Review: Picasso exhibition (UK)
But Picasso: Challenging the Past, the most hotly-anticipated show of 2009, which opens at the National Gallery on Wednesday, is less thundering and confrontational than the early publicity might have had us believe.
The hype around this exhibition of Picasso's relationship with art's old masters had been about the way the iconoclastic Spaniard tackled the likes of Velázquez, Delacroix and Goya head-on, proclaiming: 'Any work they could do, I can do better.'
Some of the 60 paintings on view live up to this hype, notably the black-and-white, Cubist take on Velázquez's royal portrait, Las Meninas, in which Picasso brazenly replaced the king's great guard-dog with his own playful dachshund.
Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, Delacroix's Women of Algiers, and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe are other masterpieces whose instantly recognisable re-workings are on show, but otherwise Picasso's source material is less obvious.
In most cases here, it is a painter, a period, or even a whole tradition of European painting – like the reclining, female nude – that inspired him, rather than a single, specific work.
Challenging the Past comes to the National straight from its run, in rather different form, in Paris. There, every painting was accompanied by a past master's work alongside, even in cases where the connection was only superficial.
It was intended as the biggest blockbuster in living memory: juxtaposing works by the most crowd-pulling of moderns with old masters' greatest hits.
The paintings were worth an estimated total of £2 billion, and attracted 10,000 viewers a day, but the show was roundly criticised in France as a cynical attempt at curating by numbers.
Under the sway of Nicholas Penny, who assumed the National Gallery directorship last year with the promise that the age of the blockbuster was over, the National's curators have thankfully avoided such a populist approach.
Challenging the Past is a more subtle, less clunky exhibition, meaning visitors are spared games of 'Spot the Difference'.
It is solely Picassos on show, and those wishing to make comparisons with his artistic forebears are directed, by the accompanying booklet, to salient works in the gallery's permanent collection...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
The hype around this exhibition of Picasso's relationship with art's old masters had been about the way the iconoclastic Spaniard tackled the likes of Velázquez, Delacroix and Goya head-on, proclaiming: 'Any work they could do, I can do better.'
Some of the 60 paintings on view live up to this hype, notably the black-and-white, Cubist take on Velázquez's royal portrait, Las Meninas, in which Picasso brazenly replaced the king's great guard-dog with his own playful dachshund.
Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, Delacroix's Women of Algiers, and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe are other masterpieces whose instantly recognisable re-workings are on show, but otherwise Picasso's source material is less obvious.
In most cases here, it is a painter, a period, or even a whole tradition of European painting – like the reclining, female nude – that inspired him, rather than a single, specific work.
Challenging the Past comes to the National straight from its run, in rather different form, in Paris. There, every painting was accompanied by a past master's work alongside, even in cases where the connection was only superficial.
It was intended as the biggest blockbuster in living memory: juxtaposing works by the most crowd-pulling of moderns with old masters' greatest hits.
The paintings were worth an estimated total of £2 billion, and attracted 10,000 viewers a day, but the show was roundly criticised in France as a cynical attempt at curating by numbers.
Under the sway of Nicholas Penny, who assumed the National Gallery directorship last year with the promise that the age of the blockbuster was over, the National's curators have thankfully avoided such a populist approach.
Challenging the Past is a more subtle, less clunky exhibition, meaning visitors are spared games of 'Spot the Difference'.
It is solely Picassos on show, and those wishing to make comparisons with his artistic forebears are directed, by the accompanying booklet, to salient works in the gallery's permanent collection...