Picasso: in love with the Old Masters I Picasso: the great comedian of modern art I Picasso v Old Masters: head-to-head I Times Archive: Picasso exhibition seen by 450,000

This show hits you straight in the face like the force of an explosion. Here is a talent as savagely destructive as it is creative, as ruthlessly mocking as it is admiring, as vulgarly garish as it is susceptible.

It is this ferociously competitive talent that is explored in a landmark show that brings a brash Modernist into the National Gallery’s hallowed halls of high culture.

Times Archive, 1960: The Tate displays the genius of Picasso

Handsomely presented and hung, it unfolds in a leisurely sequence with every picture in a place of satisfying prominence

• Picasso exhibition seen by 450,000

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• Picasso: in love with the Old Masters

• Picasso v Old Masters: head-to-head

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• Picasso: Challenging The Past

The radical Spaniard would no doubt have been delighted. We may see him as a great revolutionary but in fact he had a traditional academic training. He constantly measured himself against his predecessors as his choice of classical subject matter — nudes and character portraits and still life compositions — makes plain. He didn’t even put an aeroplane into his famous Guernica. A lightbulb is probably about as contemporary as he gets.

Picasso was an art historical climber who was prepared to do pretty much anything to claim his place in the canon.

As you step into this show, there is no doubt that you are in the presence of a fiercely ungraspable yet subtly insinuating protean force. Look at the amazing opening room of self-portraits, hung (as are all the galleries in this show) chronologically so that it forms a sort of mini-retrospective of his work in this genre.

Here is Picasso in his many incarnations, from the mocking heir to Goya through the monumental painter to the image-smashing Cubist; from the determined young artist through the tongue-wrestling lover to the charging Spanish bull. You might try to pin him down, but, writhing and twisting, he will always wriggle loose, spring backwards and then return again fighting.

How does he compare with his predecessors, against whom he pits his wits? The spectator is in the presence of a predator who wolfs down visual influences. Sometimes, as with Degas or Toulouse Lautrec, he swallows them whole and then regurgitates them pretty much undigested.

The paintings feel like inferior parodies. Sometimes, as in a crass rip-off of a famous Van Gogh self-portrait, he comes across as a brazenly over self-confident lout.

But where his works leave pastiche and look for the sources of personal inspiration — in his monochrome meditation on Velázquez’s great masterpiece Las Meninas or his lushly tender takes on Ingres’s polished odalisques or in the sombre austerity of his still-life compositions — Picasso’s “versions” come across not only with the directness and individuality of an iconoclastic Modern force but can also, at the same time, return us afresh to tradition.

In Paris, where this show was previously, Picasso’s canvasses were hung directly alongside works by influencing predecessors. It reduced the exhibition to a spot-the-difference-style competition. National Gallery curators have made the right choice in keeping Modern and Old Master separate. But drift upstairs afterwards and wander through the collection. You will feel the presence of Picasso like an aftershock.

To June 7 2009 (nationalgallery.org.uk).

The Times is media partner of Picasso: Challenging the Past.

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