Culture

Theatre Picasso

The Master from a Fresh Perspective

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition, Theatre Picasso attempts to reframe one of the most familiar names of twentieth-century art through the lens of performance. Curated by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, it focuses on Picasso’s fascination with theatre, masquerade, eroticism and spectacle.

Forty-one of the forty-two Picassos from Tate’s own collection are presented alongside significant loans from French museums, spanning painting, sculpture, textiles, drawings and collage. Some are on view in Britain for the first time.

The exhibition design, by Lucie Rebeyrol, is striking, transforming Tate’s fourth-floor galleries into a theatre. Visitors enter through a “backstage” corridor, where sixteen paintings are displayed on a rack, as if waiting to be called, before moving into a shadowed auditorium, complete with proscenium arch, footlights and curtains. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso plays on a large screen, placing the artist himself on centre stage. Throughout Theatre Picasso, works are lit like performers: canvases are spotlit against black walls, sculptures appear as if caught in a beam, while a soundscape of flamenco rhythms and archival film clips create an atmosphere closer to installation than conventional display.

Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern transform the exhibition space into a theatre for displaying over 45 works
by Picasso from Tate’s collection, alongside key European loans. © Tate Modern.

The effect is immersive, and yet this bold and atmospheric setting also distracts. shifting the viewer’s attention away from the works themselves. There is no chronology and little historical context; instead the exhibition is divided into thematic sections: “Theatre,” “High and Low Culture,” “The Painter and the Model,” “Animals, War and Violence.” While this framework is ambitious, it frequently results in sparse or strained interpretation. Wall texts offer little more than perfunctory notes, while some contextual claims, such as suggestions about Picasso’s supposed fascination with “nonconforming bodies,” feel overstretched. Even Weeping Woman (1937), one of Tate’s most important canvases, is introduced with only the briefest mention of its sitter, Dora Maar, leaving the painting’s complexity unexamined. Maar’s own artistic achievements, and the turbulent relationship that underpins the painting, are overlooked. The possibility that the work was an attempt to grapple with both personal and political demons is left unexamined.

Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers 1925
Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.

Left: Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman (1937). Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.
Right: Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers (1925). Tate. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025.

On the wall, however, the work dazzles. Maar’s face is fractured between profile and frontal view, her attire suggesting festivity while her expression registers catastrophe. The clash of saturated reds, blues, greens and yellows turns grief into something almost unbearable to look at, sorrow rendered in brilliant, jarring colour. Most unsettling is the jagged black void at the bridge of her nose, a wound that transforms the face into a mask of anguish. Picasso’s brushwork heightens the drama: thick strokes pull the eye to particular features; while thinner passages allow the image to recede, making the suffering both vivid and dramatic.

At the heart of Theatre Picasso stands The Three Dancers (1925). A canvas of violent contortions and haunted desire, it appears here more disturbing than ever, its skeletal figures caught between frenzy and collapse. Positioned as a climax, it anchors the exhibition’s themes of desire, jealousy and death with visceral force. Around it, drawings and sculptures echo the motif of metamorphosis, emphasising Picasso’s obsession with bodies in flux.

Despite such high points, the exhibition struggles to sustain its ambition. By flattening Picasso’s career into a handful of thematic categories, it risks glossing over the extraordinary breadth and depth of his achievement. The absence of historical grounding means the political urgency of works like Weeping Woman or Guernica studies is largely muted, their meaning bypassed by the curatorial insistence on performance.

What does come through, despite the distractions, is Picasso’s prodigious energy – the sheer outpouring of creativity, the continual reinvention of form and subject. Seen as a whole, the works testify to an artist whose innovations repeatedly upended the course of modern art. But the scope of the exhibition is too wide, the connections feel forced, and in its determination to stage Picasso as a performer, it fails to engage with Picasso the artist. Theatre Picasso is, in the end, a dramatic production that, while engaging, does not quite deliver.

Author: Louisa Treger

Louisa Treger is the author of The Paris Muse, a fictionalised retelling of the disturbing love story between Picasso and Dora Maar, the ‘Weeping Widow’ of Picasso’s paintings.