La collection

The Musée National Picasso–Paris will once again display its collection across three floors from March 12; this follows a year of celebration and the major exhibition devoted to the artist Sophie Calle. Ten years after the museum’s reopening, the collection is now permanently housed in the setting of the Hôtel Salé.

The formation of the Musée National Picasso–Paris’s collection is the result of an extraordinary history and was made possible by the dation—a legal mechanism allowing works to be transferred to the state in lieu of inheritance tax. Today it constitutes the largest public collection of Picasso’s works, the “Picassos by Picasso.” Originating in the artist’s own studios, this collection enables us to better grasp the aesthetic explorations of a Picasso who is at once disconcerting, plural, contradictory, reflective, gestural and conceptual, an aesthete and politically engaged, a resourceful tinkerer and a poet. Is he symbolist, cubist, classical, surrealist, or simply figurative and political?

As an open and living institution, the museum engages with societal questions, using a traversal of his work to examine its reception—that of the most renowned, the most observed, but also the most debated painter.

It is also an opportunity to mount focused dossier exhibitions or counterpoints within the collections. The first in this series pays tribute to the artist Françoise Gilot, who recently passed away. Beyond her famous book Life with Picasso, published in 1965, the artist’s career is evoked from her proximity to the Réalités Nouvelles group to the large, totemic compositions of the “emblematic paintings” of the 1980s.