Picasso 1932, Tate Modern, review: the artist as you've never

seen him before

Picasso is one of those artists everyone feels they know. The landmark
moments of the great Spanish painter’s career, from the Blue Period
and Cubism to his still-controversial late works, will be familiar
territory for most gallery goers, while his complex private life has been
endlessly raked over.
I doubt, however, that you’ve experienced Picasso in quite the way you
will in this extraordinary exhibition.
Rather than trawl through his stylistic development, as one might in a
conventional retrospective, the exhibition, which originated at Paris’s
Musee Picasso, cuts into his career at one pivotal moment, offering a
month-by-month account of his his so-called “year of wonders” – 1932.
As the exhibition opens, Picasso, already the world’s most famous –
and expensive – living artist has just turned 50, and is conducting a
passionate affair with the much younger Marie-Therese Walter,
without the knowledge of his wife.
Walter’s strong features and prominent roman nose dominate the
exhibition from the first room: serene in the features of a white
sculpture in Still Life at the Window, reduced to a single fluid, quasi-
sculptural form in Seated Woman by a Window – a shape seen again in
an actual sculpture, the meltingly organic, yet extraordinarily forceful
Head of a Woman, which stands directly beside it.
On the opposite wall, however, are more troubled, challenging images
of the female form, typified by Woman with a Dagger, in which a
monstrous, fanged female, rendered in brutally cursory lines, stabs a
tiny prone man in the heart. While such images have been seen as
expressing Picasso’s increasingly hateful relationship with his wife, the
40-year-old former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, the show argues they
relate in a more general way to Picasso’s interest in Surrealism and its
preoccupation with violence and repressed desire.
While Picasso tends to be seen as a self-contained genius, magnificently
indifferent to artistic trends, the exhibition reveals him as twitchily
alert to his position in the hierarchy of cutting edge art, and
determined to prove his continuing relevance at a time when many
younger artists – inspired by Surrealism – believed painting to be dead.
There’s a strongly Surrealist feel to two portraits of women in
armchairs, their faces, arms and curves reduced to floating, rock-like
forms. But Picasso’s signature approach during 1932 involves
abstracting the human form into flat areas of colour with a bright,
heraldic immediacy, in which the sitter’s features – invariably Walter’s
– remain clearly recognisable.
Walter looks out at us from Reading, her body a jumble of breasts, belt
and looping arms, her face flattened into a lunar sphere. But Picasso
becomes increasingly obsessed with watching her asleep, absorbed –
we surmise – in rapturous, post-coital dreams. In The Dream she’s
dropped off in a chair, her blouse falling from her shoulder, but none of
her clothes remain in the half dozen paintings that form the core of the
exhibition, completed in just 12 days in early March of this
extraordinary year.
In Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which in 2010 became the third most
expensive painting ever sold at auction, when it sold for $106.5 million,
Marie-Therese’s body is reduced – or perhaps that should be elevated –
to a slumped mass of prone flesh, with lips parted in erotic reverie.
Here, Picasso is painting not so much what his lover looks like, as the
totality of their physical relationship: he’s looking at her dreaming of
him (well, who else would it be?), her pneumatic breasts, limbs and sex
ordered as his body, as much as his eye, perceives them. It’s a conceit
which pervades the entire series, extending beyond it to dominate the
entire exhibition.
By the end of March, Picasso is treating the reclining female figure in a
more overtly surreal manner: reduced to a black outline, overlain with
a jagged, geometric human form. But he soon tires of this game, and is
back on the recumbent Marie-Therese, formalised into a single semi-
abstract arrangement in Reclining Nude, with pointed curving limbs,
inspired by a squid’s tentacles, the curators argue.