MOSCOW (EFE).- Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts will inaugurate Feb. 25 an exhibition devoted to Malaga's universally acclaimed painter, with works on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris, currently closed for remodeling, the Russian museum's deputy director, Zinaida Bonami, said Wednesday.

In this large-scale show dubbed "Moscow. Picasso," not only will the best-known paintings and engravings by the Spanish artist be on display, but also his sculptures and ceramics.

"The museum's works are on a world tour and we expect the Moscow project to be something special, since it will be the biggest retrospective ever of the 20th-century master, exceptional for his artistic temperament and experimental diversity," Bonami told the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Exhibited together with the works from the French capital will be the Pushkin collection, including the masterwork "Acrobat on a Ball."

The organizers of the exhibition plan to show what they call Picasso's "Russian dimension," in reference to the warm relations the Malaga painter had with many Russian artists, Bonami said.

As an example, the exhibition will feature a portrait of the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, Picasso's first wife, as well as photos from his personal collection with autographs of several members of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, with which he collaborated in the design of sets, backdrops and wardrobes.

The Pushkin Museum, moreover, has planned for this year another great project in which masterpieces of classical painters from the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts will be shown.

This exhibition will focus on such painters of the Spanish school as El Greco, Velazquez, Goya and Murillo, with a smaller representation from the Pushkin Museum collection, Bonami said. EFE