Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and the other British artists in this exhibition would have been the first to say that they could not hold a candle to Pablo Picasso. The Spaniard is among the all time great painters, for me, up there with Titian and Velázquez.
The curators make no attempt to claim that Bacon, Moore et al match Picasso's greatness and judiciously avoid pairing his masterpieces with his followers' work too often, instead gathering the Picasso works that appeared in the UK in clusters, followed by works showing the effects of his work on a succession of Britons.
More often than not, the British artists' works are less strident: Picasso's visual drama is adapted to a more becalmed, distinctly British kind of lyricism, particularly in the works of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
Francis Bacon, meanwhile, takes the Spaniard's visceral power onto an infinitely more disquieting terrain, while David Hockney's response is self-conscious hero worship.
Of course, the Spaniard is the main event here, and a central room with about 30 Picassos from 1901 to the Thirties is magnificent.
British artists were simply in awe of him. See this show, and so will you be.
