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Showing posts from May, 2009

Review of “Picasso Challenging The Past” at the National Gallery till 7th June by Phillip Worth

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What more can be said or written about Pablo Picasso, easily the dominant figure of 20th century art? Apart from specialist galleries devoted to his art in, for example, Paris and Barcelona, a comprehensive retrospective of his huge output would be unthinkable unless, as a phantasy, you contemplated using all the space of the main London Galleries at the same time – and probably the Parisian as well. And so, historically, Picasso exhibitions have tended to focus on particular aspects of his work, e.g. the nude, Cubism, Sur-realism, figuration, ceramics, still life, or phases of his artistic development, such as the “Blue” or “Rose” periods, war-time, post-war and so on. Thus the exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery until June 7th this year turns the spotlight on the artist’s debt to the great masters of the past, especially in the European tradition. In this context it would be doing him a grave injustice to suggest that Picasso was a mere copyist (although he assid