Theatre Picasso 2025

In October 2025, I visited the Theatre Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern. Here's what, in my head, the artist told me.....

My sense of humour's often overlooked
as if admitting that I joked in painting
might reduce the value of my work.
The first piece is a thirty-second film
which shows me laughing, dressed as Carmen at
the cigarette works, trying to strike a match.
When I succeed, the flame illumines with
a flash my eyes. I painted Dora Maar
my lover with a fag in Weeping Woman,
puffing grey fumes through her teeth, illumined
by a cone of white light from a lamp
beneath her eyes which stare straight out 
while elsewhere she's in profile.
It's a cartoon, if you like, a comic
disarrangement, strange, absurd, amusing.
Shadows fall in monochrome straight lines
across the face of Woman at a Window
turning everything to geometry - 
......and so I sculpted cubism in Project
for a Monument Apollinaire 
in nineteen twenty-six. The triangles
and squares are now 3-D. He wrote about us 
in 'Les Peintres Cubistes' nineteen thirteen
and attempted in his poetry 
the same effects of dislocation and
simultaneity to ours in art. 
Here's my Seated Nude of nineteen ten,
all angled lines and shades. It's just a figure
really, neither clothed nor unclothed but
my agent Kahnweiler called 'nudes' my paintings 
even when no nude was present, as,
in his view, they would sell more easily.
I loved the circus. Here's my Acrobat 
in nineteen thirty. Just a simple line 
embraces those impossible contortions.
And to prove that I can really draw
in nineteen five I did a watercolour
of a Circus Artist - blue like the 
Madonna - with a baby at her bosom.
I turned dancers into cubes when I 
designed the costumes for Diaghilev's
Parade in nineteen seventeen and married
one of them in Olga Kokhlova
who tired of the merriment of marriage 
when she found out I'd maintained relations
with my other girlfriends, like Fernande
Olivier - that's her in Bust of Woman
nineteen nine - and started new ones with 
eg Marie-Thérèse Walther who's
the Nude in Red Chair nineteen thirty-two. 
I never stopped my penchant for the fun
of brothel life and showed it in cartoons
which in Tate Modern are preceded by 
a warning and in one spectacular
French Kiss, teeth touching, tongues entwined, in lines
on paper titled Pour Joanna Drew,
who staged an exhibition of my works 
in nineteen sixty at the Tate. My art is
wit and speed, but also peace and prayer.
Let's end on what I contributed to
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
in nineteen forty-nine. They used it as 
their logo and on letterheads: The Dove. 
I am Picasso: don't make war, make love...