soon the Spanish Civil War would see hundreds of thousands die in a curtain raiser for World War II, the deadliest military conflict in all history that cost sixty million lives and still haunts our political landscape to this day. A conflict that humanity can never truly recover from but one, it seems, where the lessons learnt are starting to be forgotten as, once again, we see disrupters, nativists, and authoritarian right wing xenophobes rise to the top, this time unburdened by even the notion that their lies have to be consistent.

Despite living in Paris during the Nazi occupation Picasso is reported to have held, and expressed, firm anti-fascist beliefs. It'd be interesting to know what he'd make of the current shitstorm, it's unlikely he'd be impressed, but, with his art, Picasso has left a legacy where love always, eventually and often after a vicious struggle, wins out over hate. He called love "the greatest refreshment of life" and if we keep our love for art, our love for life, and our love for each other strong we should remain fit and healthy as the hatemongers go thirsty, their dry mouths choking on the dust of their barren beliefs.

""Essentially, there is only love. Whatever it may be" - Pablo Picasso.

The Rescue (1933)

Thanks to Shep for joining me for this exhibition, for some tasty tapas in Meson Don Felipe in The Cut afterwards, and for a lengthy debrief in the pubs of Southwark as the night rolled on. Dos mas?