I should have been at work today but instead we snuck off to the first day of the new Picasso Exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Quite disappointed that we weren't greeted with white whine and nibbles - not even a pigeon sandwich to go with the theme of the show but of course what really mattered was the art and this was truly art - and so so much of it. The Picasso Event Horizon occurred about two thirds through when the paintings started to be Picasso's versions of previous famous works - Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Las Meninas etc. and while obviously in his style (at risk of sounding pretentious should we say metastyle) they smacked of mass-production and loss of inspiration.
Not like The Charnel House, one of the first paintings in the exhibition, a painting similar in style to Guernica and outwardly a depiction of a specific, ruthless atrocity in Spain but of course a marker for the greater tragedy of the whole of Spain. This is a grey work - it apes a newspaper picture - and despite being the visual record of death, of the unmoving victims of some small war crime, perhaps like all Picasso's work, it moves within itself, suggesting the post-mortem accusations of the murdered family, blaming those who carried out the terrible acts and indirectly us for being part of the wider world which allows this. The whole black time from the early skirmishes in the mud of Flanders to the ultimate atrocities of the concentration camps (and beyond into our own time) are channelled out in this picture. A little event given meaning with a scream directed from the artist into canvas. It gives no solutions other than being a reminder to moderate one's own behaviour for fear that the smallest break in your vigilance will let in the evil that men do.
[Paragraph removed due to being overtly Bathetic].
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