Picasso: Challenging the Past at the National Gallery explores the fathomless depths of Picasso's work in relation to the Old Masters that inspired him.

Picasso's resolution of his variations on Delacroix's 'Women of Algiers' known as version 'O' (1955)

After the almighty mess that was Picasso et les maîtres at the Grand Palais in Paris last autumn, it is a relief to report that a much smaller version of the show, which opens at the National Gallery in London on Wednesday, is utterly different and a thousand times better. Although the immense subject of Picasso’s relationship to the Old Masters is still something of a thematic oil slick, the organisers in London have done their best to contain it.

Now the focus is wholly on Picasso, whose work is shown on its own and looks wonderful in the Sainsbury Wing galleries. Unlike in Paris, if visitors want to make comparisons with the Old Master paintings that served Picasso so well, they’ll find them not on the walls but reproduced in the gallery guide and catalogue. This allows us concentrate on the work of this most demanding and rewarding of artists while avoiding some of the more grotesque moments in the French show, such as the juxtaposition of Titian’s Venus with Cupid and Music with several of Picasso’s late pornographic etchings.

Then too, the National Gallery’s curator Christopher Riopelle has the advantage over his French counterparts of being sane. He and his colleagues are well aware that Picasso had lived and breathed the history of art since childhood. So steeped was he in the art of the past that when looking at one of his paintings it is not always possible to point to a single source of visual inspiration. His monumental Large Bather of 1921, for example, certainly looks back to Renoir’s voluptuous late nudes, but Renoir himself was working in a classical tradition which stretches back to antiquity and which also lends the weight of centuries to Picasso’s ponderous colossus. Of course, some artists held an enduring fascination for him (Goya, Velázquez, Ingres), but more generally the art of the past was the invisible scaffolding on which the work of a lifetime was built.

And so, more interesting than which picture or artist may have stimulated him to paint this or that picture, is the much more important question of how Picasso used the Old Masters. Not surprisingly, the answer differs with each new work. When he first arrived in Paris in 1900, Toulouse-Lautrec was alive and working, so in early pastiches of Lautrec such as Le Divan Japonais and At the Moulin Rouge, Picasso is doing what any other hungry young artist would do – imitating the art of a successful older contemporary.

In his search for an artistic identity he soon found that Lautrec (like Steinlen, Daumier, Forain, and Burne-Jones) had nothing lasting to give him. Then, in Puvis de Chavannes, he discovered an artist whose decorative classicism would lead him to the works of his first maturity - the Blue Period pictures of lonely figures shuffling across empty landscapes, similar to the example in this show, 'Girl in a Chemise’ of 1905.

Often in the early years the catalyst for stylistic change was Picasso’s in- depth exposure to the work of another artist. After seeing Gauguin’s primitivist sculptures in the memorial retrospective in 1906, for example, he was inspired to look at Iberian and archaic Greek statuary, which in turn enabled him to move on from Blue Period sentimentality to the more direct and powerful expression of human experience that begins in the mask- like face of his 1906 'Self -Portrait with Palette’ and which will culminate in the full frontal obscenity of the 'Demoiselles d’Avignon’ of 1907.

Remember that what looks inevitable to us today in Picasso’s stylistic development was not so at the time. The 'Demoiselles’ could easily have lead Picasso to the orgiastic expressionism of German artists like Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Instead, after seeing Cezanne’s memorial exhibition in the autumn of 1907, he embarked on a more disciplined and intellectual search for the underlying structure of things that would lead to Cubism.

First, Picasso adopted Cezanne’s method of laying paint on the canvas in straight parallel strokes, one next to another with a hatching motion, like a sculptor using a chisel on a stone. With each shift in the direction of the brush strokes, a facet or plane emerges, which in turn creates depth, form and volume. In the Cubist 'Seated Nude’ (1905-10) the woman’s body seems to project outward from the shallow background plane, just as figures in Cezanne’s pictures do. But if Cezanne inspired the new painting technique, the pose here reminds us of more than one late Renaissance master - for the nude turns her long neck to one side and raises one elegant hand to cover her breast in a gesture associated with figures by Titian or Parmigianino who, in their turn, had found the pose in antique sculptures and carved reliefs. So for all its profound originality, this one painting is like a palimpsest where we can look through Cezanne to the Italian Renaissance and beyond to the classical world.

Then, in the exquisite 'Still Life with Glass and Lemon’ of 1910 Picasso pushes Cubism to the brink of abstraction. Now he combines transparent and opaque planes in such a way that the edge of one plane merges with that of another to create innumerable shimmering facets. You can just about make out the sides of an octagonal table and tablecloth, the knob of a drawer, a sliced lemon, and what could be a cylindrical glass – but though all these objects are there – tactile, palpable and specific- the interlocking lines so enmesh them in their surroundings that as soon as you’ve found them, they vanish again, thus mimicking the unstable nature of visual and psychological experience.

As in the Parisian version of the exhibition, for me the most fascinating pictures in the show are the late series of variations in which, rather than embedding the old masters into the very fabric of his pictures, Picasso pulls back to challenge them directly. I was particularly moved to see the culmination of his variations on Velasquez’s 'Las Meninas’ (1957) hanging near the great canvas which represents the resolution of his variations on Delacroix’s 'Women of Algiers’ known as version 'O’ (1955). I had never before realised how elements from one composition bleed into the other - as for example in the way the distant figure in the doorway of this version of the Delacroix comes straight from Velazquez’s original picture, or how the massive seated figure with a hookah at the left in the 'Women of Algiers’ somehow morphs into the towering figure of Velazquez at his easel in the homage to 'Las Meninas’.

As well as the references to Matisse I also began to pick up faint echoes of Picasso’s own 'Demoiselles d’Avignon’ in Version O (but not other canvases in the series) beginning with the similarity between a brothel and a harem. In the 'Demoiselles’, Picasso creates a stylistic division between the classically inspired figures in the middle and the more savage, primitive creatures at the right. A similar divide occurs in Version O where the rational space indicated by the perspectival recession in the ceiling at the left gives way to spatial confusion and shattered fragments of flat colour intended to represent patterned textiles and broken light falling through a lattice work screen. Likewise, the intact figure of the upright odalisque belongs to a different order of visual experience from that of the reclining odalisque at the centre, who is shown from both front and back and both horizontally and vertically.

But then Picasso’s depths are fathomless. There is always more to say. 'The Women of Algiers’ (1954) is always cited as his homage to Matisse, but an earlier picture in this show, 'In the Garden’ painted in the year of Matisse’s death, 1953, refers directly to that artist’s 'At the Piano’ . And monochromatic 'The Kiss’ of 1969 has less to do with any old master painting than with the close up of kissing lovers in the final reel of a black and white film.

I have only one criticism of this otherwise enjoyable show, but it is a serious one. In art, chronology is everything, and the greater the artist the more it matters that we see his work in the order it was made. The thematic hang here ('Self Portrait’; 'Characters and Types’; 'Models and Muses’) takes away half the point and a lot of the pleasure of looking at Picasso by robbing us of the chance to watch his development as it unfolds.