This is Pablo Picasso the way he is rarely seen – at least in so far as the hundred or so pieces at the British Museum’s Picasso: Printmaker have been displayed. The viewer is treated to dazzling marked draughtsmanship that also evinces a mastery of techniques: the use of drypoint and etching, lithographs, linocuts and aquatints.
The span of the work humbles. From the early 1900s (Picasso moved to Paris in 1904, keeping an address at the Washhouse Boat in Montmartre), we find the almost shocking A Frugal Meal, where the much diminished couple sit together in strained impoverishment, their minds abstracted by distance from each other. Struck by malnutrition, we see the sagging bodies, the skeletal fingers, the piece of bread on the side of an empty plate, wine partially filling one glass. Made with a salvaged copper plate, the work also heralds Picasso’s first serious attempt at printmaking.
In 1905, the print Salomé announces a serious yet teasing effort by Picasso to depict the body of the naked dancer before Herod much “like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels”. The outstretched leg suggests the Moulin Rouge.
To the end, we get a sampling of the 347 Suite of etchings from 1968, where the playful, irreverent artist is in full, zesty swing. Along the way, we find Picasso the cubist (Still Life with a Bottle of Marc (1911)), where he keeps fused company with Georges Braque, and the choice morsels from the Vollard Suite (1930-7), where the lure of classical art, animal sexuality and playful mythology is most evident.
The Minotaur is a randy villain governed by instinct, the masculine, beast hybrid that galvanises the work throughout. He connives in the bacchanalian excesses that artist-man-Picasso also engages in. Ignobly, the Minotaur ravishes or suggests it, evident in Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman (1933).
In the lubricious mix are other creatures of Greek mythology. The intentions of the faun in Faun Uncovering a Woman (1936), with a nod to Rembrandt’s depiction of Jupiter and Antiope, are unambiguous. Here, Picasso plays with lust, longing and discomforting moments of predatory assumption. But then comes the masterful 1934 Blind Minotaur being led by a Little Girl in the Night, its aquatint with scraper effect producing a moving work: a sightless minotaur vulnerable, punished for its misdeeds, holding a dove, walking under a sky carpeted with stars.
This theme of visited punishment and regret is also found in The Little Artist (1954), a colour crayon transfer lithograph made after the end of Picasso’s relationship with Françoise Gilot. Three figures dominate: the two children he shares with her, flat and downcast, and Gilot, protectively shadowing them in forbidding form.
The 347 sequence is schoolboy randy and remorselessly mocking. The sublime Renaissance painter Raphael, who the biographer and rumour tiller Giorgio Vasari claimed expired after too much over vigorous intercourse with his lover, La Fornarina, keeps company with unmatched voyeurism, including the Pope’s leering antics. The shift to the contemporary scene is evident in giving the French war hero and President Charles de Gaulle a noticeable member as he consults the female form.
Violence, ever present in the Picasso oeuvre, finds expression in the gladiatorial, ceremonial form of the bullfight. Looking at the displayed prints brings Ernest Hemingway to mind, whose perspective on such a brutal spectacle in Death in the Afternoon (1932) is fine stuffing for Picasso’s moral universe. “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”. The bullfight was “very normal” to Papa Hemingway, with its messages on life, death, mortality and immortality. At the conclusion of the battle between bull and man, “I feel very sad but also very fine.”
Much about Picasso tends to get absorbed into the outsized man’s legacy. The lovers, the infidelities, his preoccupation with violent themes, and the “woman” question. But this exhibition is exhilarating for offering the viewer the sources that moved Picasso while also providing offerings that do, inevitably, show the man at his throbbing, priapic best (and worst). Two young ladies were utterly captivated by the generously erotic depictions, with one squealing in delight, “Now she does have a cunt!”
Beyond the land that is purely mired in cunt and cock, however, we see a delicious lithographic tribute to Lucas Cranach the Elder with its variations, focusing on King David’s lusty longing for the woman he sees bathing, Bathsheba. Picasso renders the king menacing in intention, his head expansive, his harp disproportionately large. One senses sympathy for Bathsheba at the inevitable dishonouring.
There are also reverential tributes to the masters of Spanish painting. El Greco, Velázquez and Goya tower. The latter links the two in terms of a shared interest in the bullfight and their subversion of conventional forms of beauty.
By the time one reaches the end, where the master offers the viewer his own reflection in Picasso, His Work and His Audience (1968) it behoves the spectator to wonder whether feeling fine is, in fact, the sentiment to entertain. For many, it is bound to be. Others, bothered by the desecrations, the defiling, and more besides, are bound to be troubled. But most are unlikely to have even wanted to see Picasso in the first place.
British Museum, November 7, 2024 to March 30, 2025
