Drawing inspiration in Cork

When it comes to art exhibitions, there are a few key words that are virtually guaranteed to draw the crowds. They include the positively magic invocation Impressionist (which is why, presumably, the National Gallery of Ireland will launch its new wing next year with an Impressionist show). Other sure-fire winners are Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and, of course, Pablo Picasso. Picasso, synonymous with genius, is not so much an individual as a brand, and in a sense apart from the rather dubious attachment of his name to products entirely unrelated to his life and art.

So the Crawford Gallery's current Picasso exhibition is a good bet. Not least for the standing of the Crawford itself, which has experienced something of a mixed reaction to its two-storey, wedge-shaped extension, designed by Dutch architect Erick van Egaraat. The emphasis of the extension, with its bulging brick facade, is on architectural statement, and the two internal spaces have proved difficult in terms of displaying work. Iontas, the annual National Small Works exhibition currently, and quite happily, occupies the brighter, higher-ceilinged upper floor, while Picasso: Watercolours and Drawings 1896-1934, is downstairs, and is, sure enough, bringing in the crowds.

The show is comprised primarily of drawings, some 60, all on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris, which boasts a superlative collection of his work. None of the drawings have been seen in Ireland before. Judging by comments overheard in the gallery, it could be that some or even many of the visitors might be a little disappointed by the fact that most of what they see is small in scale and in black-and-white.

It is, after all, a show of drawings and, while there is some colour, there are no big, spectacular works, no obvious show-stoppers. Yet opting for drawings was a good move in that they are at home in the grey, subdued light of the downstairs gallery. As visitors to exhibitions in the state-of-the-art print room at the National Gallery may have noticed, conservatorial practice nowadays is directed towards protecting works on paper from harmful levels of light, moisture and anything else that might hurt them. And the Crawford is able to point out that it can host its Picasso show precisely because of the climate and lighting controls offered by its new extension.

Which brings us to the Picasso factor. A low-key drawing show with the lights turned down doesn't sound like a recipe for excitement, but the fact that the drawings are by Picasso is enough to quicken the pulse of any prospective visitor. And not without reason. The thing about Picasso is that he lives up to the hype. It is a measure of the remarkable quality of his work that it effortlessly shines even in the Crawford's frankly difficult space and in the dim light of the conservators' worthy caution.

Looking at the drawings, certain qualities about Picasso become quickly apparent. He had an endlessly fertile and restless mind and was never content to stick with a comfortable style. He worked hard and did his thinking in his work, so that you can see the wheels turning, the ideas forming and reforming, as in a sheet covered in versions of self-portrait heads. He was almost always fully, fruitfully engaged with the work, no matter what it was - doodle, sketch, paintings, sculpture, print, ceramic - unlike, say, Dali and many others, past and present, who were and are content to coast along on the strength of their celebrity.

Some of the most impressive things in this show are tiny, like a little pencil sketch, economically drawn with a fast, elliptical line, of the dancer Olga Koklova and her infant son Paulo, or three Matisse-like watercolour studies of two athletic dancers - again, no more than a few lines, but models of concise expression and incredibly alive. The Study for Woman in Shift in an Armchair is a beautifully complete work in itself, a fantastic piece of pictorial design, and as such is indicative of just why Picasso's compositions translate so convincingly across scales, so that big, complex compositions look every bit as good in postcard form.

The 60 drawings encompass work from the artist's pre-Parisian days in Barcelona, his pre-Cubist exploration of styles of representation in images often marked by pathos and sadness, through the revolution of Cubism and on to the relative serenity of the 1920s, when his assured grasp of any style or idiom is breath-taking. Later in the decade, harsher notes indicate emotional turbulence. This period, from about 1918 on, sees him switch constantly back and forth between Cubist and Surrealist-inflected imagery, straight representation and Neo-Classicism, without missing a beat. It is interesting to see the emphatically, even aggressively sculptural qualities of some drawings - notably the Cubist ones - alternate with the purely graphic and painterly qualities of others.

This is also, it must be said, a coherent show with a consistent thematic thread: the human figure or, rather, Picasso's varied, enduring fascination with the human figure which he compulsively desires, explores, describes, de-constructs and re-constructs, constantly alert to every expressive nuance, never missing a trick and always willing to follow new lines of enquiry.

Picasso himself, as well as various biographical and critical studies, has elaborated on the way his personal life is woven into his work and is a generative influence on it. Specifically, major stylistic shifts have been linked to shifts of affection. His relationships with Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Koklova and Marie-ThΘrΦse Walter all come within the time-span of this show. Pretty soon after, another woman, Dora Maar, was to enter his life.

There is a pattern to these relationships. The idyllic absorption exemplified in the little sketch of Olga and Paulo, or perhaps in the stunning, Ingres-influenced 1920 portrait of Olga (in charcoal and lead point), progresses to something like the self-pitying theatricality of an explosive ink drawing The Murder, a version of David's Death of Marat in which a knife-wielding female figure frenziedly attacks a male. Meanwhile, a new love interest is covertly introduced, exemplified here perhaps in the form of the meditative The Painter and His Model in Front of the Painting, which parallels Picasso's developing interest in an idealised Walter and his growing unhappiness with a demonised Koklova.

It is not overly dramatic to speculate that Picasso, who was terrified of growing old and superstitiously afraid of any reference to death or dying, sought to reinvent himself in the benign space of each new relationship. There is something undeniably vampiric about his relentless adoption and abandonment of successive women, as several memoirs attest. He has actually been quoted as remarking, rather melodramatically, that death, which he admitted was a constant preoccupation, was the one woman who would never leave him. It is as if his ferocious inventiveness and productivity, fuelled and renewed by the exhilaration of successive romantic attachments, was a way of keeping death symbolically at bay.

The exhibition is a major plus for the Crawford. It takes a less than obvious line on the most famous name of 20th century art and manages to be both demanding and accessible.

And, it is interesting that in the light of the debate surrounding the Hugh Lane's imposition of a charge to view the Francis Bacon studio, that admission to the Picasso is free.

Picasso: Watercolours and Drawings 1896-1934 is at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery until October 27th. The gallery is open Mon-Sat, 10am- 5pm