The Brits seem determined to prove that Modernism didn't only belong to Paris and New York. "Rothko in Britain," currently on at the Whitechapel Gallery, investigates the links between the master of color field painting and the British Isles. And coming up next February, Tate Britain's "Picasso & Modern British Art" will bring to the fore the artist's little known stays in Britain as well as his lasting influence on generations of British artists including Duncan Grant, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney.

In 1919 Picasso was requested by Ballet Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev to come to London and design the set and stage curtain for the company's ballet "The Three-Cornered Hat," to be held at the Alhambra. Picasso was already a regular of Diaghilev's entourage. He had created the set for "Parade" in 1916, and married the Ballet Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918. Like Monet 20 years before, Picasso and his young wife settled at the Savoy for six weeks, and the Spanish painter used the studio of Diaghilev's main set painters, Vladimir and Elizabeth Polunin, on Floral Street, a stone's throw from Covent Garden.

The Tate exhibition includes a moving photograph of a dapper Picasso posing with Olga outside the Alhambra. The story goes that Clive Bell, the famous art critic and member of the Bloomsbury set, had just taken him to Savile Row so that "he could dress like a proper English gentleman."

Picasso's work had already been shown in London at the time — most notably in Roger Fry's two post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 — but it was derided by the British establishment. "Apart from a few heroic collectors," said Tate curator Chris Stephens, "very few people were ready to take Picasso on." Artists were much quicker to click — and very early on they absorbed elements of his multifarious style. "Any artists with avant-garde ambition needed to respond to Picasso's art," said Stephens.

Detecting and analyzing artistic influences can be a delicate task. But for this show, the curators have picked particularly eloquent examples. The golden yellow and hatching of Picasso's 1908 "Vase of Flowers" re-emerge very clearly in Duncan Grant's primitivist "The Tub" (1913). Carving his wooden "Reclining Figure" of 1935, Henry Moore was no doubt thinking about Picasso's personification of spring, "La Source," painted two decades earlier. The two stylized female figures are exactly in the same position: resting on their left forearm, head turned to their right, legs slightly apart. Bacon's "Crucifixion" (1933) is equally saturated with the Spaniard's influence. His Christ stick figure echoes the lean subjects of Picasso's "Bathers at the Beach Hut" (1929). The young Bacon's first career plan was to be an interior designer. He changed his mind, said Tate curator Stephens, upon encountering Picasso's painting.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, Picasso's work was regularly shown in the UK but it failed to get much recognition — despite "Guernica" having toured the country in 1938-9. His show with Matisse at the V&A in 1945-6 — sent by the French government, explained Stephens, "as a thank you for the liberation" — was met with great hostility, re-igniting the debates about modern art that had raged at the beginning of the century. "Señor Picasso's painting cannot be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilized masters," wrote Evelyn Waugh in a letter to the Times in 1945. "He can only be treated as crooners are treated by their devotees."

But 15 years later, critics had changed their tune. Tate's 1960 Picasso retrospective — the artist's biggest show to this day — was a groundbreaking success, "attracting the crowds that used to be associated with Chaplin films," commented the Listener magazine. Tate's first ever blockbuster had more than 460,000 visitors, and David Hockney is said to have seen the show no less than eight times. The story of Picasso's reception in the UK exemplifies the reception of modernism as a whole: from initial contempt to widespread acclaim. Tate curator Stephens explained that when Picasso left Barcelona in 1900, his destination wasn't Paris, but London — he got somewhat "stuck" in the French capital. "Picasso & British Modern Art" continues the journey.