Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a pugnacious little man, and many of his rivals weren’t living artists but the great dead. “That bastard,” he said of Delacroix (1798-1863), “he’s really good!”

The exhibition “Picasso Challenging the Past” at the National Gallery in London, which opens today, considers his work in relation to the masters whom he revered -- and sought to outdo. There are at least two ways in which the show could be visited, the second much more challenging than the first.

You could simply enjoy the best opportunity to see his work in London since “Matisse Picasso” at Tate Modern in 2002. Or you could get into the spirit of the thing, and try to spot the connections between Picasso and his artistic ancestors, who also included Rembrandt, El Greco, Manet and others. The catch is that the works of the latter artists aren’t on the walls.

In the larger Parisian version of the show, Picasso’s work hung next to those of his predecessors -- a spot-the-difference approach that didn’t please everyone. The National Gallery’s tactic is more cerebral. The caption on the wall explains the connection between the painting you are looking at and, say, Van Gogh or Ingres.

Some points of reference, particularly works in the National Gallery’s own collection are reproduced in the gallery guide.

Mental Images

If you have a well-stocked mental image bank, you can flip through and find the others, say, Ingres’s “Odalisque With Slave” (1839-40) to compare with Picasso’s “Sleeping Nude With Blonde Hair” (1932). Afterwards, you could follow the National Gallery’s suggestion, and climb the stairs to the main galleries to look at the masterpieces that hang there, with Picasso in mind.

If you do all this, what do you learn? Well, that Picasso had a complicated relationship with the artists who came before. On the one hand, they were his touchstone and inspiration. “Greco, Velazquez INSPIRE ME” he jotted on an early drawing. On the other hand, it was important not just to repeat the past. He had to do something new. “You’ve got to make what doesn’t exist,” Picasso said, “what has never been made before.”

Since Picasso was inventive, combative and mischievous, the result was a friendly yet serious game played between him and various older masters throughout his 70-odd-year career. Chameleon-like, he tried on their styles, and even their clothes. In the self-portrait section we encounter him dressed up here as a Goya, there as a Gauguin. Later on he pops up, goggle-eyed, in Van Gogh’s straw hat, with effects that are downright funny.

Cubist Translation

Yet when Picasso set himself to paint variations on a given picture -- as he did late in life with Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers,” Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” and Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” -- he was not copying the original at all.

It was more like cannibalism: Gobbling up art history, and turning it into pure Picasso. He translated “Women of Algiers” into his Cubist terms while retaining a barely identifiable trace of the original. The old painter, you sense, was having fun in his studio, teasing an eminent ghost, “that bastard” Delacroix.

The exhibition succeeds in demonstrating how Picasso’s art grew from the past, partly as imitation of it, partly as reaction against it. Perhaps, though, it is one of those points better made in the pages of a book than on the walls of a gallery.

“Picasso: Challenging the Past” opens today at the National Gallery, London, and runs through June 7. For more information, go to http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk. Credit Suisse Group AG is a partner of the National Gallery.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Bloomberg News. The comments expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin@cgayford.freeserve.co.uk.

Last Updated: February 24, 2009 19:00 EST