At the core of Tate Modern’s exhibition Theatre Picasso, opening this week, is a painting that Picasso esteemed more highly even than Guernica (1937). Picasso told Roland Penrose that he much preferred The Three Dancers (1925) to his anti-fascist opus, because it is “a real painting—a painting in itself without any outside considerations”.
Tate is marking the painting’s 100th anniversary with a show that includes its entire Picasso collection as well as major loans, but with a fresh perspective courtesy of its staging by the artist Wu Tsang and the writer and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca. By inviting contributions from contemporary dancers and choreographers, the duo will open up fresh interpretations of a masterpiece that has already proved inexhaustibly fascinating.
The Three Dancers has an emblematic position in my life in art. It is the first Picasso painting I remember seeing, in reproduction on the wall of my secondary school art room. I recall being utterly confused by it, lacking the skills to see much beyond what I perceived to be its ugliness. It was hard to make sense of the central pink dancer, despite its relatively coherent bodily form, but the Cubist planes of the figure at the right, with its tiny head overshadowed by a giant black profile, and the frenzied fracturing of the woman at the left, seemed impenetrably abstracted.
Mysteries unravelled
My art teacher, Jean Morrison, was serenely calm amid the mindless “it’s-not-art” protests of suburban teenage boys. She continued to introduce us to Picasso and other Modern artists with a quiet insistence, hoping she could prise open even a small fissure in the carapace of our ignorance. The Three Dancers remained remote even while I sampled the (at least formally) more straightforward gateway drugs of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. But its mysteries began slowly to unravel, and soon I was hooked, most particularly after Mrs Morrison took a group of us students to the Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou in Paris—an epiphanic moment in my life.
Immersing myself in Picasso, I came to realise that the painting contained multitudes, not just in those once indecipherable formal inventions—whose ugliness was central to the picture’s meaning, I realised—but in the historical and cultural worlds it opened up. While at school, I read the catalogue entry on it by the Tate curator Ronald Alley. Through this one painting—which is partly a tribute to Picasso’s late friend Ramon Pichot—I was sent back to fin-de-siècle Barcelona and to Blue Period Paris. Its position as “a turning point in Picasso’s art almost as radical as the proto-cubist Demoiselles d’Avignon”, as the New York Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr put it, led me to Rome and the Ballets Russes, the poetry of Jean Cocteau and the “return to order” after the First World War, and forward to Surrealism, to Guernica and the Spanish Civil War.
The Three Dancers is symbolic of art’s power to harness a breadth of thought and ideas
For me, The Three Dancers is symbolic of art’s power to harness a breadth of thought and ideas—and the value of arts in schools. And while art and design have not been the worst affected subject areas, the UK has suffered a huge arts education crisis: research from the Cultural Learning Alliance has shown the proportion of GCSE entries in expressive arts subjects fell from 14% in 2009/10 to less than 7% in 2023/24, as Conservative-led governments systematically downgraded arts subjects, fundamentally denying young people the kind of experiences I have described. The Three Dancers taught me about painting and Modernism, of course, and social and political history. But it also helped me learn fundamental values: self-expression and empathy, open-mindedness, critical thinking and reflective judgement, imagination and curiosity, meaning-making.
Gaining these ideas and principles shifted me from dismissal to adoration of Picasso’s painting, but I hope they have also proved helpful in attempting to navigate and interpret the wider world. It seems more crucial than ever that, through the arts, young people should have ample chance to develop them today.
• Theatre Picasso, Tate Modern, London, 17 September-12 April 2026