money Picasso: Legacy of Youth, Sainsbury Centre, review: too many works by other artists - not enough by Picasso
This is an exhibition that tries to do too much with too little. Its subject is the early part of Picasso's career – from 1894 to 1914 – charting his rise from precocious teenager in Spain to veritable master of the art world.
Born in Malaga in 1881, he lived in various Spanish cities as a youth, before visiting Paris for the first time at the turn of the century and settling there soon afterwards.
The works from the start of his career have the advantage of a certain freshness, being much less familiar to us than the masterpieces that followed. The earliest picture on show, a drawing called Corrida (1894), is a good example. With a smattering of rapidly executed lines, it depicts a bullfight in which man and beast stare each other out – in a moment of stillness before active combat resumes.
Picasso made Corrida when he was 13. Impressive though it is, one can hardly believe that in another 13 years he'd paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), the proto-Cubist picture hailed by his biographer John Richardson as "the most inventive painting since Giotto". (That work never leaves the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is represented here by a preparatory drawing of the central of its five women.)
Picasso's rise was one of the most thrilling in art history, and it deserves a show of many more exhibits than the 50-something here – especially as only half are by the Spaniard himself.
Works by Degas, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec and other figures from late-19th and early-20th Century Paris abound. The idea, I suppose, is to give some context to Picasso's development. But so freely did he adapt elements from the work of so many other artists that to showcase their efforts alongside his is to end up with a show that feels flabby.
The wishy-washy wording of the wall-texts doesn’t help either. We’re told, for example, that “through the 1880s and 1890s, Impressionist works dominated the advanced art world in which Picasso was keen to play a part”. Urgh.
On the plus side, few though they are, the paintings and drawings by the Spaniard don’t disappoint. In 1901’s Portrait of a Young Woman (The Madrilenian), a fashionably dressed lady with red hair looks us in the eye. Most of the painting, including her hair and hat, is executed in loose brushstrokes and impasto that we don’t readily associate with Picasso.
The woman’s face, however, is painted evenly, which ensures her gaze is all the more steady and penetrating.
Elsewhere, a Symbolist vein runs through Sick Woman in Bed (1899-1900). Its subject is probably Picasso’s little sister, Conchita, who had recently died. Not that her figure can really be discerned in this near-abstract scene, which is painted with such fluidity that it evokes the release of the woman’s soul from her body.
Fine individual works can’t hide the fact, though, that this show’s 20-year timeframe is too large. It fails to give us any proper sense of the strides forward that Picasso made.
In the past decade, exhibitions at Tate Modern and the Courtauld Gallery have been dedicated to single years of his career (1932 and 1901 respectively) – and those were without any of his peers getting a look in.
'Pablo Picasso: The Legacy of Youth', at Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, from Mar 13 to July 17; sainsburycentre.ac.uk 01603 593 199
