500,000 Saw Picasso Show At The Tate Gallery

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29326, 4 October 1960, Page 13

500,000 Saw Picasso Show At The Tate Gallery

(From ANTREA GODDARD tn London}

A record half-million people have seen London’s huge exhibition of Picasso paintings at the Tate Gallery. The exhibition, which has just closed, was first of its kind and consisted of nearly 300 pictures collected from all over the world, including Russia. It was open for 75 days, on every one of which long queues stretched out the gallery’s front doors, down the steps and on to the pavement awaiting entry. The largest daily total of visitors was 10,700 on the Thursday before the exhibition closed. The daily average was between 5000 and 6000. The Arts Council, which arranged it, expects to make a substantial profit in spite of the enormous cost of getting the paintings to England. Transport alone cost £BOOO.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which lent six pictures, was so concerned at the possibility of loss it insisted they should cross the Atlantic in three different ships. The total insured value was around £6,000,000. However, apart from the 3s 6d a head entry fee, the Arts Council sold more than 90,000 catalogues at 7s 6d each and hired out about 77,000 at Is a time, which more than covered costs. Although a visit to the exhibition became a necessity for anyone wanting to be in the social swim; it attracted people from all walks of life. They trudged through, room after room hung with paintings of every Picasso phase through the blue and pink periods to the cubist and the expressionist periods. Ten paintings were lent by the Russian galleries for the first time, two of which were famous “Acrobat on a ball" and “Old Jew” from Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. Picasso himself reluctantly lent

100 pictures he has kept himself. As he packed them he told one exhibition organiser sadly that he gets most unhappy about sending paintings away. “It is almost like having an appendix removed,” he said. He refused an invitation to visit the exhibition, which was the biggest of his ever held anywhere in the world. At the age of 79 he feels he has not enough time left for painting to spare any for travelling. "I just want to work, work and work and then more work," he said.—(Associated Newspapers Feature Service.)