There must be as many stories about Picasso as the artist had names. At the height of his fame, the man christened – deep breath – Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso would make a quick sketch on a napkin to cover a restaurant bill.
One story has it that, when asked to sign the sketch, he replied that he wanted lunch, not to buy the whole place. You can see why he took to going by his last name.
Other tales are less benign, about his misogyny, his conflicted relationships with his children and his appropriation of African art. In 1911 he was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. The case went to trial, and although he was innocent of that crime he did turn out to have two Iberian statues stashed in his Paris apartment, each stamped with the Louvre’s mark.
Even beyond a fascination with his genius, Picasso’s life coincides with interesting times. Born in the city of Málaga in 1881, he lived through the Spanish civil war and both world wars, and achieved huge fame, before dying in France in 1973. He is credited, alongside Georges Braque, with inventing cubism, yet his restless quest for truth led him to explore and experiment with a vast variety of media and forms of expression.
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When he designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in 1917, the writer Jean Cocteau said, “Picasso amazes me every day... A badly drawn figure of Picasso is the result of endless well-drawn figures he erases, corrects, covers over...”
Guilliaume Apollinaire, Picasso’s coaccused in the Mona Lisa affair, described his fellow artist’s ballet designs as “a kind of surrealism”, three years before surrealism became a recognised art form.
Is Picasso just a ‘problematic white guy’? Or is he one of the greatest artists and innovators in the canon of 20th-century art?
On the other hand, on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, the Guardian newspaper remarked that, “today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist and cultural appropriator, the ultimate example of problematic white guys clogging up the artistic canon”.
Is he really all that? Or is he really just that? The landmark exhibition newly opened at the National Gallery of Ireland gives us a chance to explore the artist’s life and art, but not through blockbuster pieces such as his blue period Old Guitarist, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Le Rêve or Weeping Woman (two of which are from the 1900s and two from the 1930s).
Instead, drawn from the collection of Musée National Picasso-Paris, with the addition of two works from the National Gallery, From the Studio primarily focuses on the art that Picasso could not bear to part with.
But isn’t everything for sale, at a price? Fortunately not. Sometimes the keeping is because a particular piece marks a moment of departure, a working out; it can become a touchstone of making, something to return to when the artist needs an anchor.
At the Paris museum you can also see works from Picasso’s collection by other artists, more touchstones. There is a series of mythological sketches by Renoir, and Chateau Noir by Paul Cézanne, whom Picasso and Henri Matisse both described as “the father of us all”.
Not all reasons for keeping are practical. On show at the National Gallery is Claude Drawing, Françoise and Paloma, a deeply beautiful painting in rich purple, blue, green and grey from 1954.
It shows the artist Françoise Gilot, who was Picasso’s lover at the time, leaning over their two small children, Claude and Paloma, as Claude sketches and Paloma curls up into herself, in the way that little girls do.
There is a rich enigma here: is Gilot looming over her children’s lives as they emerge into individuals, or is she sheltering, nurturing? She seems to enfold love and peace, yet there is also the sense of exclusion, and who is being excluded? Picasso, of course. Perhaps this is something every father feels.
[ Françoise Gilot: ‘Picasso took the cigarette and touched it to my right cheek’Opens in new window ]
“I think there’s an emotional attachment,” says Joanne Snrech, of the Musée Picasso, who curated the exhibition with Janet McLean of the National Gallery.
“He has kept them with him his whole life. A lot of the portraits of his children, he kept, and paintings of his studios.”
The Studio at La Californie, also in the exhibition, shows the interior of Picasso’s Cannes studio, which he inhabited from 1955 to 1961.
“We’re sending some of our icons to Dublin,” Snrech says. “And this is one of my favourites. It’s fascinating. It’s the place and the point in which Picasso’s life and Picasso’s work are completely fused. The three huge rooms are both his studio and the livingroom.”
Studios define the scale of what an artist can make while also inflecting their work through light and through their environment. At Vallauris, on the Côte d’Azur, in the 1950s, Picasso was surrounded by ceramics factories, and many of his ceramics from this period feature in the National Gallery exhibition.
A photograph, by André Villers, shows the Californie studio in all its balance of creative order and chaos. This painting, Snrech says, “has so much packed into it. He did a series about this specific studio. It’s the one he painted most, and he calls the paintings ‘interior landscapes’, so they are almost like self-portraits. He identifies with the place so much.”
She also points out that the painting is “a kind of homage to Matisse. He paints them just after Matisse passed away. So they are both a homage to Matisse and a self-portrait of Picasso. There’s also a portrait of his wife in there. I think that’s my favourite part.”
There are also references in the painting to early cubism and to Braque. At the centre of The Studio at La Californie a blank canvas sits on an easel, the white rectangle sucking you into its emptiness.
“It’s all the paintings that are yet to come,” Snrech says.
It makes me think of the angst of the poet John Keats when he wrote, in 1818, about “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain”, which perhaps is a way into an understanding of Picasso’s life and work.
In 2010 the Kunsthaus Zurich, in Switzerland, restaged a key exhibition that Picasso had curated of his own work back in 1932. Starting with his early, impressionist-inspired work, into the pink and blue periods, through cubism and neoclassical, to an explosion of colour with both cubist and surrealist scenes, the overriding sense was of an artist if not bored with his own genius then constantly seeking the challenge that would wrench truth out of his head into art.
The idea of truth is, of course, a tricky one. Picasso himself said that “we all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
He was clearly one of those people unable to prevent themselves from soaking up everything around them: ideas, impressions, images, emotions, feelings.
This is an uncomfortable space in which to find oneself; psychologically speaking, your options are to either shut down or try to get it out. In some ways this connects to the appropriation question: everything went into his art.
Picasso is also an artist who accessed the darker sides of his mind, and put them in his work, to lie in wait until each generation is ready to see them. It is humanity in all its facets, and such things don’t come out of nowhere. It takes someone such as Picasso to absorb, to distil, to crystallise.
That doesn’t excuse behaviours, but it is an error to reject work that explores all facets of humanity just because we would prefer not to look them, or the life of the maker, in the face.
Take Guernica, Picasso’s mind-blowing scream at the horrors of war, which he painted in 1937 after the bombing of Guernica, in the Basque Country of northern Spain, during the Spanish civil war.
There is the gored horse, the screaming women, the dead baby, the dismembered soldier, the bull, the flames. The original is on display at the Reina Sofía Museum, in Madrid. A full-scale tapestry version at the United Nations building in New York was, infamously, covered up by a blue curtain in 2003, so that it would not be visible during press conferences as Colin Powell argued, as US secretary of state, in favour of war on Iraq.
We don’t have to admire the life of the artist to realise the power of the work he created.
A series of eight photographs by the French surrealist photographer and antifascism activist Dora Maar show Guernica in evolution. Picasso was Maar’s lover at the time, and it is argued that she had a profound influence on Guernica, through both her political activism and her artistic style.
Exhibited as a slide show at the National Gallery, her images get underneath the skin of how art comes about, and watching it is a mesmerising experience. Nothing, it seems, is set in stone (or at least, in paint) until the final moment. That central horse moves about, blocks of light and shade change. Its making seems as restless as the artist himself.
Maar later said that “all his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” She was, of course, entirely right. Picasso’s artistic subjects were the basis for his works, but his works are the medium through which so much else comes through.
Think of his Weeping Woman, from 1937: it is “of” Dora Maar, but it is also of a grief so intense that everything fragments. It is almost as if humanity itself is falling apart. Weeping Woman is part of a series of paintings made in response to the bombing of Guernica. The most famous of these is at Tate Modern, in London, and that touches on another intriguing aspect of this exhibition.
In the 1990s a cognitive scientist at Cornell University, James Cutting, showed how we tend to think famous artworks are better than lesser-known ones. He also showed that this effect can be reversed with exposure.
Add to this, as Stephen Campbell recently explored in The Irish Times, that it is more or less impossible to come to a very famous work of art without preconceptions, or without a strange form of deja vu. Drawn from Picasso’s own studio, the works here are by definition lesser known, but this gives us the rare opportunity to meet many of them fresh. We can both look and see.
Art changes through the prism of ownership and exhibition, and we have all experienced that lurching from label to label in vast museums, seeking out the icons, perhaps overlooking their lesser-known neighbours. We can miss worlds of remarkable art that way.
Janet McLean, the National Gallery curator, agrees with Snrech’s idea of Picasso’s intense affection for certain works. “He felt they were almost like members of his family,” she says.
She also underlines the connection in this exhibition with the series of studios he inhabited through key phases of his life. “Picasso was different at different times of his career. As a curator I’m always intrigued by the works I don’t know, so here I think you’ll see different sides and aspects of him.”
The National Gallery’s Still Life with a Mandolin, from 1924, tells a parallel story of the life of an artwork once sold: how changing tides in the lives of collectors often reflect shifts in politics and capital, and how time can move ownership from personal to institutional.
These are all things that are not part of the art, yet they are the elements from which art comes about. We can be seduced by the idea of “knowing” an artist, as if reducing it to personality can help us to be at less of a loss when standing before something extraordinary, disconcerting or marvellous.
So is Picasso just a “problematic white guy”? Or is he one of the greatest artists and innovators in the canon of 20th-century art? This exhibition gives us an exceptional opportunity to consider.
Picasso: From the Studio is at the National Gallery of Ireland until February 22nd, 2026. You can buy tickets at nationalgallery.ie
All photographs courtesy Musée National Picasso-Paris. © Succession Picasso/Dacs, London 2025. © GrandPalaisRmn
