Meeting  Peter, who has moved into a flat in Vauxhall, for coffee was a good way to start  my day in  London last week. Coffee finished, he went home to install his new computer while I walked over Vauxhall Bridge to Tate Britain to see the new Picasso exhibition – ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’. The show begins with a look at Picasso’s early visits to London (the first in 1919) then moves onto different British artists whose work was very definitely been influenced by him.  Ben Nicholson began using collage after seeing the way Picasso used it. I could see Henry Moore’s statuesque sculptures walking away from some of Picasso’s portraits of women.  A reproduction of Guernica hangs alongside work by Graham Sutherland, an artist I am only just beginning to discover. Seeing Frances Bacon alongside Picasso’s work has helped me understand his work better too. Work by David Hockney hangs in the penultimate room. I guess he had the luxury of looking back over the whole of Picasso’s life and, perhaps, the freedom of working after the great man had died. One commentator said that artists looked at the way Picasso worked and used his ideas only to find that by the time they were working he had already moved onto something new! It was through his genius that modern art came to Britain and made this new direction acceptable with the public. In the final room is the large ‘The Three Dancers’, painted in 1925 and presented to the Tate following the Picasso retrospective held in 1960 which was the first of the blockbuster shows. There are also some interesting photographs from the  fifties and sixties as well as (only) one of his ceramic pieces.  An excellent exhibition!