When Picasso died in 1973, his heirs negotiated with the French government to pay inheritance tax in kind, a selection of works from his private collection. What they handed over, works Picasso had kept for himself through every period of his career, is now the foundation of the Musée Picasso. The collection is housed in the Hôtel Salé, a seventeenth-century mansion in Le Marais.
The tour traces Picasso's career through works he never sold, the Blue Period self-portraits, the proto-Cubist studies, the Classical works of the 1920s, the wartime paintings, and the late works that divided critics and still divide them now. It also addresses, directly, the question of Picasso as a person, the violence, the misogyny, the exploitation of the women in his life, because the work cannot be understood without it.
What you will see
The early Picasso. The Blue Period paintings of 1901 to 1904, made when he was poor and moving between Barcelona and Paris, cold in colour and full of isolation, and then the Cubist works in which he took apart the conventions of representation and altered the course of twentieth-century art.
The later Picasso. The Classical period of the 1920s, when he returned to monumental figurative forms, the part of his career most often passed over, and the late paintings of the 1950s and 1960s that critics once found excessive and later generations have reconsidered.
The Blue Period · Cubism · the late work
Pépin's advice
The Hôtel Salé deserves attention. The mansion is one of the finest examples of seventeenth-century Parisian domestic architecture, and the building alone is worth the visit, independent of the collection.
The tour does not avoid the difficult questions. Picasso's treatment of the women in his life is documented and serious, and the tour addresses it as part of understanding the work, not as a separate moral lesson.
