On viewing Picasso

To the Staatsgalerie yesterday, for a second look at the Picasso exhibition. (I'm a member of the gallery association, so I can drop in whenever the mood takes me.)

The exhibition includes works from all periods of his life, and takes as its theme a sculptural group The Bathers, which is in the Staatsgalerie's permanent collection. All of the works on display involve the sea or bathing in some way. The lead-in image is the famous photo of Pablo holding a huge sun umbrella over the head of his mistress and muse Marie-Thérèse on the beach at Juan-les-Pins, with his son Paulo (a man of her age) in the background.

There are some exceedingly fine works in the show, most of the best are on loan from the Picasso Museum in Antibes; but there are also quite a few things that I suspect wouldn't get a second glance if they bore a different signature. Picasso's output was (in my humble opinion) very varied, he produced masterpieces and trivia in equal proportion.

There is a game which I learned at my father's knee in many childhood hours of being bored to misery in museums and galleries around the world, called "Only one": If you could take any one piece home with you (we assume that the taker has the necessary time, tools, opportunity and means of transport) which one would it be? It may sound impossibly difficult to choose from the God-knows-how-many hundreds of paintings, but you would probably be surprised to find that one does decide quite quickly and easily. Even in a room full of masterpieces, there is always one work that stands out.

My selection from the Picasso show is a 1928 watercoloured ink drawing entitled "Girl leading a blind Minotaur". (It's one of the works on loan from Antibes, so there was no postcard of it available. When I am appointed Director of the Staatsgalerie, I will make it a condition of loan contracts that we may print postcards of all works made available to us.) The figure of the Minotaur is a common motif in Picasso's work around the middle of his life (about my current age, thanks for asking), and can usually be read as a self-representation.

His Minotaur is a long way from Crete: weak, ageing, reclining, in decline; a figure of pity rather than fear. The little girl leading the blind Minotaur is the summation of this fall. Is she leading him to Theseus? and does he go willingly?