Museu Picasso

Museu Picasso review

'There is where it all began… where I understood how far I could go,' Picasso said of his formative years in Barcelona. His family arrived here just before his 14th birthday; the nine years he was based here, before moving to Paris at 23, were to exert a lifelong influence on his work.

After training in La Llotja art school (where his father taught), the poverty-stricken Picasso lived in the port area, where he became fascinated by the underbelly of fin-de-siècle Barcelona - its brothels, beggars and street entertainers feature heavily in his early work. He was also a key member of the bohemian circle of artists at the Quatre Gats café, several of whom became lifelong friends. One was Jaume Sabartés, who later became Picasso's secretary and founder of the Picasso Museum.

By the time the museum opened in 1963, Picasso was world famous and the museum was housed in the prestigious Palau Aguilar. Sabartés donated his own personal collection and also united most of Picasso's pieces from the city museums. The collection has grown to fill five adjoining palaces, with more than 3,500 permanent pieces and a constant stream of high-profile temporary shows.

Rather than being an overview of the artist's work, the museum is a record of the young Picasso's vital formative years.
The seamless presentation of his development from 1890 to 1904, from deft pre-adolescent portraits to sketchy landscapes to the intense innovations of his Blue Period, is unbeatable. It then leaps to a gallery of mature Cubist paintings from 1917. Those looking for hits such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the first Cubist paintings from the time (many
of them done in Catalonia) will be disappointed. But the pièce de résistance is the complete series of 58 canvases based
on Velázquez's Las Meninas, donated by Picasso himself after the death of Sabartés. Tribute is paid to Sabartés with a room dedicated to Picasso's portraits of him (best known is the Blue Period painting where he wears a white ruff), and Sabartés's own doodlings.

The display ends with linocuts, engravings and some wonderful ceramics donated by Picasso's widow. Guided tours in English take place at 6pm on Thursdays and noon Saturdays and are included in the ticket price.