Theatre Picasso

A playful exhibition of Picasso’s work at Tate Modern highlights the performative nature of the artist and his world

Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes).

Tate Modern, London
17 September 2025 – 12 April 2026

by CHRISTIANA SPENS

When I finished university, I moved to Paris, working as an au pair and a tour guide, and reviewing art exhibitions. The first room I found was a tiny boxroom overlooking the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre; by chance this street, Rue Gabrielle, was where Picasso had also once lived. Although I was quite melancholic at that time, it was a magical period, and I met several people with whom I became good friends, but with whom I lost touch in the years that followed.

It was special, then, that as the lift doors opened to the Theatre Picasso press preview, I saw an old friend, who had also lived in Paris at that time, while he was writing a book about the French surrealist photographer and performer Claude Cahun. We embraced outside the exhibition, and then quickly caught up with the past 15 years just before the director’s tour started. In between the director talking about the various rooms and works in the exhibition, we continued our own quiet discussions, filling each other in on what had happened between that time in Paris and now.

Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes).

During this preview, which was already much more than a press tour, we were greeted by Picasso in a pink shawl, pretending to be Carmen with a cigarette in his mouth, before we followed the director and curator into the first room, which had been made to look like the back room of a museum, with paintings and etchings hung on metal screens as if in storage. If this was backstage, then the next room functioned as the wings to a great stage, where I noticed Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman (1936), where the curtains and shadows of the woman’s bed recollect the curtains of a stage, as well as hinting at the fine line between dreams and consciousness, real life and plays.

We walked through this dark into the main room, or rather stage, where most of the works were on display. Whispering as the talk continued, with the other journalists making notes and listening earnestly, we went around the works. In Dora Maar Seated (1938), Picasso presents his then-girlfriend in black ink on white paper, the surrealist photographer looking like a Pierrot clown.

Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman 1937. Oil paint on canvas. Tate. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2025.

Woman in an Armchair No 1 (The Polish Cloak) (1949), meanwhile, is intricate and expressive, with the patterns of French windows lining the sorrowful face of a woman dressed in black. There is also Weeping Woman (1937), which again shows Maar, this time in an inconsolable state: Picasso produced it in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish civil war. This is such an iconic image, and yet to see it up close, especially with Picasso’s other portraits of Maar and other women, is a deeply moving experience.

Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers 1925. Tate. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2025.

Another prominent work is The Three Dancers (1925), an early painting that stands tall, seeming like a window into another world with the slightly ajar French windows in the background. At first glance joyful in its vibrant colours and expression, this painting tells a story of a fraught love triangle. One dancer is often interpreted as Picasso’s friend Ramon Pichot, who died during the painting process itself, while another, whose head is bent in an impossible angle, was based on Pichot’s wife, Germaine Gargallo, with the dancer in the middle her lover, Carlos Casagemas, who shot himself after attempting to shoot Gargallo. Behind the seemingly joyful exuberance of this scene there is tragedy and heartbreak.

As the other journalists circled around the exhibits, they gradually realised that they were also on show; the gallery had been transformed into a stage, and in the second room spectators could watch their fellow visitors as if they were the performers. Some embraced this happily; one woman danced across the stage, overtaken by a desire to be centre stage, while another, in the audience, rudely told another woman having her photo taken to move so that she could take pictures of the paintings without other people in shot.

Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932. Tate. © Succession Picasso / DACS London 2025.

In this way, the theatrical setup worked like an experiment in human behaviour; some people were compelled to release their inner performer, while others made obvious their inner director, or critic, or tomato-throwing audience. Either way, this uninhibited exhibitionism abounded, simply because the gallery had been made to look like a stage. We were spectators but also players, and we slipped easily into our roles.

Perhaps because I had been reunited with my old friend in such a serendipitous way, I found the exhibition particularly magical, as if we had stepped into a film – or a sequel to an old one. Although shortly after we left Paris, we both contributed stories to an anthology called We’ll Never Have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix, which was about the ways in which Paris could be disillusioning and false compared to its stories; this particular reunion was indeed the stuff of films. Perhaps this is still why people go back there and fall in love with the place; there is a tendency for Paris to become the backdrop for our own stories and personal mythologies, where anyone can find themselves against the backdrop of a Picasso or an ancient cemetery for their own scenes.

Pablo Picasso, Girl in a Chemise c1905. Tate. Bequeathed by C. Frank Stoop 1933. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2025.

Picasso’s mythology – in his performance over his lifetime and in his lasting works – contribute so much to this idea of Paris, and indeed what it means to lead an artistic life. Perhaps part of his so-called genius was realising the degree to which we are all performative creatures, exhibiting versions of ourselves for one another, not in a spirit of artifice necessarily, but in everyday creativity and communication.

He breaks down these acts and stories, and he builds them up; he performed the persona of Picasso for most of his life, sometimes to transform the gravity and pain of darker stories; other times, perhaps, to mirror those around him in their performances of ecstasy, exuberance and loss. In these ways, he helped shape the ways in which we understand what it is to be an artist – as a role to be played just as much as a creator of work, and as a creator of roles for other people, too. I, for one, was glad to have a walk-on part in this dazzling show, or rather a background pas de deux.