MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Restless energy and inventiveness
CHRISTINE LINDEY is taken by Pablo Picasso’s output of 1932 – a curatorial choice that allows a full appreciation of his genius
Picasso's Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (left) and Reclining Nude (right)
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Picasso 1932 — Love, Fame, Tragedy
Tate Modern
London SW1
Despite its rather misleading title, erotic love is the overarching subject of Tate Modern’s Picasso 1932, Love, Fame, Tragedy. Indeed, when first shown in Paris this extensive exhibition was more explicitly titled Picasso 1932 — Année erotique (erotic year).
This emphasis is clear from the selection of works, their captions and the wall texts, which are reproduced in the accompanying free booklet, and in some large statements by Picasso painted on the walls like “Essentially there is only love. Whatever that may be.”
Picasso’s muse was his young and illicit lover Marie-Therese Walter, whose long-limbed body and Grecian profile had arrested his gaze in a Paris boulevard in 1927. His cliched, but prophetic, chat-up line was “I feel we could do great things together.” And they did. She was not yet 18, he was 45.
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KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage
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