At the heart of Tate Modern's groundbreaking exhibition "Theatre Picasso," which opens this week, stands a painting that Pablo Picasso valued even more highly than his renowned masterpiece Guernica (1937). According to Roland Penrose, Picasso expressed a strong preference for "The Three Dancers" (1925) over his famous anti-fascist work, describing it as "a real painting – a painting in itself without any outside considerations."

Tate Modern is commemorating the painting's 100th anniversary with an ambitious exhibition that showcases its complete Picasso collection alongside major loans from other institutions. The show presents a fresh perspective through its innovative staging by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer-curator Enrique Fuenteblanca. By incorporating contributions from modern dancers and choreographers, this curatorial duo aims to unlock new interpretations of a masterpiece that has already proven endlessly captivating to audiences and scholars alike.

"The Three Dancers" holds a deeply personal and symbolic position in my journey through the art world. It was the first Picasso painting I can remember encountering, displayed as a reproduction on the wall of my high school art classroom. I distinctly recall feeling completely bewildered by the work, lacking the visual literacy skills necessary to appreciate anything beyond what I initially perceived as its disturbing ugliness. While the central pink dancer maintained some recognizable bodily form that I could partially comprehend, the Cubist fragmentation of the figure on the right – with its tiny head dominated by an enormous black profile – and the chaotic breaking apart of the woman on the left seemed completely incomprehensible and abstract to my untrained eye.

My art teacher, Jean Morrison, remained remarkably calm and composed despite the predictable "it's-not-art" protests from suburban teenage boys in our class. She persistently continued introducing us to Picasso and other Modern artists with quiet determination, hoping to create even the smallest crack in what she recognized as our fortress of ignorance. "The Three Dancers" remained distant and inaccessible to me even as I began exploring what seemed like more approachable gateway artists such as Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. However, the painting's mysteries gradually began to reveal themselves, and I found myself increasingly drawn to it, particularly after Mrs. Morrison organized a transformative trip for a group of students to visit the Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou in Paris – a truly life-changing moment in my artistic education.

As I immersed myself deeper into Picasso's world and work, I came to understand that this single painting contained entire universes of meaning. These layers existed not only in the once-incomprehensible formal innovations – whose apparent ugliness I eventually realized was essential to the picture's profound meaning – but also in the rich historical and cultural worlds the work opened up for exploration. During my school years, I carefully studied the detailed catalog entry written about the painting by Tate curator Ronald Alley. Through this one remarkable artwork, which serves partly as a tribute to Picasso's late friend Ramon Pichot, I was transported back to fin-de-siècle Barcelona and the melancholy atmosphere of Blue Period Paris.

The painting's significance as a pivotal turning point in Picasso's artistic development – described by New York Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr as almost as radical as the proto-Cubist "Demoiselles d'Avignon" – led me on an intellectual journey through Rome and the revolutionary Ballets Russes, the innovative poetry of Jean Cocteau, the cultural "return to order" movement following World War I, and forward through the development of Surrealism, ultimately connecting to "Guernica" and the tragic Spanish Civil War.

For me personally, "The Three Dancers" has become a powerful symbol of art's remarkable ability to bring together and synthesize a vast breadth of human thought, ideas, and experiences. It also represents the immense value and importance of arts education in schools. While art and design subjects have not suffered the most severe cuts compared to other areas, the United Kingdom has nonetheless experienced a devastating crisis in arts education. Research conducted by the Cultural Learning Alliance reveals that the proportion of GCSE entries in expressive arts subjects dropped dramatically from 14 percent in 2009-10 to less than 7 percent in 2023-24, as successive Conservative-led governments systematically devalued and downgraded arts subjects, effectively denying young people the kind of transformative educational experiences I have described.

"The Three Dancers" taught me invaluable lessons about painting techniques and the broader Modernist movement, as well as crucial aspects of social and political history. Beyond these academic subjects, however, it helped me develop fundamental life values and skills: authentic self-expression and deep empathy for others, intellectual open-mindedness, critical thinking abilities and reflective judgment, boundless imagination and insatiable curiosity, and the essential human capacity for creating meaning from complex experiences.

The gradual development of these ideas and principles transformed my relationship with Picasso's painting from initial dismissal and confusion to genuine adoration and understanding. More importantly, I believe these same skills and values have proven invaluable in helping me navigate, interpret, and make sense of our complex wider world. In our current challenging times, it seems more crucial than ever that young people should have abundant opportunities to develop these essential capacities through meaningful engagement with the arts.

"Theatre Picasso" runs at Tate Modern in London from September 17 through April 12, 2026, offering visitors a chance to discover their own transformative encounters with this remarkable work of art.