LONDON — How to stage an exciting exhibition on an artist about whom seemingly every stone has been unturned, researched, written about, then turned again? In Theatre Picasso, Tate Modern has given artists Wu Tsang and Enrique Fuenteblanca every curator’s dream — use of its entire Picasso collection and apparent carte blanche to do something cool and, crucially, different with it. The result is every curator’s nightmare: Each piece is crammed tightly in a dark room — anxiety inducing when at high visitor tides — and accompanied by Wikipedia-length explanatory captions, along with a bunch of open-ended questions with no curatorial cohesion that would aid in answering them. In staging Tate’s entire Picasso collection, Tsang and Fuenteblanca ask: “If we look at it in its entirety … what does it reveal?” and “how and why [do] museums collect what they collect?” — questions that are not addressed again. Instead, the exhibition mixes together a lot of chaotic ideas. In one room the curators use the display device of museum storage (the presentation method du jour) to show (but how?) Picasso’s depictions of obscenities and the theater, “[using] architectural stages to frame obscene imagery. In this way, Picasso performed the role of a tragicomic artist by bringing onto the stage things that some may not wish to see.” Pablo Picasso, “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair” (1932); Tate (© Succession Picasso/DACS London 2025)They also ask us to look at his works “through the lens of performativity.” This term can be interpreted in several ways, but apparently “an important one is the way in which words and actions can effect change.” They see Picasso as performative through his words and deeds, and how he curated his persona through the media, as in “performing” brushstrokes for the camera. They add that he was also interested in theater design, music, and flamenco, contributing further strands to an already complicated muddle of themes. A consistent, clear link back to the “performativity” concept would have helped.The arrangement of the paintings is neither chronological nor particularly sensible, based largely on superficial themes. Lumped together, for example, are groups of women who happen to be sitting on chairs, such as a 1909 Cubist version placed next to a nude Marie-Thérèse Walter in an iconic 1932 abstraction; designs for theater staging; and sections with generic titles like “Animals, War and Violence” and “The Artist’s Studio.” The collection encompasses huge parts of Picasso’s formidable oeuvre that warrant their own surveys — and have already been surveyed to death. Installation view of Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern (photo Olivia McEwan/Hyperallergic)The piece de resistance, however, is Tsang and Fuenteblanca’s decision to frame the entire show as a stage: The audience enters via a plywood backstage-like structure into the dark main collection room. They then emerge into lightness to look back through a proscenium framed by raised step and curtain, where subsequent visitors still linger. This is all very meta — the audience are themselves the action and participants. Yet this device could be applied to any artist with the same result. Why the remaining paintings in the final “audience” area focus variably on the idea of the masterpiece and on a 1949 copy of a collection of anti-colonialist writings by Aimé Césaire illustrated by Picasso, is anyone’s guess.The introductory text explains how the Tate invited contemporary artists not to create a “conventional historical approach” to examining and presenting the art, but instead to respond to the collection, which is like excusing a nonsensical plot device as being all a dream. On a basic level, by eschewing selection of any kind, this is anti-curation. Given the entire collection to work with, taking a disciplined approach and investigating focused strains in more depth, such as Picasso’s interest in theater design or music, could have answered some of the many — and interesting — questions the artists pose in their curatorial statement. Regardless of what you think of Picasso, it is almost an insult to take one of the most complex artists history has known and to do this art school project with him.Installation view of Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern (photo Olivia McEwan/Hyperallergic)Pablo Picasso, “Girl in a Chemise” (c. 1905); Tate (© Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025)Pablo Picasso, “The Studio” (1955), oil paint on canvas; Tate (© Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2025)Installation view of Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern (photo Olivia McEwan/Hyperallergic)Theatre Picasso continues at Tate Modern (Bankside, London, England) through April 16, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Wu Tsang and Enrique Fuenteblanca, with Rosalie Doubal, Natalia Sidina, and Andrew de Brun.