«At twelve years old, I could draw like Raphael, but I needed a whole lifetime to learn to paint like a child.» This is how the artist himself described the path he followed and added drawing to a dialectic process where deconstruction and schematizing harmonise with classicism and bold lines that touch the very heights of craftsmanship.
The early drawings of Picasso as a teenager and a young man show maturity in the sureness and virtuosity of the strokes which contrast with his prime, or even his declining years, where spontaneity and simplicity hide the real mastery and fluidity of a versatile rhythm that plumbs the most personal depths of the artist. With Picasso, we discover that his underlying desire was to pass from classic archetypes to pictures where the allegorical gives way to a subtle sense of humour; pictures where mockery, caricature and the monstrous veil feelings and answers but allow the psychology of the artist to come to the surface.
Drawing takes on an essential role in the birth and development of Picasso’s career as an artist. The collection of drawings that we are showing not only shows us the true dimension of how his drawings affected the artist’s work in general, but also capture the very essence of his artistic journey. These drawings, in fact, are not only a testimony of his outstanding quality as a draughtsman, but form part of Picasso’s most private surroundings, a legacy that he always kept with him and through which we can trace his genuine experimental craft. They define the pace of his creativity, his research and his achievements and reveal the beginnings and development of his most essential work.
Particularly in the second half of his life, Picasso undertook a lucid analysis of that stage of his life and of his daily routine. Drawing becomes the means through which the artist’s autobiography is told. Simple lines alternate with malleable and sinuous outlines that emphasise the perfection of the drawing of a master. A subtle irony alludes to the fleetingness of life; the strokes are mature now, but full of the power of renewed youth, and define the “Picasso style” which has determined art in the 20th century. 
The exhibition will contain more than 200 works, and has been shown first at the Musée Picasso de Paris (27.09.2005 – 09.01.2006), on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the opening of its rooms.

Curatorship: Dominique Dupuis-Labbé
Organization: Musée Picasso de Paris, la Réunion des Musées Nationaux de Paris – Museu Picasso de Barcelona

In the summer of 1946, Picasso went to live in the south of France where his contact with the Mediterranean stimulated a new dimension in the artist’s work. His canvases from this time gave life to mythological beings and pagan scenes. The main work of this period, “La joie de vivre ”, an unselfconscious and carefree painting, highlights the artist's mood of renewal and his faith in life. The pagan spirit of this era, a legacy from Poussin's "The Bacchanalia", painted in 1944, comes forth in a series of pictures of mostly pastoral scenes: fauns, centaurs and goats inhabit the world of this new and exuberant stage in the life and work of the artist. Through literally hundreds of graphs and different techniques, paintings, drawings, ceramics and sculptures, Picasso created various different anthems to life.
Most of these works belong to the collections in the Musée Picasso at Antibes –in the Grimaldi castle in the town, which was inaugurated as a Picasso museum in 1949, three years after Picasso set up his workshop there– and can be seen at our museum in the summer of 2006, while the French museum is temporarily closed.
The exhibition will contain about 100 works and will be first shown at the Museo Picasso de Málaga (13.03.2006 – 11.06.2006).

Project director: Jean-Louis Andral
Organization: Musée Picasso d’Antibes – Museo Picasso de Málaga – Museu Picasso de Barcelona

Picasso’s links with the circus world were a constant feature throughout his life. Towards the end of the 19th century, Picasso went to circuses that came to Barcelona, although there is no trace of this in any of his work of the time. The street circuses in the boulevards of Paris were frequently visited by the young Picasso and his friends, when they first stayed in the city. Late 1904 and the beginning of 1905 is when the subject of the circus, in particular the Medrano circus, became an essential part of his life and work and the focal point of the output of the period. The artist created a fictitious scene where acrobats and tight-rope walkers –who had already appeared throughout the literary and artistic tradition of Romanticism as a symbol of human isolation and suffering– play roles in daily life, display their domestic problems, isolation and lack of understanding of their feelings. Family scenes featuring acrobats and harlequins from this period are the legacy of family group portraits whose roots take hold in the blue period. These compositions would be the base for a great painting that Picasso had been working on for some time, “Acrobat Family”, 1905. The Harlequin, as with the Minotaur of the 1930s, became the artist’s alter ego. The Harlequin, whose genesis dated back to the Blue Period, took on serious importance in what came to be known as the Rose Period.
During the years of analytic Cubism, the Harlequin family reappears in isolated cases in a set of oil paintings from 1909 and in the still life “Loaves of bread and fruit bowl on a table”, where the composition refers us back to a previous work, “Carnival at the tavern”. In 1915, Picasso undertook a series of experiments to continue his analysis of representing the Harlequin and which culminated in the painting entitled “Harlequin”, property of the Museum of Modern Art in New York around which he painted a series of watercolours and which, in his own words, formed the climax of his interpretation of this figure. This intense work would culminate two years later in his first, daring collaboration with the theatre, “Parade”, where, by recreating life at a fairground booth, Picasso was able to create a series of plastic experiments based on the circus world. In this way, his triumphs in Cubism would alternate with a Naturalism that hinted at the great classics, that would appear much later in his life, where the figure of the Harlequin would continue to command a central role.
From 1920 onwards, the subject of the Harlequin and the Pierrot regained importance and together with the 1917 figures, gave rise to the two great and definitive versions of “The three musicians” –where the artist once more takes on the identity of the Harlequin– and which are the splendid culmination of what he learnt on his trip to Italy. In the 1930s, the figure of the Minotaur, with whom the artist identified himself to the point that it also became his alter ego, gradually gave way to that of the Harlequin until its remains were gathered in the symbolic drawing “Minotaur and Harlequin”.
In his last works, the circus show acquires special significance and the artist exorcises the circus work of his youth. Once again, the amazons and the clowns appear in a rich and varied display where his work defies the inexorable fleetingness of life. He did not hesitate to allow himself to be photographed as a clown on several occasions, revealing his inner personality as both heroic and sad. These magnificent photographs were taken by photographer friends such as David Douglas Duncan, André Villiers and Edward Quinn.
The Picasso and the Circus exhibition will review Picasso’s treatment of the circus world, throughout his artistic career. The exhibition will later travel to the Fondation Pierre Gianadda at Martigny (09.03.2007-10.06.2007).

Curatorship: Dominique Dupuis-Labbé and Maria Teresa Ocaña
Organization: Fondation Pierre Gianadda de Martigny – Museu Picasso de Barcelona

The group of art works that comprise the permanent collection of a museum form its central essence, around which all its activity and work rotate. Within this criteria, the analysis of the Museu Picasso of Barcelona collection, making it better known to the general public and linking it to other aspects of Picasso’s body of work not represented in our Museu, are the objectives behind a brand new exhibition we wish to present.
Focussing on Picasso’s formative years –the central axis of the Museu collection– we have decided to feature more closely throughout this year of 2006 on certain aspects of our portfolio of his early works, along with the inclusion of some paintings and drawings generously lent from private collections. To be more specific, we have directed our attention on the period between his childhood years spent in La Coruña up to his entry into the field of the avant garde. At the same time, we have in this exhibition the chance to review an excellent section of cubist drawings –a phase of his work that is very scarcely represented in our Museu.
This new look of our permanent collection reveals just how much Picasso’s work was both tenacious and prolific; to what extent the process of creating his projects trickled over difficult terrains until finding a way to materialise, sometimes immediately or on occasions, never surpassing the simple study phase, only to reappear, almost by surprise, years later in some other work.Our Museu is emblematic of everything to do with the great artist’s formative years and constitutes the clearest exponent of the rigorous idea that from an extremely young age had framed his career. The inclusion of these new works also rewards us with a greater incision into new aspects of our collection, as well as to demonstrate the process that carried Picasso from academy to innovation, as revealed by the magnificent series of cubist drawings previously referred to.

Organization: Museu Picasso de Barcelona

To mark the occasion of the PICASSO2006BCN project, the Museu Barbier-Mueller d´art precolombí in Barcelona organises a rather unusual exhibition, juxtaposing the work of Picasso with sculptures by artists from the tribal world of pre-Columbian Latin America or from Mediterranean Antiquity. This will be the first ever showing in Spain of a wooden head sculpture by Picasso from 1907 alongside the object that inspired its creation: an Iberian stone head dating from the 5th  Century B.C. A catalogue, including the collaboration of Maite Ocaña, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller and Pierre Daix, with a preface by Jorge Semprún, shall be published for this occasion.

Curatorship: Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller
Organization: Museu Barbier-Mueller d’art precolombí de Barcelona – Museu Picasso de Barcelona

Talk on the exhibition at the Biblioteca de Nou Barris, with a focus on the circus.

Organization: Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona – Museu Picasso de Barcelona