Tate Modern has opened Theatre Picasso, an exhibition that examines the role of performance and theatricality across Pablo Picasso’s career and brings together more than 50 works by the artist.
The show, which marks 100 years since Picasso unveiled The Three Dancers, is being staged by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer-curator Enrique Fuenteblanca. It pairs major paintings such as The Three Dancers with prints, drawings, sculptures, textile works and collages, and includes loans from leading Picasso museums in France.
The exhibition places The Three Dancers at its centre alongside Weeping Woman (1937) and Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932), the Tate said. It explores Picasso’s longstanding fascination with performers — from circus artists and bullfighters to flamenco dancers — and presents these figures as both subjects and forces that shaped his public persona.
Tate programming for Theatre Picasso includes live dance and flamenco performances intended to complement the works on display and highlight the artist’s theatrical approach to painting. The gallery said Picasso "was fascinated by performers and their boundless capacity for transformation, and he approached painting as a dramatic act in itself."
Works drawn from the Tate’s collection that appear in the exhibition include Girl in a Chemise, Horse with a Youth in Blue and Bullfight Scene (1960). The show spans Picasso’s career, reflecting his experimentation with styles and themes and his pivotal role in movements such as Cubism; Weeping Woman is cited in the Tate’s materials as an example of that influence.
The Tate frames part of the exhibition as an inquiry into the mythologised version of Picasso — a figure portrayed as both celebrated creative genius and outsider — and how that constructed image has influenced perceptions of the artist and the role of the artist more broadly.
Theatre Picasso runs at Tate Modern on Bankside from 17 September until 12 April 2025. Admission is listed at £15 for non-members. The show brings together a mix of familiar masterpieces and lesser-seen works to trace the recurring presence of performance, drama and marginal entertainers in Picasso’s visual vocabulary.
Pablo Picasso, born in Málaga in 1881 and died in 1973, is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned many decades and styles, he repeatedly revisited themes of performance and transformation, drawing on the visual and cultural worlds of circus, theatre and popular entertainment.
The Tate said the exhibition aims both to display Picasso’s sustained engagement with performers and to prompt visitors to consider how theatricality and persona shaped his art and its reception.