Picasso comes to London

You may have heard of him. His name is Pablo Picasso and he has just arrived in London. He's staying at the National Gallery. He is coming from Paris, where he was the star of a big exhibition along with works by the old masters he was supposed to be facing - although only Picasso's paintings have crossed the Channel.

They make a little, cute exhibition that has got its name wrong. It is called Challenging the Past - but Picasso was not challenging the past: he only and always was challenging himself. Picasso was the only thing Picasso cared about. And that this exhibition does show fairly well.

An image of the legendary artist.

Picasso's life devoted to painting perfectly epitomises the struggle of the art of painting to find new ways of depicting reality. After being trained in naturalism by his father when a child, Picasso embarked himself upon moving painting ahead, on pushing it always forward.

We see it in the first room of the exhibition, where the self-portrait in a Goya-like style he painted when being 16 hangs next to older self-portraits in every manner and style, all different, all the same. Turning around and seeing so many Picassos looking at you from so many different styles is both impressive and fascinating.

Ever since his early youth Picasso was using the old masters as the ladder one uses to climb and then throws away - his only aim putting himself on top, mastering the whole art of painting.

Women were Picasso's only other obsession and they always accompanied him through his life and art. There are some of his interesting female portraits which go from the sad looks of his blue period to the colourful exuberance of a neo-expressionist nude.

But Picasso is not as concerned about the object he is painting as he is about the style itself. For Picasso everything that counts is what is between himself and the white canvas, the act of painting, of capturing reality. Whatever is behind the canvas, the naked woman, the series of objects that make a still life, even Picasso's own face - is only a means to an end: twisting the style, squeezing it, mastering it and then moving into a new one.

A self-portrait that Picasso painted.

This is even clearer in the variations Picasso focused on during his later years. If in Paris the originals were shown along with Picasso's versions, here we only have Picasso's works and usually only in its last versions. Picasso plays with Delacroix's Women of Algiers or with Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and his own variations are magnetic and captivating by themselves - but it is his Meninas which incarnates in full the essence of Picasso's aspiration.

He appropriates Velázquez's masterpiece with such naturalness and authority that he transcends it and creates a complete masterwork of his own. And by doing so Picasso shows how in art everything is still possible and will always be, how art is never finished and how every peak in the history of painting is just a new beginning.

No, Picasso was not challenging the past, he was challenging the whole idea of painting, the possibility of art - in order to show how everything, anything can be said, painted. He only and always was challenging himself.