Picasso and Paper review – an accumulation of sacred relics

A dog and a dove open this stupendous performance on paper – each cut from a slip of frail tissue. The dog’s jaunty walk and cheerful eye are calculated to canine perfection. The contours of the bird’s fluttery wing are described in a single superlative sliver. Picasso is drawing with a pair of scissors, making creatures that seem to live and move in their own characteristic way. He was not more than nine years old.

That these marvellous scraps survive is no surprise. The whole of this immense exhibition – gallery after gallery, numbering around 300 drawings, and a luxurious quantity of paintings – is nothing less than an accumulation of sacred relics. Picasso pere, also an artist, saved every fragment of his son’s juvenilia and collectors have followed suit ever since, from the humble barman to the dollar zillionaire.

The stories of Picasso paying his brasserie bills with a casual sketch on the menu are all true. And some of the exhibits at the Royal Academy amount to little more than doodles on envelopes, the margins of letters or magazine spreads. The master adds a saucy leg to a Vogue model and the page enters the art museum, despite being the least work here, in every respect.

The greatest, in the most literal sense, is a collage nearly five metres in length. Women at Their Toilette (1937-8) is an outsize assemblage of postcards, coloured paper and lengths of wallpaper simulating brickwork, parquet, garish furnishing fabrics and so on, ripped and snipped and bound together with overpainted elements – three female heads and one more in the mirror’s reflection, a painting within a painting.

This is the same astonishing facility you see in the dog and dove, now used by the adult Picasso to return – the work of a lifetime, he once said – to the untutored art of a child. It is also one of the wildest sights in this show. A concatenation of trompe l’oeil textures that looks all the way forward to pop, Richard Hamilton, Patrick Caulfield and beyond, plus a loose and almost self-parodic variation of his cubist heads. It is startling, liberated, humorous.

Which is an aspect of Picasso you see on paper far more than canvas. It is there in those lithe jeux d’esprit, where he summarises the quizzical eccentricity of a penguin in one continuous line. It’s there in those weird late lithographs, where the priapic artist hoists his paintbrush, so to speak, in a brothel. And in the magical accordion-pleat trick where he cuts, draws and folds a single sheet of paper – in which order it is impossible to tell – to make a table-top sculpture of a woman in both positive and negative, speaking as well as silent.

Paper holds a fascination in itself. Nicknamed “the king of the rag-pickers” by the poet Jean Cocteau, Picasso loved children’s lined jotters, cardboard matchbooks and cheap pads where the pages could be used and torn off with all the speed of his thinking. That colossal modernist icebreaker, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was pieced together out of dozens of such drawings, many of them displayed in this show.

Oil gliding over smooth bonded paper, watercolour sinking into cartridge, coloured pencils catching on the coarse weave of blotting paper: Picasso relishes every variation. He makes a sculpture of thick crumpled paper, overlays litho with chalk or pastel, tears a paper napkin and burns two eyes and a mouth with a cigarette end to make the poignant little Head.

The very delicate Violin, from 1912, is a single page from which shapely voids have been cut, to imply the F-holes, strings and bridge. Pasted inside a folded sheet of antique laid paper, the instrument becomes luminous when held to the light, a rival watermark to the 19th-century script that scrolls around it like violin music.

The show is arranged with chronological concision, from the rose and blue periods, through cubism, surrealism, and neoclassicism to the obsessive investigations into Manet and Delacroix, and finally to the late minotaurs and musketeers. But at every stage Picasso branches out, making lightbulbs out of paper, ballet costumes out of card, guitars from pasteboard and string. If his preoccupation with the female sex was ever in doubt, the incessant images of women sitting, standing, weeping and very occasionally smiling, nude and clothed, are the one unvarying theme from first to last.

Picasso’s line is intensely familiar – strong, suave, tensile – even from the very earliest works. And it carries through this show, from wall to wall, round every corner, through the smallest and grandest works, like an electrical charge. It has unfailing vigour as its uppermost characteristic, along with a zeal for clarity that characterises even the most complicated cubist drawings.

You see it at its most refined in a series of neoclassical portraits, above all an exquisite drawing of Igor Stravinsky. All of the composer’s acerbic logicality and self-discipline are distilled in the knife-edge contours of his frown, spectacles and few strands of combed hair – a couple of dozen gleaming lines.

Picasso was 39 when he made this drawing; by now you feel he could do it in his sleep. It is compulsive, but is it also an involuntary urge? “I draw,” he said, “like other people bite their nails.”

At the Royal Academy, this virtuosity comes to feel athletic, relentless, inexhaustible. The eye is compelled along by such coruscating brilliance, image after image, but all the while the irresistible question is rising: does one subject matter more than another? Does the meaning shift with each revolution in method? Is one woman – or idea, or emotion – more important than the next?

A late gallery is given over to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s famous 1956 film Le mystère Picasso, in which the 75-year-old artist is shown performing his genius for a crew of film-makers against the clock. He is drawing on unprinted newspaper, using the new felt-pen inks, among other media, and Clouzot shows both sides of the page. Picasso sits before the easel, in a pair of shorts, working up image after teeming image; which appear, on the other side, like a kind of brilliant animation emerging at high speed before your eyes.

This is exactly the effect the French artist Christine Rebet achieves, not incidentally, in one of several new films currently at the Parasol Unit – the final show before this Hoxton gallery closes its doors after 15 years, alas. Quirky ink drawings turn into the visions of a monk descending from a mountain, including the hypnotic transformation of a chrysalis into a butterfly. But Rebet is using stop-start methods, where Picasso simply keeps on transforming the same image in real time: a flower becomes a fish, which turns into a cockerel and eventually a faun. Picasso could have kept it up for ever, he implies, had not the reel of film run out.

Staggering precocity turning rapidly into restless and long-lived virtuosity: that is one narrative of the Royal Academy exhibition. Even when Picasso stops drawing in the late 1930s, in a spell of misery, the poems he starts writing look more like ink sketches on the page. One even breaks into a detailed watercolour of a horse.

It may be advisable to take the show slowly, and not give equal attention to every work, no matter that the force and urgency of Picasso’s art seems to require it. Surely not even he prized the incessant investigations of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers – taking it apart, trying to gauge its character and atmosphere in study after study – above the radical linocuts or the myth-making lithographs.

The co-curators of this show, jointly organised with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Picasso Museum in Paris, have included paintings at judicious positions throughout. And you come especially close to Picasso himself at both the outset and the end. The final image is a self-portrait, in black and white crayon, made at the age of 91. The eyes are like blank holes in a primitive mask, the head a sketch of a skull; halfway between drawing and death.

• Picasso and Paper is at the Royal Academy, London, until 13 April