Pablo Picasso's portrait of Bibi la Purée stands out bizarrely in the post-impressionist room at London's National Gallery where it has just gone on view. The horrible complexion of this absinthe-drinking former actor, painted by the 20-year-old Picasso in Montmartre in 1901, is an uneasy interloper among Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Cézanne's Bathers. Even in this youthful work, the shocking radicalism and daring of Picasso glares from the wall like the awful flower in Bibi's jacket.
Grotesque, ugly and monstrous, this man could be an early design for The Joker or a junk-addled clown. Clearly the young Picasso was fascinated by the low life of Paris and drawn to the demi-monde where art met absinthe. If Bibi la Purée seems to belong to the world of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that's because Toulouse-Lautrec was Picasso's hero when he first encountered the art and atmosphere of Paris. The 20-year-old Spanish visitor here tries his hand at painting like the chronicler of Montmartre's dancers and prostitutes. Being Picasso, his attempt at emulation turns into a work of uncomfortable originality.
Seeing Picasso in the National Gallery, which has got the portrait of Bibi la Purée on long-term loan from a private collection, is tremendous. He belongs here. His art exploded out of the European traditions of art this museum exhibits, and all his life he engaged with the masters of earlier centuries as rivals, enemies, models. It is in the context of such a collection that you see his audacity to the full.
This painting, in this collection, reveals Picasso's revolutionary appetite for ugliness. Next to Bibi la Purée, the nearby paintings of Van Gogh and Cézanne seem besotted with a cult of beauty invented by the Renaissance. Their colours harmonise and they exult in nature. Picasso instead delights in coarsely ill-matched colours and a face pale and diseased from modern city life. He is really on to something here, in 1901, as he sees discord as the art of modern life. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is just six years away. He will paint it in a studio in the same Montmartre where he met Bibi la Purée.
