The Arts Council touring exhibition now at The Theatre Gallery shows one of the unlikelier pairings of artist and text: Pablo Picasso was commissioned to produce thirty-one illustrations for a forty-four volume description of the entire world of nature, Histoire Naturelle, published in the eighteenth century. His prints, made in 1936, were published in 1942 with selected text from the Histoire. This exhibition omits the text, though some of it is available in an exhibition guide. You arrive at the Gallery with your preconception of Picasso in mind, only to find there is almost nothing by that Picasso in these images, and that the shocks or surpises you were expecting are simply not there. All the animals have eyes and noses properly distributed on their faces, and except for a spider that has a wonky leg, everything is essentially naturalistic, though evidently not drawn from nature.

And then things take on a different slant. The cat, for a start, is a whacking, muscled thug, licking its chops and looking like the king of the dustbins. It is the cat that just ate the cat that ate the canary. The ostrich is plainly a dancer at the Folies Naturelles, ungainly, costume askew, running backstage to escape some wicked looking carrots being heaved at her, and shortly to get the sack. The monkey is in the Cirque Universelle and has just done something very rude and is looking for a handout before he repeats his act for new visitors. The Spanish bull, contra the exhibition notes, is posing for a bullfight poster with its tail flared just so, eyes squinted as a result of overbreeding, and horns raised to a safe, unmenacing position. The goat looks silly, the wolf is a phantom out of a Grimm tale, the dog is a townie. The cock and turkey are confections of detail, and in fact the cock is not of the chicken family at all, being a Spanish peasant done up as a cock and caught at the three-quarter mark of his transformation (a self-portrait?). The dark, handsome lizard has been drawn while still under earth and stone, carved of rich metal and embellished with jewels, and the lobster has a delicate, exquisite carapace that is so fine that it needs to be hidden under the sea.

This is Picasso the observer, the artist finding a new shorthand, employing his sense of fun, playing with the medium and exploring its possibilities. From the pattern of grasshoppers arranged as if they were pressed in an old book (precisely what the original Histoire Naturelle tried to do in words), to the lioness emerging as if released by the artist, Picasso gives rein to his artistic imagination, using each subject as the takeoff point for experiments with the medium. And as with all his art, what we the viewers see is only a starting point to what we can get out of his pieces, if we can tune in to what he is doing as if he is doing it right now, for us and for himself.

There is no note to say who hung the images, so it isn’t possible to tip the hat by name. However, he or she has been very clever. The doe is drawn grazing a meadow out of some classical legend, and her spare lines and elegant body prompt the viewer to stare again at the surrounding, mundane animals from our less than ideal world. In another group the lone, timid pigeon is ill at ease and gripping hard, as it should do in the company of a vulture, a sparrow hawk and a white eagle each with a savage ripper on the end of their beaks. Picasso knocked off a ‘thirty-second print’ to the series, the flea, using the offending insect as an excuse for a soft porn image of a woman. The true thirty-second image is however the photograph of Picasso himself – a phenomenon of nature, black eyes, long and very strong arms, powerful shoulders, a unique species out of a twentieth century Histoire Naturelle. A very good exhibition. Many thanks to the Arts Council and the Hayward Gallery.