Pablo Picasso

Picasso, Tate, 1960: the world's first 'art blockbuster'

Before 1960, Pablo Picasso and modernism were more often lampooned than loved in this country. But all that changed when the Tate's huge Picasso exhibition caused a sensation and changed the course of British art for ever

Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 29 January 2012

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Visitors at a private viewing of the Picasso exhibition at London's Tate Gallery the day before it opened to the public, July 1960. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

In the summer of 1960 Britain was overwhelmed by what the newspapers were inevitably calling Picassomania. The Tate gallery's Picasso exhibition opened in June, the most extensive retrospective of the artist's work ever staged, and from that moment the cultural life of the nation would never be quite the same again. The 1960 show was dubbed "the exhibition of the century"; William Hickey in the Express called it "the most vigorous entertaining, interesting merry-go-round of art that London has ever seen". Tatler magazine coined a new term for the phenomenon: it was "an art block-buster".

It was also the moment when Picasso, and modernism, finally arrived in Britain. That arrival had been a long time coming. As a new Tate exhibition will show, Picasso had been a prime influence on more radical British artists since the first showing of his work here in 1910, but if he was known to the wider public before the second world war, it was often as the butt of cartoonists' jokes.

The attacks had been led by the arch anti-modernists of the cultural establishment. For a while Evelyn Waugh took to signing off letters "Death to Picasso!" GK Chesterton described one of Picasso's drawings as a "piece of paper on which Mr Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots". Even up until 1949, Alfred Munnings, president of the Royal Academy, could famously address the RA's annual banquet with a story about Winston Churchill, who had asked "Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his… something, something?" Munnings heartily agreed that he would.

The painter Howard Hodgkin, who was, in 1960, working toward his own first solo show, recalls the excitement of the Tate's overdue Picasso exhibition very well. "I was in a rather uniquely privileged position among British artists, because I had lived in New York for a long time where there were plenty of Picassos to look at," he told me on the phone last week. "But at the time there were very few on permanent display in this country. I had been telling all my painter friends about a particular work, but they had not had a chance to see it. We had Picasso-influenced artists such as Keith Vaughan and John Craxton, painters of that sort, but they were really very dilute versions of the man himself."

In the 1950s Picasso remained a divisive figure. The showing of his Guernica at the Whitechapel gallery before the war, and on a subsequent tour round Britain – in Manchester it was hung in a car showroom – had been a political as much as an artistic event. There had been plans for a Picasso show in London in 1952 but it was decided to be too contentious. In a letter to the American ambassador in London, preserved in the Tate archives, the then director, John Rothenstein, wrote that at a recent trustees meeting plans for the Picasso exhibition had been abandoned. "The Communist party is active in this part of London and it is possible that they might try to make capital out of the Picasso exhibition…"

To some extent Picasso was lost in translation. When the artist had last been in Britain, for the 1950 World Peace Congress in Sheffield, a welcoming party of artists met him in London. It was only when the artists arrived at Victoria station that they realised there was no French speaker among them and Picasso had no English. Victor Pasmore, a pioneer of British abstract art, was finally pushed into a taxi with the Spaniard in order to escort him to St Pancras and the Sheffield train. There was, apparently, silence between the two men in the cab as Pasmore shyly tried to conjure an appropriate French phrase. Finally he turned to Picasso with the words: "Moi, je suis peintre."

Picasso looked at him. "Oh," he said. "Moi aussi."

In large part English artists had to put up with black-and-white reproductions of the artist's paintings in books. Hodgkin recalls how RH Wilenski's Modern French Painters was particularly valuable in this respect. "I always remember a phrase from Wilenski," he told me. "It was something like this: 'No exhibition can really do justice to Picasso's range; you'd have to have a temple dedicated to him to achieve that.' In a way, that was what the Tate show of 1960 was attempting, I suppose."

If anyone was to create a temple to Picasso then Roland Penrose, co-founder of the ICA and the artist's friend and first biographer was that man. Penrose had curated two earlier shows of the artist's work in 1951 and 1955 at the ICA but they were necessarily small-scale affairs. The Tate show, in 1960, would be something different; half the gallery space at Millbank would be devoted to the exhibition and every period of the artist's career would be represented by major work; Picasso himself promised 100 pictures from his private collection to supplement those begged and borrowed from around the world.

Penrose was almost as much concerned with preparations for the publicity surrounding the opening as with the show itself: he was desperate for the public to finally "get it" about Picasso. The Tate archives contain a wonderful record of the minutes of meetings of the Picasso party organisers, a "ladies' committee" that included the socialite patrons Lady Norton and Lady Ogilvie, Nancy Balfour, an editor at the Economist, and Fleur Cowles, the American writer and biographer of Salvador Dalí.

Mrs Cowles was in charge of catering, and she proposed a Spanish buffet on the lawns of the Tate for the 2,000 guests paying five guineas each. It would, the minutes noted, be "economical, gay and different". Cowles advertised the fact herself in a story for the Telegraph, explaining breathlessly that guests would be served sangría "that cool, cool drink which lives so chic and social a life in Spain". The party, she advised her readers, was for her simply "a prelude to the regular holiday I take every summer with friends in Marbella, a tiny village at the southernmost tip of Spain".

Notes of one of the "ladies' committee" meetings details how the flamenco music of Satie and De Falla was deemed appropriate background for the party, "Mrs Morland ["ICA board member and doctor's widow"] would investigate the possibilities of borrowing records and securing steriophonic [sic] installation free of charge." Mrs Morland eventually came good, and Decca provided a hi-fi.

The party committee's machinations were almost as fraught as those of the museum hierarchy who horse-traded for loans of Picassos. Penrose deemed it essential that paintings be brought from Russia, despite cold war animosities. Rothenstein travelled to Moscow and Leningrad on a less than conclusive diplomatic mission in order to try to secure the loan of paintings.

Meanwhile preparations for the catering were getting heated. The Tate kitchens felt they should do the party, but Fleur Cowles was insisting on a Spanish chef. Details were leaked to the press: as the party approached it was discovered that 600lb of rice, 800lb of chicken, 450lb of prawns and 160lb of pimentoes had been ordered; "all this," it was reported, "so they can make a Spanish peasant dish they call 'paella'".

Perhaps for the first time, "colour supplement" writers were dispatched to the show's opening, rather than just art critics. Olga Franklin in the Mail did not know what to make of it all. Watching the pictures being hung, she struggled in particular with a painting of Lee Miller, the photographer (and wife of Roland Penrose), from Picasso's pink period. "What did it mean?" she wondered of Mrs Penrose, who was standing nearby. Mrs Penrose replied curtly that the painting was "wasted on her because she was clearly 'the nervous type'. 'You don't really dig all this, do you?'" she said. Eventually, though, the reporter got her answer about what it all meant from "a chap at Sotheby's". Someone had bought Picasso's painting La Belle Hollandaise the previous year for the most money ever paid for a work by a living artist. "That is what Picasso is about," Franklin concluded: money. (The painting had sold for £55,000.)

  

How British Pathé newsreel reported on the 1960 exhibition. 

When the night itself came round it was hard to say what excited the press the most, the paintings or the party. The ladies' committee had pulled off the considerable coup of getting the Duke of Edinburgh to come and he was joined on the guest list by Mrs Jack Heinz ("of the Heinz 57 varieties"), Luis Dominguez, the famous Spanish bullfighter, the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, Yehudi Menuhin, Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn. The Duke of Edinburgh summed up the show "with his usual cheery frankness". Standing before a canvas called Woman in Green, he asked: "It looks as if the man drinks. Does he?"

The aspiring Brangelina of the moment were actors Margaret Leighton and Laurence Harvey, friends of Fleur Cowles, who were overheard in conversation.

"We don't own any Picassos do we darling?" Leighton wondered.

"Of course we do," said her husband, who had recently been Oscar-nominated for his role in Room at the Top.

"Oh, I didn't know they were Picassos," she replied, innocently.

One person missing from the guest list was Picasso himself, who was holed up in his new chateau at the foot of Cézanne's Mont St Victoire and saw no point in attending: "My old paintings no longer interest me," he wrote to a friend, "I'm much more curious about those I haven't yet done." As the exhibition opened, he was photographed at a bullfight with Juliette Greco, Yul Brynner and Jean Cocteau. Penrose wrote to the painter to explain the mood: "My dear Pablo, the Picasso explosion… is overwhelming. Already over 10,000 people have visited the show. There are queues the entire day until eight o'clock in the evening when the gallery closes. You have conquered London – people are enchanted and dazzled by your presence on the walls."

The crowds were such that it was reported that several of the gallery warders suffered nervous collapse. Rothenstein sent an urgent memo to his opposite number at the Arts Council. "The large crowd has placed a very heavy strain on our two floor polishers," he lamented, "one of whom is shortly to go on holiday. I wonder if the Arts Council could take on at least the sweeping of the Picasso rooms, possibly using student labour?"

As news of the show spread, the young Queen expressed a wish to visit the exhibition. Penrose recalled the after-hours' visit of the royal party in another letter to Picasso in Provence, "To my delight, she went in with an enthusiasm that increased with each step – stopping in front of each picture – Portrait of Uhde, which she thought magnificent, Still Life with Chair Caning, which she really liked, the collages, the little construction with gruyère and sausage, in front of which she stopped and said: 'Oh how lovely that is! How I should like to make something like that myself!'"

As the show went on, one publicity coup followed another. The consignment of paintings from Russia finally arrived and an extra gallery was set aside for them. A woman was caught smuggling in paintings by her husband to hang in the show, when she dropped a canvas from under her coat. Mrs Vivian Burleigh explained that her husband painted murals in launderettes and hair-dressing salons "in Picasso's early style… I had to do this to prove my husband is also a genius," she said. "It is disgraceful that the British Arts Council take no interest in their own painters." Mrs Burleigh claimed to have left one painting in the exhibition, stuck up with chewing gum. When alerted to this possibility Joanna Drew of the Arts Council was having none of it. "I know a Picasso when I see one," she said, briskly, "and they are all Picassos here."

What seemed most revolutionary to some observers was the new mix of society that joined the queues. As well as the expected "women in elegant dresses" there were "teenagers in winkle picker shoes and girls in no shoes at all".

By the time the exhibition closed in September, more than half a million people had seen it, breaking all records; 300,000 postcards had been sold, and 92,000 catalogues bought. The "Spanish gypsy style" was featured in Vogue as the summer look; Marbella suddenly looked a possible holiday destination for the would-be chic. Howard Hodgkin went to the show "many, many times to look at different things". David Hockney, for whom comparable queues are currently forming, went eight times, and opened himself up to the possibility that an artist could work in many styles and media in a long career. British art would never be the same, but something else seemed to have shifted, too. The Scotsman noted in a prescient editorial that "It is going to be difficult after this to say that great [modern] art is not popular here."

Not everyone was swept up in the new, new thing though. The head attendant at the Tate, the ex-grenadier guardsman Arthur Wellstead, closed the exhibition with a sharp blast on his whistle at 7.55pm on 19 September. Six minutes later, one observer reported, "the crowds had all gone – including two young men in sandals who tried to dive through a solid line of attendants for a last look. Arthur Wellstead breathed a sigh of relief. 'I'm not sorry it's over,' he said. 'It made a change but it was all a bit hectic.'"

The Queen's speech: What the royals made of Picasso

During the 1960 Picasso exhibition at the Tate, the young Queen requested a private after-hours tour of the show from curator Roland Penrose. Penrose kept a note of some of the conversation as the royal party which included the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon walked through the rooms. His subsequent notebook read as follows:

Cubist room:

Queen "I can see character in it."

Margaret "I like letting my eyes wander from surface to surface without worrying about what it means."

Construction room– real enjoyment:

Queen "Oh, how delightful. I wish I could make things like that myself."

Margaret "What fun it must be to make collage."

Philip, coming in: "Do realise, darling, there are 270 pictures to see and we have hardly begun."

Queen "Why does he use so many different styles?"

In front of La Muse:

Queen "These are the ones that make me feel a bit drunk, I'm afraid… Why does he want to put 2 eyes on same side of [a] face?"

In front of portrait of Dora Maar [Picasso's lover and muse]:

Margaret "Did he love her very much?"

Queen Mother liked The Kitchen and thought it v. good at end of gallery.

Bay at Cannes greatly appreciated by QM & Q.

Las Meninas' subtlety of colour, restraint and feeling of texture noticed & enjoyed by QM.

Pigeons much admired.

Portrait of Jacqueline noticed [by] Margaret.

Queen Mother "What a tremendous output! He is the greatest of our time."

After the visit, which lasted for two hours, a royal spokesman telephoned Penrose to say "that the Queen had declared she hadn't spent such a pleasant evening for a long time".

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