The Tate Modern is set to unveil a groundbreaking exhibition that explores Pablo Picasso's deep connection to theater and performance through some of his most powerful works. "Theater Picasso," opening September 17 and running through April 12, showcases the museum's impressive Picasso collection alongside exceptional loans from the Musée Picasso in Paris, presenting the artist's work through a dramatic lens that reveals his lifelong passion for spectacle and performance.

At the heart of the exhibition stands one of Picasso's most haunting masterpieces, "The Weeping Woman" from 1937. This isn't merely a portrait of sorrow - it's a visceral depiction of horror and grief. The figure grinds her teeth on a handkerchief that resembles a jagged white-and-blue spearhead while her fingers claw at her face, tearing flesh to expose skull beneath. Her chin appears as two grenades, and her eyes are filled with terror - black silhouettes of planes are reflected in her transfixed eyeballs, representing the German bombers that attacked the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937.

The painting's journey to the Tate tells its own story of artistic recognition. British surrealist Roland Penrose purchased "The Weeping Woman" directly from Picasso in November 1937, while the paint was still fresh on the canvas. Fifty years later, Penrose's son donated the work to the Tate Gallery in lieu of tax payments, ensuring its permanent place in British cultural heritage.

This latest exhibition takes an innovative approach to presenting Picasso's work. Rather than following traditional curatorial methods, contemporary film artist Wu Tsang and writer Enrique Fuenteblanca have "staged" the show, creating cabaret and theater-like spaces designed to give visitors what they call "a rhythmic experience." According to Tsang, Picasso anticipated the fluid relationship that today's artists maintain with performance, making him remarkably contemporary in his approach to art-making.

Picasso's love for spectacle encompassed a wide range of dramatic forms, from the elegant world of ballet to the brutal reality of the bullring. His passion for bullfighting - a spectacle that ended in real bloodshed - fueled some of his greatest artistic achievements. The corridas provided inspiration for visceral, densely packed paintings he created in the 1930s featuring dying matadors, horses gored by bulls, and his artistic alter ego, the man-bull Minotaur. These works would eventually evolve into the monumental "Guernica."

Yet Picasso was equally comfortable in the refined atmosphere of the ballet. In 1917, he collaborated with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie on the production "Parade," creating sets and costumes that would establish his reputation in the theater world. This led to ongoing collaborations with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and in 1918, he married one of the company's dancers, Olga Khokhlova. The marriage proved disastrous, and the artist's treatment of women has faced increased scrutiny in recent years.

One of the exhibition's most intriguing pieces suggests Picasso's interest extended to opera as well. A clip from a movie shot by Man Ray shows the stocky painter in drag as the opera heroine Carmen, complete with mantilla and cigar. "It's a bit of a gem to me to see him with the mantilla and the cigar," Tsang observes, highlighting this playful yet revealing moment in the artist's life.

Picasso's later rejection of the ballet world and high-society elegance produced some of the greatest works in the Tate collection. "The Three Dancers," painted in 1925, stands as a violent, apocalyptic masterpiece that has never lost its power to disturb. The painting presents a drama we don't fully understand, yet we watch its brutal conclusion like a stunned audience witnessing something terrible unfold.

The composition resembles a stage set - a room with a view - but beyond the strangely opaque windows lies only a hard blue Mediterranean sky suggesting unbreathable air. Life becomes theater in this painting, where figures move among fake furniture in an illusory set with no freedom or genuine space for authentic existence.

The three figures in the painting unleash themselves in Dionysian frenzy. The central woman flings her arms skyward, raising her head in what appears to be a dance to hot jazz - fitting for 1925, the year "The Great Gatsby" was published. But this dance carries lethal energy that seems to accelerate into madness. On the left, a woman gyrates even more ecstatically, twisting so dramatically that a round hole appears where her heart should be, showing dead sky beyond. Her face displays the empty nose socket and hollow eyes of a skull.

The male dancer on the right features a body that's partly brown and partly white, suggesting the multiculturalism of jazz - something more readily embraced in 1920s France than in the segregationist United States. Notably, Josephine Baker first performed in Paris in October of that same year, bringing African American jazz culture to European audiences.

"The Three Dancers" represents one of Picasso's crucial revolutionary works. He considered it superior to "Guernica" and kept it in his personal collection until 1965, when he sold it directly to the Tate. With its flattened spatial relationships and overlapping, difficult-to-read imagery, the piece helped revive Cubism, an artistic experiment that seemed to have concluded by 1914 with the outbreak of World War I.

Cubism, the movement Picasso undertook with Georges Braque beginning in 1907, posed fundamental questions about the nature of reality and art's ability to perceive it. By 1913, when Picasso created works like "Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper," he and Braque were incorporating real objects into their art, essentially inventing the appropriation of found materials as an artistic technique.

The war changed everything. Picasso stepped back from what had been a dizzying demolition of art as Europeans understood it. Some critics even blamed the war on the chaos represented by Cubism. By 1918, Picasso participated in the "Call to Order" movement, which hoped to restore civilization through more traditionalist art. His 1923 "Seated Woman in a Chemise" exemplifies this quieter phase of his work, demonstrating that when Picasso chose to draw or paint in conventional ways, he could surpass virtually anyone. As he justifiably claimed, he was born with the talent of Raphael but had to learn to paint like a child.

The catalyst that set Picasso back on his revolutionary path came in 1924, when a younger group of artists - the Surrealists - published their manifesto declaring that all creativity springs from unconscious and erotic impulses. "The Three Dancers" represents a jazz-age fusion of Cubism and the Surrealist cult of desire, liberating Picasso to create his most potent artworks. This period produced masterpieces like "The Acrobat," a wondrous painting of an impossible body, and the boldly sexual sculpture "Cock" - ostensibly depicting the bird, but undeniably loaded with sexual energy.

The early 1930s also saw Picasso pursuing sexuality as a kind of Sadeian theater, discovering Cubism's most shocking application - the ability to show all of a lover's intimate aspects simultaneously. A dazzling work from this era, his 1936 print "Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman," shows him transformed into a mythic creature observing his lover with completely unabashed voyeurism.

Picasso's scandalous theater of sex and death provided him with the imaginative power to accomplish what few other artists managed - creating art that actively fought fascism. In the year he painted "The Weeping Woman," bombers filled his vision and his art. Working in his studio in a 17th-century building on Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris, he planned and executed the gut-wrenching "Guernica," completing it by early June and unveiling it in July at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition.

While Picasso's work is certainly theatrical, his true artistic genre is tragedy. "The Weeping Woman" cannot stop herself from seeing those murderous planes. The nightmare is literally turning her skin green, as if she's rotting from the horror. Yet remarkably, a honeybee feeds from one of her tears - suggesting that from this paralyzed rage, some hope might emerge if people choose to act.

"The Weeping Woman" is often identified with Picasso's lover Dora Maar, but the chunky fingers in the painting look more like Picasso's own hands. Just as he could imagine himself as the opera heroine Carmen, here Picasso becomes the weeping woman, merging with Maar in grief for the murdered civilians of Guernica and those yet to die in an age of total warfare.

The relevance of Picasso's war art extends powerfully into our contemporary moment. When we look at "Guernica" today, we see Gaza and Ukraine. When we examine Picasso's satirical strip "The Dream and Lie of Franco," we recognize today's far-right populists and new-style dictators. Picasso lived through a time of emergency, and it seems we do as well. While he was far from perfect in his private life, he was ultimately a political artist who acted meaningfully in history. On that stage, he stood firmly on the side of the angels - and of the Weeping Woman.

The exhibition features several key works that demonstrate Picasso's theatrical evolution. His 1909 "Bust of a Woman" shows him making sculpture for the first time, carving raw wooden images that honor African art while dismantling European assumptions about clear, legible perspective. The 1913 "Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper" incorporates an 1883 sheet from Le Figaro, perhaps mourning a bohemian café lifestyle that was already becoming historical.

Picasso's 1930 "The Acrobat" reflects his lifelong fascination with circus performers, presenting a figure that's all arms and legs with no torso, contorting in impossible ways. The closed eyes tell us it's a dream - a surrealist vision of pure performance. His 1932 "Nude Woman in a Red Armchair" uses Cubist techniques to glorify his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, composing her face from multiple viewpoints to suggest dual personalities - one daylit, the other nocturnal and mysterious.

"Theater Picasso" at Tate Modern promises to reveal new dimensions of one of art history's most revolutionary figures, showing how his engagement with performance, spectacle, and drama created some of the most powerful protest art ever made. The exhibition runs from September 17 through April 12, offering visitors a chance to experience Picasso's theatrical vision in spaces designed to echo the cabaret and performance venues that so deeply influenced his revolutionary artistic development.