Exhibition
Picasso and Modern British Art - Tate Britain
The exhibition presents us with interlocking stories: first, that of Picasso’s career in Britain, from his first and much-pooh-poohed showing at Roger Fry’s 1910 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition, to his major and unprecedentedly popular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1960, attracting a record-breaking 500,000 visitors; and second, the story of his influence on British artists, with the curators drawing out those moments when Picasso’s formal experimentation and creative energy opened up the way for major artistic leaps within the careers of others. 
Picasso and Modern British Art is the first exhibition to explore Picasso’s lifelong connections with this country. This major show will examine Picasso’s evolving critical reputation here and British artists’ responses to his work, demonstrating the depth of British engagement with Picasso and his art. Comprising over 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, the exhibition charts Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure both of controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime. It also examines Picasso’s enormous impact on twentieth-century British modernism, through seven exemplary figures for whom the artist proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. Broadly chronological, the exhibition will culminate with a work symbolic of Picasso’s affection for England: his great 1925 painting,The Three Dancers, which Tate acquired from the artist following his 1960 exhibition.
