Money for Old Hope:How the Design Museum shot itself in the foot.

The Design Museum in Holland Park managed to shoot themselves in the foot not once but twice with their recent Hope to Nope:Graphics and Politics 2008-18 exhibition yet, despite that, it was still an informative, educational, and edifying experience.

If one of the museum's aims is to show how good design leads to better products and ultimately better living and better values then this particular exhibition backfired in that it showed how shoddy design, Make America Great Again caps, Vote Leave merchandise, and the like, actually had more effect on most people and therefore had managed to steer the direction of the narrative during at least the last two to three years of the decade Hope to Nope covered.

More worryingly, and perhaps a huge illustration of why the right are holding so many cards at the moment, was the back story to the show. Initially a paying exhibition the museum's management had to drop the entrance fee when several of the owners of the exhibits on display pulled them in protest at the Design Museum's decision to host a private event for Italian aerospace and 'defence' company Leonardo (breathtakingly named for the artist). This resulted in a third of the one hundred or so exhibits, including Shepard Fairey's iconic 2008 Hope poster of Barack Obama, being returned to their owners.  How ironic that an exhibition devoted to the power of protest should itself be hit so savagely by a protest! The Design Museum clearly took a hit on this but did they lose more money because of the protest than they made with the iffy Leonardo deal? We can but hope so.

Mr Bingo - People Who Voted for Brexit Who Are Now Dead tea towel (2018)

It made for a strange visit and it stood at odds with the exhibition's mission statement not to endorse any "particular point of view" but to show how "global protest moments and divisive leaders have made people more politically engaged than they have been for a generation". The pull of some of the show's keystone works certainly proves the latter point to be true but the hosting of an event for a company that produces missiles, armoured vehicles, and naval artillery (killing machines basically) certainly suggests a "particular point of view" was taken by the museum's management if not the show's curators who've been faced with the indignity of having to explain, constantly throughout this three room exhibition, exactly why so many plinths are standing empty.

It's even more a shame because the initial concept, the curation, and the execution were otherwise first class. From humorous anti-Brexit tea towels, Mr Bingo posted the idea on Instagram and he got so many likes he decided to make a real one, that reflect the referendum's generational divide in a none too delicate way to the left-wing anti austerity Spanish political party Podemos's election manifesto that, in the tradition of 'culture jamming', had been mocked up to look like an IKEA catalogue the exhibition space, despite some glaring gaps, was still full of fascinating things to take in.

Yet Brexit is (probably) happening (catastrophically, chaotically, and with much unnecessary damage to the UK) and Podemos did not replace the Christian, and conservative, People's Party as the government in Spain (although Pedro Sanchez's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party took over in June) so was it the politics that deterred people from voting for them or was it their reliance on good design?

Podemos election manifesto (2016)

I suspect it's the politics. Trump's base and the sort of people who voted for Brexit, they don't seem to me to be the kind of people who worry about design. If you've ever visited a far right website (and I do it for research for these blogs sometimes) you'll notice that design, along with spelling, grammar, punctuation, and any semblance of truth, was something, that if it was ever there in the first place, was sacrificed to the altar of blame, hate, scapegoating, and incitement to violence long ago. 

IKEA catalogues and blunt political satire on a tea towel? Those kind of things are just not going to make the same impact on the people whose votes may ultimately decide the direction of travel. But a pro-Brexit Wetherspoons beermat, a giant bus with a massive lie painted on its side, or, in America, a good ol' fashioned trucker's cap 'promising' to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN? These things speak to those that've been sold the lie by the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and Fox News that there's some sort of unholy alliance between the metropolitan liberal elite, the EU, and often desperate asylum seekers conspiring to keep them down.

The Eurosceptic owner of JD Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, has so far introduced 700,000 pro-Brexit, admittedly his version is a fairly soft Brexit, beermats to his booming chain of nearly 1,000 pubs and from June 2015 to October 2016 Trump's team invested more money in headgear (that had been designed using a standard Times New Roman font to give the illusion of being mass produced in an American factory) than they did on polling. At least the story of the Brexit bus ends on a (slightly more) positive note. Greenpeace bought it, parked it outside the House of Parliament, and started to ask some awkward questions about what Brexit would mean for the environment. As with almost everything to do with Brexit there will be no clear, or truthful, answers.

CaliFame - Make America Great Again cap (2015-?)



North - Britain stronger in Europe campaign identity (2015/16)

If these items are lacking both design chops and truth they achieved their desired result which is something you can't say for North's Remain in the EU campaign. They're not even aesthetically pleasing so it's hard to see them even swinging over an undecided voter. 

Of which there were many and this, of course, was the key battleground in the referendum. Just as much as most people would admit they couldn't understand all the complexities, the legal implications, and the nuts and bolts of Brexit many simply had a gut instinct, and we should definitely not underestimate just how much racism had to play in this, that they wanted out. They wanted to bloody the nose of David Cameron and George Osborne and all the Westminster career politicians, even if in doing so they'd empower an even more privileged, entitled, cabal of crooks and liars.

Possibly the most depressing development of all this is how little we now seem to be responsible for our own decisions. All our lives we've known that the newspapers we read, and less so the television channels we watch, both reinforce and sharpen our prejudices. But with the rise of social media, with the mistrust of the mainstream media, which both Corbynites and Trump supporters never tire of telling us is crooked and conspiratorial, and the shocking development that barefaced and unapologetic lying, even demonstrably provable bullshit, is no longer deemed shameful but can be advantageous and politically expedient, these extremes have moved so far apart that the middle struggles to hold. Boris Johnson, just this week, dog-whistled to racists and caused a spike in reported abuse of Muslim women and that, remarkably, seems to have brought him closer to, not further from, number ten.  

Cambridge Analytica data dashboard (2016)

There's a plywood wall halfway through the exhibition that follows the exponential growth of social media since 2001 when Wikipedia was launched. MySpace followed it in 2003 and three years later Facebook opened to the public. It now has two billion active users, WhatsApp has 1.5 billion, Instagram 800,000, and Twitter 330,000. Most of these (except WhatsApp which is encrypted but is owned by Facebook and is starting to charge some users so watch this space) scrape away at the data we freely provide and as we've come to realise this some holier-than-thou types are trying to live a little more off grid.

Their concerns about these unregulated behemoths, if Facebook was a country it would be the second richest in the world behind the US, are not unjustified. So far they're just using my data to flog me a mobile phone (which I don't need, I've already got one), tell me what offers Sainsbury's have on (which I see when I go to Sainsbury's anyway), sign me up to a dating website (ahem, cough), or get me to plan my own funeral (depressingly) but soon the algorithms will get better and then there'll be some genuinely scary stuff starting to happen. Hopefully the misadventures of Cambridge Analytica and their former CEO Alexander Nix (above) will provoke governments into taking action and providing a framework so this can't happen. But do you trust the current UK or US administrations on ANYTHING?

Design is Play - Trump 24K Gold-Plated poster (2016)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Magazine cover carcicature of Donald Trump (2014-?)



Fake Donald Trump TIME magazine cover

Chris Riddell - Theresa May cartoon (2017)



Chris Ridell - Brexit cartoon (2017).

Some clearly do. For every golden Trump swastika (a riff on Michael Bierut's H for Hilary logo that suggests Trump's agenda may not be dissimilar to other divisive leaders in the past) hung in San Francisco's Mission District prior to his 2016 election, for each mocked up magazine cover (spoofing Trump's own egregious photoshopping and framing of a Time magazine cover that never actually existed but nevertheless he had displayed in several of his golf clubs), and for all of Chris Riddell's typically British satirical illustrations (think Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson) of the disasters of Brexit or Theresa May's unstable government there are others, like the American street artist Sabo, who are more than happy to celebrate Trump, along with fellow travellers Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter as our saviours, bravely fighting the Galactic Empire's Death Star, represented here by a feint, sinister, Hilary Clinton in the role of Darth Vader. 

Elsewhere we can marvel, or more likely recoil, at Pepe the Frog's journey from harmless meme to icon of the alt-right (in 2017 Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, took legal action against white supremacist users of the meme and crowdfunded a new comic to relaunch Pepe as a peaceful and positive amphibian), read about (but thankfully not listen to) 'fashwave' music that's using synth pop to spread fascist views to those who might be put off by a load of skinheads screaming and shouting, and get an idea of how this impacts on people at the sharp end of these developments, those who suffer as a result of this blame culture, via Dutch author Richard Sluijs's 2014 book The Complete Lexicon of Crisis Related Suicides Vol 1 which tells the individual story, succinctly yet powerfully, of just 712 of the estimated 100,000 suicides caused by the economic crisis between 2008 and 2013. The bankers and politicians who oversaw, even enabled, this chain of events are not spared. The victims, for once, are given dignity and treated as human beings.

Sabo - Rogue Won poster (2016)

'Gay clown' Putin protest artwork (2013)

Elsewhere other populists and demagogues get it in the neck. Putin is portrayed as a 'gay clown' (there is, of course, nothing wrong with being gay, or even a clown for that matter, but Putin has at best made sure Russia hasn't moved forward on this issue as many other countries have, and at worse has overseen a terrifying rise in homophobic assaults and anti-gay legislation), there are photos of anti-corruption protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbuil's Taksim Square and against Jacob Zuma's greed, cronyism, and lust to hang on to power regardless in South Africa, and there's a catchily titled Satirical painting by Song Byeok, a state propaganda artist who escaped North Korea after famine killed his parents and his sister and, once safely in South Korea, produced a series of works that mocked his former output. For 'balance' it's been hung alongside North Korean paintings of cultural and industrial 'progress' that look, for all the world, like they belong in Stalin's time. There's even an ISIS flag. Well, a photo of one. Perhaps an actual one was too much even for the Design Museum! You don't want to upset those Italian arms dealers.

Murat Germen - Taksim square protest (2013)



Francois F Swanepoel - Protest against President Jacob Zuma (2017)



Song Byeok - Satirical painting (2013)

While the Rogue Won poster, the ISIS flag, and the rise of the alt-right are both depressing and terrifying the story of the fightback, those who deposed Zuma and Mugabe, those who tried to depose Erdogan, and those who escaped their own certain death under the Supreme Leaders of North Korea give us hope. For there is as much, in fact more, countering negativity in this show than there is negativity. Thankfully.

Women's march placards remind us of that glorious day in January 2017 when women, and men, marched in anger at Trump's pussy grabbing boasts, sexism, and partriarchal policies (and were asked some awkward questions about 'pussies' by the kids they'd brought along). These marches saw upwards of 4,500,000 in over 900 cities rejecting authoritarian rule and division and rejecting it loudly and joyfully.

 

Women's March placard (2017)



Women's march placard (2017)

Elsewhere there are Green for Grenfell memorial and Unity Heart Ribbon pin badges (and a Three Billboards Outside Grenfell, er, billboard that riffs on Martin McDonagh's controversial recent film) made in honour of the diverse community that lived, and, in the case of 72 of them, died in the most deadly British fire since Piper Alpha in 1988, in that tower block but also to celebrate the unity of the equally diverse community that came out to help, support, and rescue survivors, there's a video of Mike Monteiro's How to Fight Fascism talk (in which Mike decrees "the world is a mess. A certain set of people designed it to be a mess. Now we need a different set of people to design our way out of it. Fascism is knocking on our front door. This is how we knock back), and a monument made to celebrate Kosovan independence from Serbia. Unveiled in Pristina on the first day of Kosovo's independence it is now repainted annually with the flags of countries that recognise Kosovo's independence.

There's space devoted to movements, both centralised and nebulous, like Black Lives Matter, #metoo, the Arab Spring, Momentum, and the Chega de Pagar o Pato (I Will Not Pay the Duck) protests that took part in Brazil in 2015 and 2016. 'Paying the duck' is a Brazilian term meaning 'to take the blame for something that is not your fault' and the Sao Paulo State Federation of Industries commissioned this huge inflatable duck, you'd need a big bath to get in with that quacker, in protest against government corruption and tax rises and it became the emblem of the movement that eventually saw President Dilma Roussett impeached and removed from office. It even rocked up at the Rio carnival. Ducks just wanna have fun.

Faisal Metalel, Omar Benyermak, and others - Green for Grenfell memorial and Unity Heart Ribbon pin badges (2017-?)

Fisnik Ismaili and Ogilvy Kosova - NEWBORN monument (2008-?)

Chega de Pagar o Pato (I Will Not Pay the Duck) protests (2015/16)

Anonymous mask (2008-?)

The show ends with the All-Seeing Trump in which the 'misfortune' telling machine makes idle threats and promises a 'terrific nuclear war'. There's a warning sign next to it advising that some of the views expressed may offend but, in truth, none of them are as awful as the ones that regularly spout unregulated from the cat's arse shaped mouth of Trump himself. That's the really worrying thing.

Despite the caveats that follow it'd been a great show, I'd learnt a lot and hopefully conveyed some of that in this piece - and I've not even had room to digress upon other avenues the show took me down (the Brixton pound currency which celebrates local culture and local heroes like David Bowie, the ubiquitous and slightly irritating Anonymous masks, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury book, global warming posters, Je Suis Charlie, Venezuelan protest shields, and the Swiss referendum on expelling foreign criminals. The Swiss have four referenda per annum and in this case 58.9% of voters opted against the motion put forward by the right wing Swiss People's Party).

Applause for the curators, Alice Black and Deyan Sudjic, for putting together such a good show, one that was both pertinent and necessary, but a big fat raspberry and an angry placard waved in front of the museum's management for undermining them in an attempt to line their pockets with cash from the military-industrial complex. A hyprocrisy worthy of the bullshitter-in-chief himself.

Andy Dao, Nathaniel Lawler, Jon Barco, Bryan Denman, and Anthony Atamanuik - All-Seeing Trump machine (2016)

The Beuys with the thorn in his side.

"Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression" - Joseph Beuys.

Woah, steady on old boy (or old Beuys, okay that's that joke done twice now, I'll knock it on the head). What about music? What about friendship? What about telling stories? What about love? There are lots of ways of freeing, or trying to free, humankind from repression, even ALL the repressions.

Art definitely is one though. Creative endeavours are one of the things that lift us above most animals. Even things like the invention of refrigeration, darts, and the chip butty involve a level of creation that would be beyond a dog, cat, fox, or your average terrestrial mollusc but is Joseph Beuys, the fedora clad art theorist and pedagogue of North Rhine-Westphalia, the kind of artist who frees us?

Filzanzug (Felt Suit) (1970)

It's difficult to say if your only evidence is a visit to Beuys' Utopia at the Stag Monuments in Mayfair's Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac where, spread out over two floors and several rooms, you can find a selection of Beuys silkscreens, pencil drawings, aggregated sculptures, and assorted readymades dating from 1948 to 1986, the year of his death.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac proudly announce, on the free pamphlet you can pick up at the desk on arrival, that this is "the most important UK exhibition of Beuys' work in over a decade" and that may well be the case but for somebody dipping a toe into the deep waters of his oeuvre it's all rather confusing. I felt like should've attended a crash course in Fluxus and 'happening' before I rocked up.

Of course there are things that even dilettantes such as myself will already know about Joseph Beuys. His installation has long been one of Tate Modern's most immediately eye catching, there's that time he spent three lots of eight hours in a cage with a coyote in a New York performance piece called I Like America and America Likes Me, and there's the story he liked to tell, possibly apocryphal, of when the Stuka dive bomber he was serving as rear-gunner in during World War II crash landed on the Crimean front in Ukraine and he was nursed back to health by Tatar tribesmen who covered his broken body in felt and animal felt. That's why the iconic suit is made of felt and why he uses fat in his art. It's a kind of thankyou to those that saved his life.  

Kunst ist wenn man trotzdem lacht (Art is when you laugh despite everything) (1971)

Ecology and Socialism (1980)

But it's also a playful dig at conventions, a scrape on the surface of the art world's pretensions that Beuys only too happily replaces with further levels of pretension. Joseph Beuys wants his cake, or his animal fat, and he wants to eat it.

Utopia at the Stag Monuments is now the work that's actually wooing visitors to Tate Modern so this show is a collection, for the first time, of the 'original elements' that went in to it as well as 'pivotal works' that inspired it or were inspired by it. Beuys saw creativity as a 'universal principle that extended beyond traditional artistic activities into all areas of human production' so if you thought that bit about darts and chip butties was facetious it wasn't. There's some work goes into these blogs, you know! Not a lot - but some.

He felt art could transform society as keenly as he felt he could free us from repression but he felt this needed to be backed up by actions, lectures, and sustained political activism - all of which were, of course, absent from a rather upmarket Mayfair gallery. Is it okay to think a Beuys show would work better somewhere like the South London Gallery between Camberwell and Peckham where it's more likely to be visited by those in need of transformation and freedom from repression than in Mayfair?

Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1960)

Thor's Hammer (1961-62)

Although it's highly likely that those theoretical visitors, much like me, simply won't be steeped in enough Celtic mythology, German folkloric tradition, or primitive Christian symbolism to make head nor tail of what Beuys was trying to say or do.

Everyday, somewhat prosaic it has to be said, items stand in for animals. Hirsh (Stag) incorporates an ironing board, Ziege (Goat) a wheeled cart and pickaxe, and Schwane (Swans) is nothing more than some feint pencil and blue pastel marks on a translucent sheet of paper. Elsewhere materials such as blankets, metal clamps, dried grass, moss, tissue paper, a bed, and a 'wet battery' are employed to make bewildering, chin-strokingly so, points about the blurred lines between humanity and art.

Schlitten (Sled) (1969)

Hasenstein (Hare Stone) (1982)

Certainly lines are blurred but does it build a bridge between humanity and art? If it does it's a shaky rope bridge like in a Scooby Doo cartoon, a fun one to go over but not a particularly sturdy, or solid, construction. This show, and these works, are described elsewhere as 'a manifesto of hope for the future' but it's hard to really see them as meaning very much at all unless you've been given some kind of back story.

I can work out that the sled refers to a sled his Tatar rescuers towed him to safety on when he was serving in the Luftwaffe, I get that the felt suit serves as a kind of signifier, cypher, or signature even for Beuys himself, and I can just about see how the crudely carved crosses are intended to point an arrow in the direction of some kind of shared, and ancient, European history. 

But I'm not a Christian (because it's bullshit) and I was never part of the Luftwaffe (not being German and being born more than twenty years after the end of World War II - and also because it's bullshit) so they don't really mean much to me. It seems to me a lot of Beuys' art is about one person and one person only - himself.

Evolutionaire Schwelle (Threshold of Evolution) (1985)

Feldbett (Campaign Bed) (1982)

Infiltration-homogen fur cello (Infiltration-homogenous for Cello) (1966-85)

I doubt that's his intention but there's enough narcissism knocking around these days and I find myself longing for an art that is more giving, more sharing. The earth caked telephone and the felt covered cello are fun, riffing on the idea of the Duchampian readymade, but works like Kunst ist wenn man trotzdem lacht (Art is when you laugh despite everything) and Ecology and Socialism are just a bit dull really. It's like a school detention where they don't even set you a proper task. How long are you supposed to look at this stuff for when you don't have the foggiest notion what it means and it's not even aesthetically pleasing. Can I go home now?

Erdtelefon (Earth Telephone) (1968)

Kleines Kraftwerk (Small Power Station) (1984)

Tisch mit Aggregat (Table with Aggregate) (1958-85)

Hirsch (Stag) (1958/1982)

Boothia Felix (1958/1982)

Ziege (Goat) (1958/1982)

Urtiere (Primordial Animals) (1958/1982)

Gekreuzigter Christus (mit Sonne) Crucified Christ (with Sun) (1949)

Maybe I'm an imbecile who doesn't get one of the greatest artists of the last century, I never claimed to be an educated art blogger - just an art blogger, or maybe I'm not - but Beuys himself said art, presumably his art, could serve as "a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one" and while that's a noble, and admirable, thing to try to do if I'm not even sure how many art pills I need to take and when I need to take them my world, in terms of the art of Joseph Beuys, remains a sick one rather than a healthy one.

Some things, admittedly, do look great when you're sick but, in the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, unfortunately not enough for me, or society (quite clearly at the moment), to be transformed. Maybe I'll get it when I grow up.

1 Kreuz (1 Cross) (before 1953)

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?