Theatre Picasso review, Tate Modern – Familiar works transformed by a bold, atmospheric setting

People may baulk at paying to see art they can normally see free of charge, but some of these works feel more alive than ever

‘The Three Dancers’ (1925) (© Succession Picasso DACS)

I was all set to hate this exhibition. Celebrating the centenary of one of Tate Modern’s key Picasso works, The Three Dancers, by getting two precocious younger artist-curators to “restage” its Picasso collection in light of his interest in performance seemed like a great idea. And with Tate’s attendance figures flagging, a major show by one of art’s most gigantic and still controversial figures seemed a commercial no-brainer. So why did they have to hinge the whole thing on “performativity”, a voguish philosophical concept few visitors will even have heard of?

Certainly, Picasso’s involvements in this area were wide-ranging and in many cases revolutionary, from his compulsive painting of actors, dancers and acrobats, to stage designs and costumes that were great artworks in their own right. His own incarnation as the ultimate rebel artist – instantly recognisable throughout the world’s media – is perhaps the greatest performance art turn of all time.

But approaching this fertile territory via the notion of performativity, which the blurb defines, a shade tortuously, as the “way identity can be constructed or transformed through words and actions”, suggests this will be one of those text-heavy exhibitions that are more concerned with impressing other curators than addressing the paying punter.

Fortunately, however brain-aching the theorising behind the show, there’s more than enough here to entrance the eye spectacularly. Its artist devisers, the American filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and the Spanish writer Enrique Fuenteblanca, have delivered on their idea of turning the gallery into a theatre to frame the “performance” of Picasso’s art. We enter through a corridor of rough boards, clearly designed to evoke backstage “flats”, to see Picasso laughing and smoking on video, wearing a veil, in the role of Georges Bizet’s Carmen – not that you’d know it – while a photograph of the artist in a bull mask summons one of Picasso’s best known self-designated identities, the “tragic” Minotaur.

A fine array of prints and paintings hang, apparently at random, on the kind of steel mesh screens found in museum storage depots, locating us backstage at the art world spectacle. The prints, mostly late period etchings, dazzlingly embody Picasso’s belief in art as “a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart”. Every form of mark-making from fine-pointed micro-detail to scratching, scraping and painterly splurging is employed in images that pull apart and reconfigure the human figure while quoting from everything: Rembrandt to African sculpture. Picasso’s transformative momentum doesn’t let up for a second. And he was at least 90 when he created these works.

‘Girl in a Chemise’ (1905) (Succession Picasso DACS)

The adjacent paintings will be very familiar to regular Tate-goers, including the haunting Blue Period portrait Girl in a Chemise (1903), and the more robust Seated Woman in a Chemise from Picasso’s so-called neo-Classical period, nearly 20 years later. If paintings often lose some of their gravitas removed from the formal gallery context, these feel more potent, more alive.

The soundtrack of Henri-George Clouzot’s legendary 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso booms from a darkened space, bombastic strings and African-sounding drumming reverberating around more classic Picasso works glowing from the walls. I’m not a great fan of music in exhibitions, but some marvellously raw, earthy flamenco is playing as I take in two superb early Cubist portraits. And if the idea of Cubism plus flamenco sounds too corny to be seriously entertained, the exhibition’s contention that Picasso’s modernist experiments were informed by the primal traditions of his native Andalucia feels completely right.

The film, famous at the time for the way Picasso appeared to paint directly onto celluloid, can be watched on a near cinema-size screen. While the images daubed into existence are often a shade slight and illustrative, the artist’s asides are illuminating. “You think it’s going badly?” he grunts at one point. “Don’t worry, it will get worse.”

‘Minotaur’ (1935) (François Fernandez/Succession Picasso, DACS)

If Tate’s holdings of Picasso and early Modernism in general tend to be thought of as puny beside those of the Pompidou Centre and New York’s Moma, the 45 works here, plus some choice borrowings, give a far better account than I expected of the protean chopping and changing, and the sheer emotional scale of Picasso’s work. The show’s aim of illuminating Picasso’s theatre of life and death is encapsulated in some canny juxtapositions. A lithograph, Head of a Young Boy (1945) – clearly showing the artist’s own son – is seen beside the sinister Black Jug and Skull (1946): the beginning and the end of things seen in heartrending, but inevitable proximity.

Finding ourselves standing on the lip of a low stage, we realise we’ve been “on stage” all along, with the painting we’re here to celebrate, The Three Dancers (1925), taking pride of place behind us. The large upright canvas with its three figures cavorting before a window is hardly one of the most immediately lovable or technically precocious of Picasso works. But it’s given greater force and resonance by the knowledge that it represents a doomed ménage à trois between three of the artist’s close friends. They perform their tragic relationship in a “dance of death” inflected with touches of flamenco, the can-can and, apparently, the Charleston.

If this isn’t quite the epic blockbuster we’d hoped, “Theatre Picasso” provides a wonderfully atmospheric and revealing deep dive into Picasso’s world that isn’t quite like anything you’ll have seen before. I felt completely transported in space and time. While some may baulk at paying to see works they can normally see for nothing, these pieces are transformed by the quasi-fictional setting. It’s like encountering treasured family heirlooms – which these things in a way are – in an unfamiliar context. They seem to speak back at you.

Indeed, while Picasso’s work was incomprehensible to most people during his lifetime – and he bridled at requests for it to be explained – nowadays most of us just get it, or not, on the primal level he intended. So while the show is full of text panels, amplifying the various themes and the thinking behind the presentation, I don’t think I read any of them.

‘Theatre Picasso’ is at Tate Modern from 17 September until 12 April