Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d'Alger, 1955. European Private Collection. © Photo courtesy of Libby Howie / Succession Picasso / DACS 2009.

From his earliest years Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a passionate student of the grand European painting tradition, frequently visiting the Louvre, the Prado and many other museums for inspiration. The masters of Spanish painting, including El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, were of crucial importance to him, as were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Ingres, Manet and Cézanne. Picasso pitted himself against each of these painters in a life-long artistic dialogue, taking up their signature themes, techniques and artistic concerns in audacious paintings of his own.

Featuring approximately 60 major works by Picasso, this exhibition explores the many ways in which the greatest painter of the 20th century sought to challenge the Old Masters. The exhibition focuses on enduring themes Picasso confronted throughout his career, with sections dedicated to the self portrait, the Spanish tradition of the male portrait, the female nude, the still life, the seated female figure, and the artist’s later ‘variations’ on great works of the past such as Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.

Sometimes his ‘quotations’ from the Old Masters were direct, at other times highly allusive and inflected by personal concerns; occasionally, they were full of parody and irreverence. Always, Picasso made the implicit case that it was he, in the 20th century, who most forcefully reinvigorated the European tradition.

Reference will be made back and forth between the exhibition and the Gallery’s own incomparable collection of Old Master paintings. In so doing, the exhibition will explore Picasso’s relationship with the art of the past, and show its daring transformation under his brush into ‘something else entirely’.

Picasso: Challenging the Past has been organised in conjunction with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Musée National Picasso, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.