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If the socially-emollient surrealist Roland Penrose is to be believed, and there's no reason to doubt him, Pablo Picasso was on his way to London when he left Barcelona in 1900; the young Anglophile's mind full of the sauce and sinuousness of Edward Burne-Jones, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. In 'Girl in a Chemise' (1905), one of the first paintings you see in this exhibition, Picasso's Blue Period beauty carries the weight of their example, or rather she would if she looked capable of carrying anything at all.
This, alas, is the first and last time influence can be seen as a two-way street between Picasso and British art, which makes the remainder of the show, as stuffed with top-drawer works as it is, sort of painful. Picasso never lived in London, of course (see our imaginary tour following the artist's journey through the capital here). He got as far as Paris, hopping across the Channel – and even staying here for a stretch in 1919 – to design scenes and costumes for Diaghilev (of which an underwhelming selection of works on paper are on display). During his visit he met with the Bloomsbury group, and in Paris Picasso received countless visitors from the British art scene, including Duncan Grant and, later, Henry Moore. And so it is that Picasso's work has entered our minds and our public collections via his ever-shifting example – from cubism, to surrealism, to neoclassicism – and by the largesse of daring connoisseurs who brought modern art to Britain.
'Picasso and Modern British Art' tells this story, these stories. To extract its many-stranded, multi-authored tales requires patience – the catalogue helps. There are sections dedicated to how, when and by whom Picasso was collected (with prices ranging from £4 for the 1907 'Jars and Lemon', bought in Paris by Clive Bell, to the £65.5m paid by an anonymous bidder at auction for 'Nude, Green Leaves and Bust' in 2010). The show ends with the Tate's 'The Three Dancers' (1925), which Picasso agreed to sell in 1965, the last great masterpiece still in his possession. 'If it gave them pleasure that would be good,' he said, revealing what seems like genuine fondness for Blighty on the old man's part.
Yet, what on paper might seem like a delicate interleaving of Picasso and British art, in the gallery can feel like you're watching a boxing match, with our boys gallantly dancing round the ring only to end up pummelled by the swaggering Spaniard. Wyndham Lewis brings snarling attitude writing in 'Blast', criticising Picasso's limited subject matter and tendency towards the decorative, but fails to outdo his fractured planes in his own painting 'Workshop' (1914-15). Duncan Grant takes the opposite approach, domesticating Picasso's proto-Cubist exoticism in still lifes, interiors and designs for Omega Workshops knick-knacks.
In choosing moments of Picasso-fuelled epiphany among British artists, the curators invite comparisons that are unflattering and perhaps, in the end, unfair. Francis Bacon is made to look weedy in a room focusing on the genesis of figures in his 1930s 'Crucifixion' paintings and their debt to Picasso. Having attempted to resurrect Henry Moore as a spiky maverick a couple of years ago, the Tate now seems to recast him as the familiar also-ran, showing his 'Reclining Figure' (1936) in the same sightline as Picasso's earlier, similarly posed, bulkily neoclassical 'The Source' (1921). Whether or not Moore saw Picasso's painting in Paris, the juxtaposition feels brutal.
David Hockney emerges as the closest we have to a winner. It's partly down to his age – born in 1937, the year 'Guernica' was painted, and making most of the work on show after Picasso's death in 1973, Hockney looks at the master retrospectively, paying homage while leaping about stylistically in a way that, humorously, seems to acknowledge the wider mismatches of the show.