Debate: Picasso v the old masters? No contest

The National Gallery's retrospective pits the Spanish genius against the all-time greats. So how does he fare?

Posted by Jonathan Jones

Monday 16 March 2009 11.41 GMT guardian.co.uk

Picasso is my favourite artist. For that very reason, I was nervous about the National Gallery's exhibition Picasso: Confronting the Past. Would it reduce my enthusiasm? Would it annoy me for putting on a poor show of his genius – or worse still, would the setting undermine my admiration and make me feel he cannot stand up to the masters in the National Gallery collection after all?

At last, yesterday I sidled in, anxiously, furtively. But I needn't have worried. There is nothing here that is less than blazing. Picasso makes other artists look like hacks – I mean, almost all other artists in the history of the world – because everything he does feels necessary. This exhibition is full of paintings I hadn't seen before or knew only in small reproductions, and explores a theme in his work that has not had a lot of attention recently. It has no cliches in it and nothing overfamiliar. It plays on Picasso's most disconcerting strength, which is the sheer volume and manysidedness of his imagination.

The most brilliant curatorial decision is to dispense with chronology. How often I seem to have entered the Sainsbury Wing galleries suppressing a sigh as I prepare to negotiate three or four rooms of minor early works by an artist before getting to the good stuff. Here, the very first room introduces you to a Picasso seen across the full range of his life. Paintings done in his youth hang near late works. His early self-portrait in an 18th-century wig shares space with his mesmerising 1958 painting Minotaur, its monstrous face intimating terrors of sexuality and violence and the mystery of art.

That Minotaur was painted at a date when Picasso is conventionally thought to have gone off – to have started to lose the prodigious creativity of his youth and middle age. Born in 1881, he was by now nearly 80 - and would go on working right up to his death in 1973. But I confess that in collections of his work like the Musée Picasso in Paris my enthusiasm has often flagged after the second world war. This exhibition's most enriching achievement is to almost stand that cliche on its head. You end up thinking Picasso progressed towards his last works, rather than declining. At any rate, his late paintings here get a truly eye-opening show. The appetite for the bizarre and the grotesque in works like his Seated Musketeer With a Sword (19th July 1969) comes over here as unbelievably funny, vital, dazzling. His versions of masterpieces are brilliantly subversive: the big pastiche or rather rethinking of Velázquez's Las Meninas is disconcerting in the way it at once pays homage to the original's deep space and mocks the illusions of art. It is as haunting as the original. The French philosopher Michel Foucault saw Las Meninas as an allegory of representation – that is, of the art of describing the world; Picasso's version makes me think more in terms of physics. Velázquez might be called the Newton of art, Las Meninas the mirror of the Newtonian universe. Picasso's response is like modern physics, exposing and thinking beyond the fictions that allowed Newton to picture a clockwork universe.

Yet, when all is said and done, it is not the interpretations of masterpieces or insulting pastiches of art history that make this exhibition so fascinating. What I came away with is a biting awareness of sex and death. No other artist makes sex as carnal. No other makes death as real. There's an effect in Picasso's art – let's call it the Picasso Effect - that he learned through his cubist experiments and then applied throughout his life to kick you into seeing things, understanding things. When I look at a Picasso, I wait for the kick - and it almost always arrives. Try this. Just look at his 1952 painting Ram's Skull for a while. Relax. Wait. Look again. For me, a great Picasso like this administers a delayed frisson, a slowly gathering shock: it's the thrill of sudden intuition, an epiphany. When the Picasso Effect kicks in, I am not looking at a picture of a skull: I am looking at the skull, and at the same time seeing it dissected, crushed, ground up, reconstituted, turned inside out, eaten, shat, buried and exhumed.

That skull does all this for me, and so does the nearby 1946 work Skull, Sea Urchin and Lamp On a Table. So does The Kiss (1969) and so does a phenomenal 1962 interpretation of Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women in which a gigantic horse looms up in monochrome over a woman. This painting captures the essence of violence. It's stunning to see such a late work that matches Picasso's terrifying depictions of bullfights and bombings from the 1930s.

This mad horse leaves me with a scary thought. Picasso has got a bad press for his life. Hostile biographers – including his own grand-daughter – have portrayed him as a cruel, evasive, brutal man in his relations with women. There are, in this exhibition, enough sensual and, yes, loving nudes to tell you that's only half the truth. But this exhibition does have a dark side. Paradoxically it may seem (but not if you look at the old masters regularly), it is in his confrontations with Poussin, Rembrandt or Greek mythology that Picasso discovers his most savage demons. There's no use denying that he paints violence well because he has violence in him - and yet, it's in high art that he finds his lusts mirrored.

Picasso inhabits the highest realm of culture and the lowest, too. He is an educated animal; the Minotaur unleashed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/mar/16/picasso-national-gallery