London based art historian Aleks Todorovic reflects on the ´Theatre Picasso´ exhibition at Tate Modern, questioning the curators´ elusive concept of ´performativity´ at its centre and recalling Picasso´s radical collaboration with the Ballets Russes, starting with the scandalous ´Parade´ in 1917 produced by Jean Cocteau with music by Eric Satie.
By Aleks Todorovic
‘When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
Almost everything in Picasso’s art is about Picasso or, rather, about creating his own public persona. Tate Modern’s exhibition Theatre Picasso offers a unique opportunity to see, in one place, its entire collection of the artist’s work including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and design, supplemented with a few loans. Doing away with chronology and hierarchy, the curators Wu Tsang and Enrique Fuenteblanca have sought instead to turn the museum space into awunderkammer - a theatre of ideas, inviting the viewer to glimpse some of the threads that are woven throughout his rich œuvre.
The exhibition catalogue tells us that ‘Picasso’s construction of the persona “Picasso, the Artist” emphasised the idea of an individual artistic genius and has influenced our imagination regarding what an artist is and consequently shaped the history of modern collecting, display and exhibition-making’. Theatre Picasso is a case in point. The exhibition starts with a short video shot by Man Ray, showing Picasso dressed as Carmen, lighting up a cigarette. In a space of only 29 seconds, the video sets the stage for what we are about to experience and summarises the multi-faceted nature of both Picasso’s art and theatre: artistic collaboration, role play, costume, playfulness and ‘performativity’ - a term central to the curators’ vision of Theatre Picasso. An elusive concept that can have a variety of meanings, ‘performativity’ is here in the exhibition catalogue is described as ‘most elementally, [the way] it refers to how words and actions can effect change’. And change is certainly something Picasso did par excellence - changing styles every so often he has, more than once, changed the course of art history.
Among various manifestations of ‘performativity’ in relation to Picasso’s work, the most obvious one is his involvement with dramatic arts including theatre, ballet and cinema. The main exhibition space of Theatre Picasso echoes the artist’s set design for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella from 1920. At first glance, this composition is a simple depiction of a stage; our eye moves past the receding wings on both sides, and rests in the distance on the stage design depicting a nocturnal setting. At a closer look, however, the device that frames the composition on the left and right is not the wings from which actors appear; it is, instead, the auditorium - two rows of boxes, each framed by a red curtain, populated with audience members depicted in black and white.
In conceiving of Theatre Picasso, the curators are, in their own words from the catalogue, ‘stealing a few tricks from the master himself’. In his depiction of the set of Pulcinella, Picasso combines the audience’s view towards the stage and the backdrop with the inverted point of view, whereby we as viewers observe the audience within the composition. The construction of the central room of Theatre Picasso as an actual stage plays a similar trick on the Tate visitors. We pass through narrow, dimly lit corridors, looking at Picasso’s artwork hung along each ‘wing’. Once we reach the final, brightly lit room, we turn around to take in the monumental ´The Three Dancers´ from 1925. It is at this point that we realise we are facing a stage set, complete with curtains and a proscenium, and that, a moment ago, we were observed by others while walking along the stage and looking at the exhibited works. The duality of our role as the observer as the observed brings to life the very theme Picasso explores in his drawing.
Seen as a way in which ‘identity can be constructed or transformed through words and actions’, ‘performativity’ is a concept that applies both to Picasso’s creation of his own persona - or rather a multitude of personas - and to construction of identities in his work for the Ballets Russes. A highly influential dance troupe that operated between 1909 and 1929, the Ballets Russes was the brainchild of Russian-born impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Uniting some of the most creative spirits working in Europe at the time, he commissioned work from composers including Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Sergei Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel, artists as diverse as Matisse, Kandinsky, Balla, Miró and de Chirico, alongside Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, and costume designers Léon Bakst, Ivan Bilibin and Coco Chanel.
Picasso was introduced to Diaghilev by fellow artist Jean Cocteau in 1916, and his collaboration with the Ballets Russesstarted with set and costume designs for Erik Satie’s Parade which premiered in Paris the following year. Revolving around the theme of a travelling circus troupe, the story of Parade took Picasso back to a milieu with which he was very familiar: a conjurer, a young girl and acrobats with a horse belong to a world of social outcasts, the demi-monde in which Picasso had dwelled during the early years of the twentieth century when, as a young artist, he moved to Paris. His Blue and Rose period paintings are populated with solitary figures including beggars, prostitutes and circus performers, a panoply of characters on the margins of society with whom Picasso identified.
The short-lived nature of a ballet performance was perhaps seen by artists as an opportunity to create work that was bolder and highly experimental. Natalia Goncharova, for example, pioneered a combination of Byzantine religious iconography with neo-Primitivism in her designs for Le Coq d’Or (1914), whilst Matisse made his first use of paper cut-outs in his work on Le Chant du Rossignol (1920). Picasso’s further contributions to the Ballets Russes were set and costume designs for Manuel de Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos (1919), Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920), traditional Andalusian Cuadro flamenco (1921) and Satie’s Mercure (1927). Throughout these collaborative works, Picasso reached into the past, present and future of his own repertoire, combining elements of Cubism and neo-Classicism with the nascent Surrealism. His work was instrumental in transforming ballet into a starkly modern interdisciplinary art form that combines music, choreography and art into ‘total theatre’.
