Art review Prolific Picasso shows there's beauty in the beast

Prolific Picasso shows there's beauty in the beast

- Jonathan Jones

Pablo Picasso had a lot on, from shattering the western pictorial tradition with Cubism to making sculptures from string and gloves. Why did he also produce a lifetime's worth of fine art prints? Right through this show we see how he took on this refined genre in order to defile it, rubbing art history in the muck while giving it perverse, indestructible new life.

The desecration begins with his 1905 print Salomé. Herod watches as Salomé dances naked, raising her leg high in the air like a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. Already Picasso is depicting the body, as he said he wanted to, "like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels".

This desire drives Picasso's prints through to his 1968 series Raphael and La Fornarina in which the Renaissance artist and his mistress have sex while the Pope watches. Picasso, 86 at this point, might be publishing a manifesto of what his life has been about - the body.