There have been many Picasso exhibitions in recent years, but perhaps none has taken the viewer closer to the essence of the artist, has shown him being so anxiously and confidently and nakedly himself, as the one that opens at the Tate tomorrow, says Andrew Graham-Dixon

 Half- way through the Tate Gallery's tremendous new Picasso exhibition, the visitor encounters a life-size sculpture of a goat cast in bronze. Picasso made it out of bric-a-brac: its ribcage and full, pregnant belly were once a wicker basket, its udders a pair of terracotta milk jars, its legs some fallen branches of a tree, its tail and whiskers a length of copper wire, and its anus a bit of old metal pipe.

 The wonder of it is how convincingly alive this accumulation of scrap has been made to seem, how artfully a pile of rubbish has been animated. Picasso's creature stands there, scrawny but full of goatish stubbornness, and pregnant too with meaning: an emblem of the artist's permanent temerity, his bold rivalry with God; one of Picasso's many ways of saying that anything He can do Picasso can do better. ''She's more like a goat than a real goat, don't you think?'' he said when he had finished it.

 By 1950, when Picasso made the sculpture, he had come to think of himself as the old goat of Modernism: pushing 70, maybe, but still lusty and vital and fantastically, stubbornly inventive. He has been dead for more than 20 years now, but the Tate's exhibition, ''Picasso: Sculptor / Painter'', demonstrates, among other things, the extent to which the world has yet to catch up with him, to grasp the implications of his immense, teeming oeuvre. The exhibition confirms him as the most imaginative and innovative sculptor of modern times, and it argues,...

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