PABLO PICASSO

The Musée national Picasso-Paris collection is the fruit of an extraordinary history, made possible by the dation procedure – today it is the largest public collection of works by Picasso, the “Picassos of Picasso”. Coming from the artist’s studios, this collection gives us a better grasp of the aesthetic explorations of a Picasso who was by turns disconcerting, plural, contradictory, reflexive, gestural and conceptual, an aesthete and a committed activist, a tinkerer and a poet. Is he symbolist, cubist, classical, surrealist or simply figurative and political?

An open and lively place, the museum is taking up the questions of society to explore the reception of his work, i.e. that of the most famous painter, the most watched, but also the most debated.

It is also an opportunity to devote special exhibitions or counterpoints, at the centre of the collections. The first in this series pays tribute to the artist Françoise Gilot, who passed away recently. In addition to her famous book Vivre avec Picasso (Living with Picasso), published in 1965, the exhibition looks at the artist’s career, from her close association with the Réalités nouvelles group to the great totemic compositions of the “emblematic paintings” of the 1980s.