It’s a match made in heaven. The National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona have combined their areas of expertise to co-organise a major exhibition on Picasso’s portraiture this autumn. Picasso Portraits (6 October 2016-5 February 2017) will present “the extraordinary range of styles Picasso employed across all media and from all periods of his career,” says Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), in a statement. Together with major loans from other institutions—including the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York—as well as loans from private collectors and Picasso’s heirs, the exhibition will feature more than 75 portraits.
Elizabeth Cowling, the curator of the exhibition, says the show provides a unique opportunity to present Picasso’s work as part of a lineage of portraiture in art history. “Picasso is variant to many of the painters in the NPG who were paid to paint historic figures as he painted his entourage without commissions. But there are recurring strategies of classic portraiture in Picasso’s work,” she says. “It was my aim to display the different modes of Picasso’s portraits but also their relationship to the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery.”
Part of the exhibition is dedicated to Picasso’s relationship to Old Master portraits and painters. This section will include a painting from the series Las Meninas (1957), in which Picasso reinterprets Velazquez’s famous painting of the same name, as well as prints inspired by Degas and Rembrandt.
While audiences can still expect to see Picasso’s well-known colourful abstract works such as Woman in a Hat (Olga, 1935), the show will also include examples from his early career, and an extraordinary collection of caricatures from 1900 to 1957. Many of the caricatures belong to the Museu Picasso and come from the private collection of Jaume Sabartés, Picasso’s friend and personal secretary. They have never been seen outside of Barcelona. For Cowling, these drawings are central. “Picasso’s sense of humour is often not sufficiently emphasised but it is an important aspect of his work. He was drawing caricatures throughout his life from as early as the age of eight.”
Other standout loans include the Cubist portrait of the German-born art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler from the Art Institute of Chicago, which has never been shown in the UK, and Self Portrait with Palette (1906), from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The latter will be included in a large display of self-portraits that will open the exhibition. The exhibition will travel to Museu Picasso, Barcelona, where it will be on show from 17 March to 25 June 2017. The exhibition is sponsored by Goldman Sachs.
