She is called the Weeping Woman, but that is an understatement. She grinds her teeth on a handkerchief that’s like a jagged white-and-blue spearhead while her fingers claw at her face, tearing the flesh to expose her skull. Her chin is two grenades, her eyes are filled with horror – black silhouettes of planes are held in her transfixed eyeballs. They are the German bombers that attacked the Basque town Guernica on 26 April 1937.
Picasso’s Weeping Woman was bought from him by the British surrealist Roland Penrose in November 1937, fresh off the easel. Fifty years later, his son gave it in lieu of tax to the Tate Gallery. Now it is about to star in a Tate Modern exhibition that showcases the museum’s Picasso collection, enhanced with terrific loans from the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Weeping Woman is a hair-raising example of Picasso’s feel for drama. Tate Modern’s blockbuster, called Theatre Picasso, is “staged” rather than curated, by the contemporary film artist Wu Tsang and writer Enrique Fuenteblanca in a series of cabaret and theatre-like spaces they hope will give visitors “a rhythmic experience”. Picasso, says Tsang, anticipated “the fluid relationship that artists have today with performance”.
He certainly loved a good show. Picasso’s passion for drama included a spectacle that ended in real bloodshed – bullfighting. The corridas fuelled some of his greatest art. Guernica evolved from visceral, densely compacted paintings he did in the 1930s of dying matadors, horses gored by bulls and the artist’s alter ego, the man-bull Minotaur.
Yet he was equally at home at the ballet, creating sets and costumes for the production Parade in 1917 with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, and going on to collaborate with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His first marriage in 1918 was to a dancer in the company, Olga Khokhlova – it was disastrous, and the artist’s treatment of women has in recent years been heavily scrutinised.
The most gossipy exhibit in Theatre Picasso suggests he was an opera fan, too: in a clip from a movie shot by Man Ray, the stocky painter drags up as the opera heroine Carmen. “It’s a bit of a gem to me to see him with the mantilla and the cigar,” says Tsang.
But it was his later fierce rejection of the world of ballet and high-society elegance that produced the greatest Picasso in the Tate collection. The Three Dancers, painted in 1925, is violent, apocalyptic and has never calmed down. It’s a drama we don’t fully understand but whose brutal denouement we watch like a stunned audience.
It’s like a stage set, a room with a view, except beyond the windows, which are weirdly opaque, is only a blue Mediterranean sky of hard pigment suggesting unbreathable air. Life is a theatre, this painting suggests, where we move among fake furniture in an illusory set with no freedom or space.
The people in The Three Dancers unleash themselves in Dionysian frenzy. The woman in the centre flings her arms in the air as she raises her head to the sky: she is dancing to hot jazz, surely, in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published. But this dance is lethal. You can feel it get faster and madder. On the left, a woman gyrates even more ecstatically, twisting over so there seems to be a round hole showing dead sky where her heart should be. Her face has the empty nose socket and eyes of a skull. On the right, a male dancer has a partly brown, partly white body, suggesting the multiculturalism of jazz, more embraced in 1920s France than the segregationist US – Josephine Baker first performed in Paris in October that year.
The Three Dancers is one of Picasso’s crucial revolutionary works. He regarded it as better than Guernica and kept it with him until 1965, when he sold it directly to the Tate. With its flattened space and overlapping, hard-to-read images, the piece helped to revive cubism, an artistic experiment that seemed to be have ended by 1914, at the outbreak of the first world war.
The movement, undertaken by Picasso and Georges Braque from 1907, had asked fundamental questions: what is the fabric of reality, and can art see it? By 1913, when Picasso collaged and drew Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, he and Braque used real things in their art, inventing the appropriation of found materials as an artistic technique.
Then came the war. Picasso stepped back from this dizzying demolition of art as Europeans then knew it. Some people even blamed the war on the chaos of cubism. By 1918, Picasso participated in the “Call to Order” movement that hoped to restore civilisation with a more traditionalist art. Seated Woman in a Chemise from 1923 is a captivating example of this quieter phase of his work: when Picasso chose to draw or paint “properly”, he could do so better than anyone. As he justifiably claimed, he was born with the talent of Raphael and had to learn to paint like a child.
The fuse that set Picasso back on a revolutionary road came in 1924, when a younger group of artists, the surrealists, published their manifesto declaring that all creativity comes from the unconscious and erotic compulsion. The Three Dancers’ jazz age cocktail of cubism and the surrealist cult of desire liberated Picasso to create his most pungent artworks, including The Acrobat, a wondrous painting of an impossible body, and the rampant sculpture Cock (the bird, but it’s truly cocky). The early 1930s was also when he pursued sex as a Sadeian theatre and discovered cubism’s most shocking use – to show all a lover’s orifices at the same time. A dazzling work from this era is his 1936 print Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman, in which he changes into a mythic creature looking at his lover with unabashed voyeurism.
Picasso’s scandalous theatre of sex and death gave him the imaginative power to do what few other artists managed: make art that fought fascism. The year he painted Weeping Woman, there were bombers in his eyes. In his loft in a 17th-century building on Rue des Grands Augustins, Paris, he planned and executed the gut-wrenching Guernica, which he finished by early June and unveiled in July in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris international exhibition.
Picasso is certainly theatrical, but his true genre is tragedy. The Weeping Woman cannot stop herself seeing those murderous planes. The nightmare is turning her skin green, as if she rots. Yet a honeybee sucks from a tear: out of this paralysed rage, some hope might come, if people act. The Weeping Woman is often identified with his lover Dora Maar, but why are her fingers so chunky? They look more like Picasso’s. Just as he could imagine himself as Carmen, Picasso is the woman weeping, merging with Maar in grief for the murdered of Guernica and those yet to die in the age of total war.
When I look at Guernica now I see Gaza, I see Ukraine. When I look at Picasso’s satirical strip The Dream and Lie of Franco, I see today’s far-right populists and new-style dictators. Picasso lived in a time of emergency and so, it seems, do we. He was far from a perfect human being in his private life. But he was ultimately a political artist who acted in history. On that stage he was on the side of the angels – and of the Weeping Woman.
Scene setters: works from the Tate exhibition
Bust of a Woman, 1909
Picasso was making sculpture for the first time, carving raw wooden images that pay homage to African art, when he painted this early cubist “portrait”. This woman has rough-hewn wooden body parts and a featureless face, as the artist takes apart the European belief that pictures must be clear, legible perspective windows on the world.
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Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, 1913
For a cubist painting, this is easy to make sense of: the guitar body is a white silhouette, part of the glass is sketched beside it, and the bottle recognisable by “Vieux” on its label. But why did he paste in such an old (1883) sheet from Le Figaro? Perhaps it mourns a bohemian cafe lifestyle that was already old.
The Three Dancers, 1925
Picasso signed this painting in 1965 when he sold it to the Tate – he’d kept it until then. He also revealed: “While I was painting this picture, an old friend of mine, Ramon Pichot, died and I have always felt that it should be called The Death of Pichot rather than The Three Dancers.” Pichot’s profile is the silhouette on the right of this jazz-age nightmare.
The Acrobat, 1930
Picasso was fascinated by circus folk. These performers star in his early Rose Period paintings, holding horses, balancing on balls or gathering in a family group with a clown as its patriarch. Here, he purifies what it means to be an acrobat: this character is all arms and legs, with no torso, as it contorts inconceivably. The closed eyes tell us it’s a dream – this is a surrealist vision.
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932
Cubism was often seen as ugly in its distortions of the human figure, but here Picasso uses it to glorify his lover Marie Thérèse-Walter, composing her face from two different views, full-on and in half-moon profile. He suggests she has got two personalities: one daylit, the other nocturnal, mysterious.
Cock, 1932, cast 1952
Picasso was a brilliant sculptor in a casually magical way, as this incredibly alive, spiky creation illustrates. Perhaps it is now in his three-dimensional creations, from a bull’s head made from bike parts to a baboon incorporating his son’s toy car, that the infectious fun of his creativity and playfulness can be felt most.
Weeping Woman, 1937
It was in the 1930s that Britain woke up to Picasso, and to modern art, of which he was the recognised leader. A generation galvanised by the Spanish civil war and angered by appeasement of Hitler responded to Picasso’s protest art. In 1939, Guernica was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, while Weeping Woman came here permanently
in the year it was painted.
Theatre Picasso is at Tate Modern, London, from 17 September to 12 April.