Pablo Picasso, Male and Female Bathers, 1921. Courtesy: Nahmad Collection, Switzerland.

In this light, Picasso's realism takes on a new breadth of meaning. The period after World War I is dominated by virtuoso Ingresque portraiture, which includes the cool detached appraisals of his wife Olga, but also by monumental neoclassical nudes, which share space with a subdued and tamed cubism in which ambiguity has been replaced by Matissean decorative effects. All of these phenomena share an affiliation with a marked return to order after the heady days of cubist deformation. Thus, the monumental amazon who is the subject of Large Bather (1921) and attributed to the influence of Renoir, who died in 1919, seems to call a halt to cubist experimentation by embodying a classical sense of order. But it would be over simplistic to confine influences to one particular painter especially when other extra aesthetic and autobiographical aspects are significant. Picasso’s marriage to Olga Khokhlova in 1919 and the birth of their son Paulo in 1921 represented a conscious return to order on Picasso's social and career fronts, one which mirrored the retour a l'ordre happening in France at large. Picasso’s annexation of territory belonging to past masters cannot be divorced from his own personal and artistic narratives any more than it can from political issues. His art inevitably mirrored his life, representing an intensification and expression of his celebrations and tribulations, which come to a climax with Guernica in 1936, when art and life intertwined with the inexorable rise of fascism.

Realism also begins to jostle with sur-realism, a term which originated with Apollinaire but which Picasso claimed as his own in opposition to André Breton’s Surrealism. Despite being elevated to the virtual status of surrealist sainthood by Breton, Picasso rejected the notion of art created via some unconscious avenue, the artist for Breton merely a recorder. For Picasso, not only was the artist a prime site of experience, but art was a relay of his own sensuous and impassioned reality, illuminated as it were from the inside. The deep comfort of sleep (as opposed to the tumultuous dream states celebrated by Breton) as a turning away from the world and entering into a realm of inner sensation is what Picasso beautifully conveys in his Sleeping Nude with Blonde Hair (1932). This is the somnolent form of Marie-Thérèse, clothed only in Matissean arabesques in a reworking of Ingres’ odalisque, depicted as a progenitor of life, her pregnant form replete with a hidden dream of domestic bliss with Picasso that was never to be realised. Nude Woman in a Red Armchair belongs to this same family of sur-realism. This, a period of relative calm, was overtaken by the Spanish civil war, the continuing breakdown of his marriage to Olga, his secretive affair with Marie-Thérèse, and the addition of first Dora Maar and then Françoise Gilot to his array of women, all of which contributed to the expressive density of his work. Several of his wartime still-lifes, such as Flayed Sheep’s Head (1939) or Skull, Sea Urchins and Lamp (1946) can be read allegorically as referring obliquely to these various attachments. But it is, of course, in Guernica that the personal and the political, and realism and the distortion associated with cubism, meet with the greatest impact. The closest we get to this explosive energy in this exhibition is a much later work, a monochromatic painting based on Poussin’s and David’s Rape of the Sabine Women, a devastatingly terrifying image of violence and terror.

The Portrait of Jaime Sabartes as a Spanish Nobleman and Picasso’s self-portrait Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone are paintings of the late 1930s. Both allude to Velazquez and Van Gogh, artists Picasso admired, but in a semi-playful manner. It is not till the late 1950s that he embarked on a much more self-conscious project that involved a metamorphosis of the old masters by taking as his framework specific iconic masterpieces that would have been instantly recognisable to the art loving public. In this period Picasso does more than just cite references to past masters--he takes on a particular composition as the basis of his own stylistic and technical reinterpretation. He had already attempted a variation on the theme of Manet’s Picnic on the Grass but it had failed to elicit what he wanted, namely inspiration. It was the death of Matisse in 1954 that acted as a real catalyst; choosing Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, he set about interpreting it in the manner of Matisse, having observed, “When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy.” The result was a work encompassing fifteen canvases in all, based on two separate Delacroix paintings of a harem. Picasso’s reworkings of the relationship between the four women attest less to his taking on Matisse’s orientalism than to the cerebral nature of his analytic skills as he pulled the figures this way and that in an effort to integrate them into the picture plane whilst conveying a maximum of three dimensionality using the conflicting visual languages of cubist and perspectival spaces. But Matisse is there in the presence of both the odalisque and the sleeping blue nude, the latter a reference to Matisse’s fauvist Blue Nude of 1907. It is also the blue sleeping nude that undergoes the most extreme manipulations as her body is literally opened up and twisted in all different directions rather like an origami doll. Picasso’s homage to Matisse continued in a series of portraits of Jacqueline as an oriental odalisque, dressed and undressed save for a turban, a part she did not appear to relish in the least but which seems to have afforded Picasso some amusement.

This dialogue with the old masters continued with a sequence of sketches around Las Meninas by Velazquez, Picasso eventually creating 45 canvases the majority of which were based on a single figure such as the little infanta. Most of these paintings exaggerate Velazquez’s original colour schemes but the main painting on display at the National Gallery is one from which all colour has been expunged so that we are left with a monochrome grisaille. It’s an extremely curious homage to which more than one critic has ascribed hostile motivations, though more perceptive ones have interpreted the giant figure of Velazquez as a mode of reparation to Picasso’s own father. This is John Berger’s contribution from his book, Success and Failure of Picasso: “It may be that as an old man Picasso here returns as a prodigal to give back the palette and brushes he had acquired too easily at the age of fourteen.” It was, after all, Picasso’s father who had first introduced his son to the painting in the Prado.

In 1961, Picasso returned to Manet’s Picnic, creating 92 drawings around the painting. He does not seem to be engaged in the cerebral exposition he undertook with The Women of Algiers, though it may be that he was exploring the difficulties attached to depicting figures in a landscape in terms of figure/ground integration within a cubist space, while at the same time using his own personal cast of characters, Jacqueline for instance, as Victorine, Manet’s favourite model. Perhaps Picasso recognised Manet’s weaknesses as his own, namely the difficulty Manet had in inventing compositions but also the difficulties he underwent prior to being recognised as the first modern artist. The studies ultimately yielded a series of cardboard cut-outs which were eventually cast as sculptures for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm where they have acquired a regal ease of presence they do not have in the original variations. During the last years of his life, Picasso no longer immersed himself in specific problem paintings though he continued to look to the past for inspiration as seen, for instance, in his series of musketeers which are reminiscent of figures in both Velazquez and Rembrandt.

In 1946, Picasso presented several paintings to the French state. Prior to their being permanently housed in what is now the Pompidou Centre they were hung in the main galleries of the Louvre, first among the French masters, then among the Spanish beside Velazquez and Goya. This caused Picasso an understandable degree of anxiety, but he eventually regained his confidence and was said to exclaim, “You see it’s all the same thing! It’s the same thing!” The public at the National Gallery was not really able to gauge their own response to this declaration, since the originals were not hung alongside the Picassos. Some critics thought this was an improvement; others did not. It created an exhibition totally devoted to Picasso’s paintings, some of which held their own in this "musée imaginaire," while others did not. What we probably also needed to see, especially in the last room devoted to the old masters, to better appreciate Picasso’s degree of inventiveness, are at least some of the innumerable sketches that Picasso worked on in his effort to claim pride of place among the old masters.

Now that Picasso has been recognised as a modern master and his work is no longer confined to the Tate but has been displayed, albeit temporarily, in the National Gallery, it could be instructive to carry on the same game and consider which 20th century artists would be displayed next to Picassos. Bacon, early Pollock, and Guston come to mind, but I’m open to other suggestions so that the challenge is no longer confined to the past but represents an ongoing revaluation in terms of Picasso’s own afterlife within the contemporary imagination.