Must-see exhibitions dedicated to Picasso this year

Organized by the American Federation of Arts with the collaboration of curator Laurence Madeline, the exhibition “Picasso Landscapes Out Of Bounds” features more than forty works spanning the artist’s entire career from museums and private collections. Landscape has been a key subject for Picasso's formal experiments, yet it is among the least studied fields by academics to date. Through this in-depth study, the Mint Museum in Charlotte seeks to reaffirm its importance in the Spanish painter’s work.

Through May 1, 2023, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel is hosting the exhibition “Picasso. Artist and Model: Last Paintings”, ten paintings related to the image of the artist and the model as subject. These highly expressive works date from the last decade of his career, and show how the Andalusian painter’s creative energy never weakened. Here the artist explores the image of himself as such, as well as that of the female body, also raising questions about the latter’s representation in contemporary times.

On the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, the Musée National Picasso in Paris has asked British fashion designer Paul Smith, known for his particular taste in the use of color and detail, to participate as artistic director in the exhibition project that will showcase some of the masterpieces in the collection. With his intervention, Paul Smith addresses an invitation to the public to look at Picasso’s works through the lens of contemporaneity, emphasizing the importance that this artist's work still has today.

Picasso approached art at a very young age, and this early start was never a cause for creative exhaustion: few artists like him had such a prolific and long-lived career, that they continued to paint until a few months before their own death. Works from the Andalusian artist’s final years are featured in the exhibition “Picasso 1969-1972: Final Del Principio” at the Musée Picasso in Antibes, in an exhibition that explores the master's creative drive in his final years, which were full of vitality and inventiveness.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York honors the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death with the exhibition “Young Picasso in Paris”, which will explore the artist’s work since he first arrived in Paris in the fall of 1900. The focus of the exhibition will be the work Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), currently undergoing extraordinary conservation work. Also on display will be a series of works from those years that chronicle the young Picasso’s fascination with the vitality of early 20th-century Paris.

Throughout his career, Picasso played with the forms of the body, breaking it down into a variety of formats and genres and choosing every possible material at his disposal, from wood to iron to concrete. Sculpture was not a secondary page in the production of this artist; on the contrary, it had the same force as painting, drawing, and ceramics, in an idea of complementarity and expansion of his own research through different techniques. The exhibition curated by Carmen Giménez, first director of the Malaga Museum, will move to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from September 29, 2023 to January 14, 2024.

Not much appreciated by Western critics, and admired by young artists seeking new inspiration, Picasso’s work of recent years is open to a multiplicity of interpretations. The “Picasso: Untitled” exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid opens a dialogue with contemporary artists who have been invited to revisit these works by contextualizing them in our present. A project that also encourages visitors to delve into the Spanish artist's works considering some of the topics of contemporary history.

Picasso’s connection with the art of the past is a subject of great interest to historians and enthusiasts, and the Picasso y El Greco exhibition at the Prado Museum in Madrid is one not to be missed. Curated by Carmen Giménez, the exhibition presents a series of works by the Andalusian painter alongside masterpieces by El Greco, of which the museum houses an excellent collection. An opportunity to tell the story of the inspiration Picasso drew from the works of the Spanish Renaissance, especially in the early part of his career.

In 1921, Pablo Picasso spent several months in Fontainebleau, in a studio arranged on the cheap. During this time, his work never stopped and he produced two of his most famous monumental works, Three Women at the Fountain (1921) and The Three Musicians (1921). These two incredible works will be the focus of an exhibition hosted by MoMA this fall, “Picasso in Fontainebleau”, along with a body of documents, drawings and photographs that will chronicle that specific moment in the Spanish artist’s career.

1906 is the year of the “great transformation” for Picasso: it is the year of the exhibition dedicated to Matisse at the Druet Gallery in Paris, the year in which the artist discovers Iberian art at the Louvre and befriends the Stein family. The exhibition, curated by Eugenio Carmona, aims to highlight Picasso’s attention to the body and its construction by considering works dated 1906, the year in which he moved for three months to Gósol, a town in the province of Lleida, where he experimented and evolved his painting with works that moved toward a precubist aesthetic.

Throughout the first quarter of the 20th century, Paris was the center of European culture: artists from all over the world gathered here. The exhibition “Paris 1905-1925” at the Petit Palais in Paris tells how the city managed for more than two decades to maintain its position as the cultural heart of Europe. Cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, the Ville Lumière inspired artists from different parts of the world and was a continuous and inexhaustible source of inspiration for Pablo Picasso.