Picasso museum: a long-awaited reopening

On October 25th, the hotel Salé which houses the national Picasso Museum since 1985, will finally reopen its doors after five years of work led by the architect Jean-François Bodin. Guided visits to a brand new museum. 

(c) Succession Picasso, 2014

”Give me a museum and I will fill it.” The celebrated words of Picasso will take on all their meaning during the reopening of the museum on October 25th, the anniversary of the painter’s birth. After more than five years of work, 52 million Euros invested in the project, an entanglement in the administration of the museum and an inauguration rescheduled several times, The Picasso Museum finally has had a face-lift. Paris holds the most complete collection of works of the artist, and it is these that the visitors can discover very shortly. The renovation work has resulted in an expanded exposition area of 3,800 square meters (compared with 1,600 square meters in 1985), the museum will now be able to display even more works and welcome more visitors.

(c) Succession Picasso, 2014

But what are the new features? To begin with, the Picasso Museum will rid itself of temporary exhibitions. The permanently exposed works shall be organized as a tour to guide the public during their visit. Up until the summer of June 2015, the exhibition will be organized as a chronological tour. For the 30th anniversary of the museum, a thematic presentation is anticipated, offering greater access to the archives of the painter. The open area organized around 5 large stages of 500 square meters each, will be redesigned on a regular basis in order to vary the setting and approach to the work of the painter. The museum’s president Laurent Le Bon comments on the topic: “Displays in a monographic museum cannot be fixed in place, it is essential to constantly revitalize the approach.”

(c) Succession Picasso, 2014

Visitors can at last admire the major emblematic works from the formative periods of the master. Over a period of seven decades, the painter quite simply revolutionized art of the 20th century. Among the classics you will be able to admire are notably La Célestine (1904), painted during the artist’s blue period and representing a fortune teller with an evil appearance, or the Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), the painter’s principle model and mistress.

(c) Succession Picasso, 2014

Another new item which will surely please visitors curious to learn more about the life of the painter, the museum will present the private collection of the artist. This is a less well-known facet of the life of the artist, but Picasso collected and accumulated scores of objects, photographs, canvases, postcards, jewelry… The artist couldn’t stand to be apart from the objects which were intertwined with his life and art, thus he saved everything in a bazaar all his own. Following his death, no less than 70, 000 objects were found to have been accumulated in his various apartments and workshops. Initially, constituted from junk found here and there, his collection became larger and more diversified from year to year, serving a testimony to the period. The painter gradually acquired renown little by little. He rounded out his collection thanks to art merchant friends who procured for him works from Ambroise Vollard, Edgar Degas, Paul Eluard or even Gertrude Stein.

(c) Succession Picasso, 2014

In total, the museum will present more n 5,000 works (including 300 paintings and 300 sculptures) at will shed an entirely new and complete light on the mastery of Picasso. There are also notably plans, over the next few months, to invite contemporary artists to expose their work among those of the master, in order to, yet once again, reinvigorate an approach to his work.