Picasso: Printmaker – a more troubled psychodrama beneath the sex-obsessed tyrant
This month was supposed to be the return of the great masters. At the Royal Academy, those three immortals of the Italian Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael – will hold court. And at the British Museum, the big daddy of modern art, Pablo Picasso, steps into the light. Here these men are, to show us how it’s really done.
But this isn’t how it feels at all. From the moment you step into the British Museum’s prints gallery, you find pictures in which the figure of the artist howls in agony, is pierced by lances, and finally, blinded, is led off into the deep night. It isn’t what anyone would call the triumph of machismo.
The first thing you see is Picasso’s The Frugal Meal (1904), made during the artist’s early years – in his Montmartre studio, housed in a building that swayed with the wind. The etching was produced from a recycled copper plate, coated in wax, scratched through with a needle, dipped in acid, and then inked.
Two gouged-out figures emerge, their skin sunken with malnutrition. Seated at a tavern table, with a bottle and two glasses on dappled cloth, the man places one gnarled hand on the woman’s shoulder. But they cannot bear to look at each other. He recoils; she gazes into the void. Like others in this series, La suite des saltimbanques – in which Picasso caught the lives of down-and-out alcoholics and itinerant acrobats in Paris – it’s not just a picture of hardship. It’s the look of shame.
Picasso: Printmaker is unnerving. This exhibition of more than 100 etchings, lithographs, and linocuts draws on the British Museum’s peerless collection of his prints (he made more than 2,400 in his lifetime). There’s much to learn. Take the brushed lines of his shaggy Monkey (1936): the animal appears to grab a handful of pitch-black soil, produced by an aquatint technique, in which the artist first drew directly onto the plate with pigment thickened with sugar.
The show’s conventional chronology encourages you to look at such works through time: for instance, passing from his Cubist drypoint Still Life with Bottle of Marc (1911), in which a deck of playing cards and flask of cheap brandy are dispersed into a patchwork of intersecting lines, to the neoclassical entertainments of his Vollard Suite (1930-1937), populated by mischievous gods and naked muses.
You see how an idea comes together: in the successive primary-coloured proofs that make his incandescent linocut Still life under the lamp (1962), or the three states of David and Bathsheba (1947-1949) which flicker and change before your eyes, moving from black lines on white, to its inverse, a rapturous final picture in which you find yourself lapping up the expanse of ink.
The one constant is his obsession with sex. Sometimes, it’s noisy and ludicrous, as when the painter Raphael beds “the baker’s daughter”, in Picasso’s Fornarina prints (1968) – made at the ripe old age of 86 – and his nemesis Michelangelo peeks up from beneath the covers like a grizzled little gremlin.
You recognise the artist’s insatiable “animal sexuality”, desires which bled the women in his life dry (as Picasso’s own granddaughter so memorably claimed), in the endless Vollard Suite scenes of the minotaur. This primal figure served as his alter-ego; rolling around with Bacchic nymphs, legs akimbo.
But then, his appetite for titillation and gluttony goes up in a puff of smoke. In one etching, the monster clutches its wounds, gasping for breath. In another, a burnished aquatint, the minotaur has lost his sight. The blinded beast follows a little girl, clutching a dove, beneath shimmering stars. It hints at a deeper psychodrama beneath all that swaggering virility.
British Museum, London WC1 (britishmuseum.org); Nov 7-March 30