London – As Tate Modern celebrates its 25th anniversary, the gallery turns its attention to one of the most transformative artists of the 20th century with Theatre Picasso, a major new exhibition marking 100 years since the creation of The Three Dancers (1925). More than a retrospective, the exhibition invites visitors to step directly into Picasso’s fascination with performance — a world of shifting identities, theatrical gestures and self-mythology that shaped his artistic life.
Bringing together over 50 works, Theatre Picasso positions performance not as a footnote in Picasso’s practice, but as a driving force. The exhibition is “staged” by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer-curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, whose collaborative approach introduces a dynamic, living interpretation of Picasso’s legacy. Their vision extends beyond the walls of the gallery: a parallel programme of dance and flamenco invites today’s performers to respond to Picasso’s enduring stage.
At the exhibition’s centre is The Three Dancers, a painting whose haunting angularity and barely contained tension have lost none of their unsettling power across a century. It sits alongside celebrated works such as Weeping Woman (1937) and Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932), anchoring the story of Picasso’s lifelong engagement with the theatrical, the ritualistic and the mask-like.
But Theatre Picasso does not linger only on the familiar. A rich selection of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, textiles and collages — including key loans from leading Picasso museums in France — reveals how deeply performance shaped the artist’s imagination. One of the exhibition’s highlights, the wool and silk tapestry Minotaur (1935), is displayed publicly in the UK for the first time, on loan from the Musée Picasso in Antibes. Its mythic figure speaks not only to Picasso’s recurring alter ego but also to the dramatic self-fashioning that defined his public image.
This idea of constructed identity runs as a vibrant thread through the exhibition. Picasso approached painting as a kind of dramatic act, and he spent his career crafting the persona of “Picasso the Artist”: genius, outsider, performer. Theatre Picasso traces how this self-mythology permeated his work and continues to shape how we imagine artistic identity today.
The exhibition also foregrounds Picasso’s enduring fascination with figures pushed to the margins — circus performers, bullfighters, flamenco dancers, and artists’ models. Works such as Girl in a Chemise (c.1905), Horse with a Youth in Blue (1905–6), Bullfight Scene (1960) and Acrobat (1930) reflect his attraction to those whose lives unfolded at the edges of spectacle. Tsang and Fuenteblanca extend this line of inquiry, examining how these figures exist not only within Picasso’s canvases but within the context of the modern museum.
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso adds another dimension to the experience, offering visitors an intimate view of the artist at work. Watching Picasso throw his body into the act of painting, we glimpse the sheer physicality — even theatricality — of his process.
What Theatre Picasso ultimately brings into focus is not a settled image of an artist but a field of contradictions: genius and outsider, performer and observer, myth-maker and myth. In staging these tensions, Tate Modern presents Picasso not as a figure frozen in art history but as one whose influence — and complexities — remain vividly alive.
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern