Picasso, through the Eyes of Paul Smith

Period

June 10 (Wed), 2026 – September 21 (Mon), 2026

Closed on Tuesdays
*Closed on August 12 (Open on August 11)

Opening Hours

10:00-18:00
Fridays and Saturdays, 10:00-20:00
*Last admission 30 minutes before closing

Venue

The National Art Center, Tokyo
Special Exhibition Gallery 2E
7-22-2 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-8558

Organized by

The National Art Center, Tokyo; Musée national Picasso-Paris; Nikkei Inc.; TBS TELEVISION, INC.; TBS GLOWDIA, INC.; TV TOKYO Corporation

With the sponsorship of:
ABeam Consulting Ltd.; Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd

With the Supported of:
Embassy of France / French Institute of Japan; J-WAVE（81.3FM）; TBS RADIO,INC.

Inquiries

(+81) 47-316-2772 (Hello Dial)

General	2,200 yen (Adults)、1,200 yen (College students)、800 yen (High School Students)
General	2,400 yen (Adults)、1,400 yen (College students)、1,000円 yen (High School Students)

・Online Ticket Sales
　[Advance] Selling Period: May 8 (Fri), 2026, at 10:00 - June 9 (Tue), 2026, at 23:59
　[General] Selling Period: June 10(Wed), 2026, at 00:00 - September 21(Mon), 2026, at 17:00
　On Sale at: e-tix

・On-Site Ticket Sales
　Selling Period: June 10(Wed) - September 21(Mon), 2026
　On Sale at: Ticket Counter （The National Art Center, Tokyo)

Book tickets here［e-tix］

• Advance tickets will go on sale starting May 8, 2026, at 10:00 PM.
• Visitors who are under junior high school students and disabled people with ID booklets (along with the one assistant) will be admitted for free.
• Free entrance to the exhibition for high school students from July 29 (Wed.) to July 31 (Fri.) ,2026, upon presenting student ID.
• Reduction (100 yen off) applies to visitors who present the ticket stub of a current exhibition at The National Art Center, Tokyo; Suntory Museum of Art; or Mori Art Museum. Please show the ticket stub at the YBA & BEYOND exhibition ticket booth.
• Students, faculty and staff, of "Campus Members", can view this exhibition for 1600 yen (students) and 2000 yen (faculty/staff). Please purchase tickets at the "YBA&BEYOND" exhibition ticket booth.
• The following credit cards and e-cash options are available for purchasing tickets at The National Art Center, Tokyo ticket counters.
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00 A Trick of the Mind

A veritable icon of the process of artistic metamorphosis, Bull’s Head is undoubtedly the most famous transformation of a found object in Picasso’s oeuvre. The artist is said to have discovered the bicycle saddle and handlebar—from which the artwork was made—in a dump, on his way to the funeral of his sculptor friend Julio González, who died in 1942. 　　　

The simple assemblage of two objects, with no intervention from the artist, led this work to be linked to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, and in particular his first one, Bicycle Wheel, from 1913. Through the magical act of assemblage, the viewer no longer sees the original object—the bicycle—which is obscured by the evocative power of the newly created bull. There ensues a semantic confusion, a trick of the mind.

01 An Artist in Vogue

Picasso’s predilection for reading periodicals and comics dates to his childhood and seems to be strongly linked to the pleasure of combining texts and images. At the age of thirteen he began creating his own periodicals, such as Azul y Blanco (Blue and White), which recounted the news in La Coruña, where he lived at the time. Later, he developed a habit of drawing directly in books, sketching characters on pages torn from novels by Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert that echoed their content. 

Adorned with fierce little figures, the May 1951 issue of Vogue Paris illustrates superbly the mechanisms of these re-readings through drawing. The kitsch photographs of brides promoting ready-to-wear outfits are here turned into absurd, grotesque, nightmarish images. 

02 Blue Melancholy

In the autumn of 1901, a few months after the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, the artist developed a new stylised, almost monochrome idiom, characterised by an expressive distortion of line inherited from El Greco. Picasso concentrated on the melancholic representation of members of the poorest social class—beggars, prostitutes, and heavy drinkers. Gradually flooded with blue, from azure to navy, his canvases became simpler, acquiring a more monumental feel.  

After several months spent in Barcelona, the young painter temporarily returned to Paris at the beginning of 1903, where he stayed with the poet Max Jacob in his apartment on Boulevard Voltaire. The two friends lived in poverty: Picasso slept in the daytime, while Jacob earned a living as a salesman, and Picasso painted and drew at night. The predominance of blue in his palette might thus be explained by his habit of working in darkness, by the light of an oil lamp.  

03 Pink Ladeis: A Prelude to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

In the autumn of 1906, carrying on from what he had begun during the summer spent in Gósol—a remote village in the Catalan Pyrenees—Picasso worked on simplifying form and space, focusing almost exclusively on the female body. All are characterised by the abandoning of illusionist procedures in favour of a new expressive language, forged in contact with a growing interest in Iberian art, which he discovered at the Musée du Louvre in Paris at the beginning of the year: construction through the articulation of simplified forms with clearly defined outlines; a hieratic and frontal viewpoint; and the restriction of the colour palette to ochre hues. Picasso subsequently developed his proto-Cubist language, making the anatomical forms rougher and thereby asserting the androgynous quality of his feminine figures, which would emerge dramatically a few months later in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 

04 The Cubist Labratory

In the autumn of 1906, the influence of several new sources of inspiration—Iberian art, Romanesque sculpture, and non-Western art, chiefly African and Oceanic—led to a key change of direction in Picasso’s work. The fruit of a close collaboration with Georges Braque, Cubism developed in several artistic fields: primarily in painting, but also in sculpture and papiers collés, the three practices all exerting a mutual influence on each other. 

Although the first proto-Cubist works were focused on the representation of nature and landscape, Cubist artists quickly turned their attention to everyday subjects. Occasionally, Cubist representations of architectural elements were attempted, as in Picasso’s The Sacré-Cœur (no. 8), which depicts the basilica as it was rising on Montmartre. The first years of the Cubist movement, from 1909 to 1911, which art historians dubbed ‘Analytical Cubism’, were also marked by the use of a limited colour palette, consisting of shades of grey and beige. 

05 Assemblages and Collages

By incorporating manufactured materials and everyday objects into their practice, Picasso and the Cubist artists (Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, ...) profoundly challenged the illusionistic and mimetic paradigm of art. This Cubist innovation, drawing in part on the popular material practices of the time (decoupage, DIYs, imitation of materials), marked a rupture in the traditional role of artists who, from then on, allowed themselves to substitute fragments of reality for its representation. 

The technique of assemblage transposed the innovative ideas of collage into three dimensions. The objects employed were gradually diverted from their original meaning to acquire new significance. While such repurposing had already emerged during the Cubist period, Picasso began to systematise this practice from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. 

06 Classical Painter

At the turn of the 1920s, the artistic climate was what art historians describe as the ‘Return to Order’, understood as a revival of figuration and classical subjects. After the traumas of the First World War, art was expected to serve as a point of reference for reconstruction. In Picasso’s case, this period—described as ‘neoclassical’ or even ‘Ingresque’—developed alongside a late Cubist style that he pursued in parallel. 

The 1920s also marked a transformation in the artist’s social status. In his private life, he married Olga Khokhlova in 1918, a professional dancer born in the Russian Empire. In 1921, the couple welcomed their son Paul. Picasso portrayed his new family in numerous works, both paintings and drawings. The delicacy that emanates from works of this period is heightened by a clear line that defines figures against blank backgrounds, without any shading or sense of depth. 

07 Childhood

Picasso places childhood at the heart of his work—as subject, symbol, creative stance, and driving force in search of forms. These loving images of his children, which fall within the traditional genre of family portraiture, also possess a universal resonance. 

Yet Picasso’s connection to childhood goes beyond familial bonds: for him, children also embodied the energy of spontaneous creation, the freshness of a new gaze, and a clear defiance of academicism. These works open up a broader perspective, revealing the artist’s interest in childhood as a means of decentring the gaze. Picasso worked on children’s drawings to see art through their eyes and to recapture a sense of freshness—a return to art’s own childhood.  

08 Bullfighting

Picasso’s work is deeply marked by his fascination with bullfighting, from the first drawings executed in La Coruña to the last great matador figures. The artist embraced this theme—strongly linked to the Spanish imagination—which he stripped of its folkloric elements in order to concentrate on its visual power, symbolic significance, and sacred dimension. An ardent aficionado, he had attended the ritual of bullfighting since childhood and continued to visit arenas throughout his life, during his stays in Spain and the South of France.  

Picasso’s works often focus on the moments when the action is at its most intense: the charging bull disembowelling the horse and the death of the bullfighter. The tragic instant of the cogida, when the bull tosses the bullfighter on one of its horns, was the subject of several works between the late 1910s and the 1930s. The circle of the bullring would in this instance form the space of an imaginary theatre, in which sexuality, putting to death, and the sacred intermingle and merge into each other. 

09 Stripes

In the 1930s, Picasso began to experiment with the motif of stripes in painting, drawing, and printmaking. The painter revisits, in fact, the classical theme of the female portrait through his own perception of the sitter. Marie-Thérèse Walter is rendered entirely in erotic curves, as in the 1932 painting The Reading (no. 49). Depicted either lost in sleep or absorbed in reading, the figure reveals her nudity and voluptuous breasts. 

The paintings inspired by Surrealist photographer Dora Maar are, on the other hand, distinguished by her sharp physical traits. Picasso portrayed her in a nearly frontal pose, with sharper contours and an open neckline, and employed a warmer palette that made the erotic charge more overt. Painted in 1939, Bust of a Woman with Striped Hat (no. 52) is saturated with dense black lines that convey a profound sense of despair. 

10 Wartime

Although the subjects he treated during the war years remained close to his favourite themes—mainly still lifes, portraits and nudes, and a few landscapes—the war was often a subtext in these works. The portraits that Picasso created in these years reflect the brutality and inhumanity of the period. The formal violence of these works contrasts with the ordinary nature of their subjects. The face in Bust of a Woman with Hat (no. 53) for instance, is distorted, the reshaped head a strange mass of flesh with misaligned eyes and a twisted mouth.  

Picasso also transcribed the toughness of the times in his depictions of interiors. Like Owl in an Interior (no. 56), the still lifes and interiors from this period are characterised by their tight, almost suffocating framing and dark tones. Although the owl may seem like a comforting presence—especially given Picasso’s love for animals in general and birds in particular—the chair on which it rests somehow morphs into a sharp spear, and confers an ominous undertone on the scene. 

11 One-off Pieces

Although Picasso created his first terracotta works in Montmartre in 1906, in the studio of his compatriot Paco Durrio, who taught him about firing clay, it was in Vallauris, where he settled in 1948, that he embarked on an intense period of producing ceramics. The thousands of original works that emerged up to 1954 from the Madoura workshop, reflect the skill, curiosity, and inventiveness of a man who relished crafting, modelling, incising, and painting clay in its multiple aspects. In addition to plates, dishes, pitchers, ases, and lamps, shards, bricks, tiles, pignates (cooking pots), and gazelles (clay pipes used to separate racks in the kiln) were decorated with depictions of musical fauns, dancers, animals, and bullfighting scenes that evoked the painter’s new environment. These rich years of mentoring place Picasso’s practice as a ceramicist at the heart of artistic and social considerations. 

12 Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

During the 1950s, Picasso executed series of variations on major works from the history of Western art. After Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment and Diego Vélazquez’s Las Meninas, he embarked on a reinterpretation of Édouard Manet’s masterpiece, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), which deconstructs and brings together in the same scene the main genres of classical painting—the plein air landscape, the conversation and the still life. Like Manet and Vélazquez, Picasso explored the device of the relationship between the artist and his model, as well as the place of the viewer. Although he sketched out a project in 1954, it was chiefly between the summer of 1959 and 1962 that he dedicated himself fully to this process of appropriation and reinterpretation. Thanks to its scope, this series of works occupies a unique place in the artist’s confrontation with the ‘masters’, Picasso producing 27 paintings, around 140 drawings, as well as 5 linocuts and several sculptures on this subject. 

13 Picasso's Striped Sailor Shirt

It was in the decades following the Second World War—marked by the rise of press photography and the advent of television—that Picasso’s media image truly crystallised. Thus, in the collective imaginary, the stereotypical image of Picasso took hold: a balding man with white hair, clad in a striped sailor shirt. The series of portraits taken by photographer Robert Doisneau played a decisive role in shaping this image. In 1952, Doisneau visited the artist at his home in Vallauris, a small town near Cannes. At ease before the camera, Picasso playfully engaged with his surroundings—for example, placing little bread rolls which he placed like hands on the table in front of him.  

The garment, through its history, reinforced the archetypal image of the artist as both bohemian and industrious. He consistently chose work clothes in photographic portraits and self-portraits: from the blue overalls of his Cubist period to the now-iconic striped sailor shirt of the 1950s and 1960s. 

14 The Late Period: 1969–1972

The final years of Picasso’s life were indeed marked by exceptional creativity and productivity: from 1961 onwards, he was living at the Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, and he made 194 drawings between 1969 and 1971, 156 prints between 1971 and 1972, and more than 350 paintings completed between 1969 and his death in 1973. This immense body of work was showcased in two exhibitions held in Avignon, in 1970 and 1973. 

Picasso’s favourite theme during these years was undeniably the human figure, explored in a variety of forms: male and female portraits, depictions of couples, and occasional representations of families, such as The Family (no. 77). This period also saw an explosion of colours. The works are further characterised by a great freedom of movement and a more pronounced gestural quality than those of previous years. While some commentators mocked these late works as grotesque or senile, most critics of the time praised the artist’s painterly virtuosity and undiminished creativity of the artist at the beginning of his nineties.  

15 Picasso on Show

During his lifetime, Pablo Picasso held hundreds of solo exhibitions. Among them, several marked decisive milestones in the Spanish artist’s career: his first Paris exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1901, which brought him to the attention of the press; his first retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1932, which he personally oversaw the installation; the 1939 exhibition at MoMA in New York, featuring his monumental anti-fascist masterpiece Guernica; and the exhibition presenting his late paintings at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970 and 1973. 

At each exhibition, posters announcing the artist’s works covered city streets, allowing a wider public to become familiar with his creations. Of the more than 400 exhibition posters recorded, a large number reproduced graphic works, drawings or prints, whose bold areas of flat and solid colour or use of black and white lent themselves well to faithful reproduction.