Theatre Picasso: The Artist, The Performer and his Stage

One of the best-known painters of the 20th century, Pablo Ruiz Picasso is a household name. To mark a century since Picasso painted The Three Dancers, Tate Modern has done something genuinely bold: rather than mount the sort of reverential retrospective that the art world has come to expect, it has handed the exhibition over to contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer-curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, who have restaged the gallery itself as a theatre. The result is one of the more unusual and thought-provoking Picasso shows in recent memory – even if it doesn’t always land its more ambitious ideas.

The exhibition features over 50 works spanning painting, collage, sculpture, textiles, and archival film footage, with many pieces on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris and Antibes, including several never before seen in the UK. The sheer breadth of material on offer is impressive, but what distinguishes this show from a conventional survey is the staging. Exhibition designer Lucie Rebeyrol has arranged the space so that visitors move not from room to room but from act to act, guided by light and shadow, with works illuminated as though they are performers stepping into a spotlight. It is an effect that, when it works, is genuinely moving.

At the centre of it all stands The Three Dancers (1925), which anchors the show both physically and conceptually. With its frenzied figures locked in a convulsive dance, the painting has long been read as a meditation on love, desire, and death. Here it becomes a gateway into the exhibition’s central premise: that Picasso’s art is inseparable from theatre, spectacle, and role-playing. Around it orbit some of the most emotionally charged works in his canon – the anguished planes of Weeping Woman (1937), the brooding sensuality of Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932), and the UK premiere of the wool and silk tapestry Minotaur (1935), on loan from Musée Picasso, Antibes. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1959 film The Mystery of Picasso also features, following the artist in his studio as he paints in real-time – a study in vigorous, physical creative process.

The conceptual thread that Tsang and Fuenteblanca have woven through all of this is the idea of “performativity”, the notion that identity is not something we possess but something we enact. The exhibition explores how Picasso cultivated his image as both a celebrated artist and a cultural outsider, a tension that can be understood today through the ways in which identity is formed through words, actions, and gestures. It is a genuinely interesting lens through which to view an artist whose legend has so often overshadowed his canvases, and Tsang, herself a filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores transformation and marginalised identities, brings real intellectual rigour to the premise.

Picasso’s fascination with those at the margins is evident throughout: circus performers, bullfighters, and flamenco dancers appear across the exhibition, figures he returned to constantly throughout his career. Works like Girl in a Chemise (c.1905) and Acrobat (1930) feel particularly resonant in this staging, their subjects understood not merely as subjects but as performers of their own precarious existence. Tsang and Fuenteblanca are also admirably willing to acknowledge the contradictions in Picasso the man – his treatment of women, his mythologising of himself – without reducing the show to a simple moral audit.

Where the exhibition occasionally falters is in the gap between its theatrical ambitions and its execution. The show sets out to explore Picasso’s lifelong fascination with performance, and there are moments when it truly sings, but for some visitors it may feel more like a patchwork than a unified story. The decision to frame the exhibition as a piece of theatre is compelling on paper, but the staging sometimes feels more atmospheric than revelatory; the works themselves, several of which you’ll have seen before, don’t always spark in the way the concept promises.

That said, there is much here to admire, and the accompanying programme, featuring choreographers and dancers invited to respond to the exhibition in live performance, adds a dimension that no catalogue reproduction can replicate. It is also worth noting that this show arrives as part of Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary year, and it wears that occasion well: ambitious, willing to take risks, and unafraid to ask whether the art museum itself might be a kind of stage.

Theatre Picasso ultimately reminds us that Picasso was not only a painter of images but a master of roles: the bohemian outsider, the mythic Minotaur, the tragic clown, the avant-garde provocateur. By placing his art on the stage, Tate Modern allows us to see him as he perhaps always wished to be seen: not just as an artist, but as a performer in the grand theatre of modern life. Whether the staging fully earns that insight is a matter of taste, but as a reimagining of what an art exhibition can be, it is well worth the trip.