BARCELONA.- The exhibition focuses on Picasso’s artistic development from his arrival in Paris in 1900, where he discovered a thriving international art community, until 1907, when he had established himself as the leading figure on the avant-garde art scene in Paris. His first direct exposure to the work of painters such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and Forain was a revelation to the young artist. His response was immediate, and was reflected in the discovery of new painting and drawing techniques and his embrace of a new subject matter, centred on his own experiences of modern life and modern art. For instance, the suicide in Montmartre of his Barcelona friend Carles Casagemas prompted works that deliberately evoked the palette and brushstrokes of Van Gogh.

One of the most important aspects of this exhibition is the way it brings out these habitual features of Picasso’s art. He was never an imitator — no Picasso can be confused with any other work — but he continually drew on the findings of his contemporaries, and on art history, to construct a personal style of his own.

This exhibition brings together some sixty pieces by Picasso in a variety of media, and twenty or so works by artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Steinlen and Gauguin, among others, whose prestige was at its peak in the Paris of those years, with the aim not of comparing them with one another but of bearing witness to the tremendous visual stimulus that Parisian life and art represented for Picasso during the first decade of the twentieth century. The exhibition will also include photographs and other materials documenting the Paris of the time.

The exhibition feature works from major museums and private collections around the world, including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Artin New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. In addition, an outstanding selection of works from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will be shown here for the first time in Barcelona, in order to give some idea of the prestige and influence of the Dutch painter in Paris in 1900.