On 22 December 2025, the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) proudly unveils the year-end international blockbuster exhibition Picasso Through the Eyes of Paul Smith. As the first stop of the global tour and the sole venue in China, the exhibition is co-organized by MAP and the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The exhibition adopts a contemporary perspective and presents seminal works spanning Pablo Picasso's entire career. The presentation constitutes the most complete and comprehensive survey of Picasso's art ever staged in China, offering Chinese audiences an unparalleled artistic feast.

A Century-Defining Master Who Redefined Modern Art

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) transcended the conventional role of "artist" to stand as one of the defining figures of twentieth-century cultural thought and visual revolution. Widely acknowledged as a founder of modern art, a pioneer of Cubism and a central presence within Surrealist currents, Picasso assimilated and transformed influences from Impressionism, Symbolism, Neoclassicism and Surrealism. Through relentless and bold experiment, he forged artistic paths previously unimagined. His works continue to prompt present-day viewers to reconsider image, emotion and reality.

A Panorama of Picasso's Core Creative Phases Spanning Half a Century Lands in Shanghai

Picasso Through the Eyes of Paul Smith showcases, with rare breadth, the full spectrum of the artist's iconic creative phases: from the melancholic gaze of the Blue Period and the tender narratives of the Pink Period, to the revolutionary reconstruction of Cubism; from the return to form of Neoclassicism and the psychological tension of the Surrealist period, to the emotional expression of anti-war works, the renewed dialogue with Western masters, and onward to experiments with mixed media, and the unrestrained visual language of his late years. It comprehensively reproduces the stylistic variations throughout the life of this most creative and influential genius of the 20th century. The 80 exhibited works include oil paintings, charcoal drawings, pencil drawings, sculptures, watercolors, relief paintings, prints, ceramics, and over a dozen other mediums, leading audiences into an in-depth conversation with the most subversive legacy of artistic revolution from the twentieth century.

From Paris to Shanghai: The Re-presentation of Picasso's Miraculous Life through the Contemporary Sensibility of Sir Paul Smith

As an iconic figure in contemporary fashion, Sir Paul Smith with his broad vision spanning fashion, art, industrial design, and lifestyle, is regarded as a major driving force in today's creative culture. His acute insight into colour, materials, and visual language positions him as an ideal collaborator, offering fresh interpretative pathways for Picasso. Invited to serve as Artistic Director of this exhibition, he infuses it with a new way of seeing within a contemporary context, drawing from his cross‑disciplinary perspective and keen visual sensibility.

This exhibition develops from Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, organized by the Musée national Picasso‑Paris in 2023 on the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death. Now making its much‑anticipated appearance in Shanghai, the two museums have jointly selected 80 works and, while preserving the core spirit of the exhibition, have specially redesigned the display for the open, unique architecture of the Museum of Art Pudong. Rejecting the so‑called "white cube" fashion that has dominated recent decades, Sir Paul constructs an immersive scenography using colour, patterns, stripes, and objects to create a rhythmic resonance between artworks and space. Visitors can truly "walk into" Picasso's world and encounter the artist's creative universe as fellow travelers.

The Convergence of Tradition and Contemporaneity: Picasso's Renewed Presence in Shanghai

The Musée national Picasso-Paris is located in the historic heart of Le Marais, while MAP stands as a contemporary landmark in Lujiazui. Their collaboration is not only a geographical connection but also a profound echo between tradition and contemporaneity, historical texture and urban future—much like the interdisciplinary dialogue between Picasso and Sir Paul Smith, both sparking new brilliance in different cultural contexts.

As the world's largest collection of Picasso's works, the Musée national Picasso-Paris is also the only institution encompassing all of Picasso's paintings, sculptures, engravings, and drawings. Its holdings include over 5,000 original works by Picasso and approximately 200,000 archive items, comprehensively presenting the artist's creative process from his early to late years through sketches, studies, notebooks, print series, photographs, illustrated books, films, and documents.

In this exhibition, Picasso's works are no longer fixed in a single context but acquire a fresh, contemporary mode of presentation within MAP's open, modern spaces, allowing the ideas and creativity of this master of the century to retain their sharpness today. Through deep collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, MAP extends its international curatorial reach and builds an urban cultural bridge connecting global artistic classics with contemporary cultural experiences.

Rebuilding Picasso's Artistic Language Across More Than Ten Thematic Sections

Picasso Through the Eyes of Paul Smith traces the trajectory of the artist's half‑century career across more than ten thematic sections, bringing together oil painting, sculpture, watercolor, ceramics, prints, and other media to fully cover all key periods of his life. The 80 authentic masterpieces from the Musée national Picasso-Paris form the most complete and comprehensive spectrum of Picasso's art ever presented to Chinese audiences. The exhibition achieves an equilibrium between art historical context and the artist's personal emotions, highlighting Picasso's continuous innovation in materials, form, and visual language, while also extending the universalism of his own creations.

Milestones of Visual Reinvention

The Reading (1932), one of the exhibition's visual anchors, exemplifies Picasso's portrait language during his Marie-Thérèse Walter period: erotic curves and flowing colours which shape a soft yet structurally clear figure. Sir Paul Smith extracts the "stripes" element from the painting, extending it onto the gallery walls, offering viewers a direct and spatialized visual experience. The Sacré-Cœur (1909–1910) from the Cubist period embodies Cubism's reorganization of real forms, situating a specific building between realism and abstraction on the canvas, presenting a key facet of this landmark artistic transformation to the audience.

Creative Codes Running Through Picasso's Life

Works on childhood themes, such as Paul as Harlequin (1924) and Child Playing with a Toy Truck (1953), reveal a tender, symbolic side of Picasso's practice. Picasso placed childhood at the heart of his work—as subject, symbol, creative stance, and driving force in search of forms. By drawing from the innocence and freedom of a child's gaze, he extracted new approaches to line and form, seeking possibilities beyond academic convention. His aspiration to "remain a child" become a guiding thread through his oeuvre.

The Iconic Masterpiece Bull's Head Debuts in China

The iconic work Bull's Head (1942), on display in China for the first time, opens the exhibition both visually and conceptually. Composed of a bicycle saddle and handlebars, this work is the most famous transformation of a found object in Picasso's oeuvre. Sir Paul extends this cross-media sensibility into the exhibition design, enabling visitors to apprehend Picasso's creative logic through the "beauty of objects." Furthermore, Bullfight: The Death of the Torero (1933) reflects Picasso's fascination with bullfighting. The painting employs a vivid palette and a static dynamism to capture a pivotal moment, creating a composition that exudes dramatic tension. During the 1920s and 1930s, he created a significant body of work on the subject of bullfighting, demonstrating a long-standing interest in the theme.

Prelude to Early Revolution in Form

Portrait of a Man (1902–1903), a representative work of the Blue Period, reveals the spiritual tone of Picasso's early work. The solitary figure is seated indoors, surrounded by a palette of bluish tones, as the image evolves from a narrative to a contemplation of the subject's inner emotions. Works from this phase often focus on marginalized groups and are frequently seen as symbolic embodiments of human suffering. The subsequent Pink Period and early Cubism find transitional expression in Bust of a Woman or a Sailor (Study for 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon') (1907). The work's crude forms and primal energy stem from Picasso's interest in indigenous cultures and African and Oceanic art. Through extensive sketches, studies, and compositional experiments, he gradually established a new logic of volume and form, preparing the ground for the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Benchmarks for Art Historical Dialogue Across a Century

Picasso's reworkings of The Luncheon on the Grass in the 1950s show how he returned to canonical works to engage in a trans-temporal dialogue with Manet, producing numerous paintings, drawings, and linocuts that deconstruct the classical composition through adjustments in posture, setting, and arrangement. The sheer scale of this series occupies a unique place in Picasso's direct confrontation with art historical tradition. Ceramic works like Rectangular Platter Decorated with the Head of a Bearded Faun (1948) present another type of experiment from Picasso's Vallauris period. Using traditional vessel forms as a base, through shaping, painting, and transformation, he turned plates, jugs, and bricks into faces of animals or deities. These creations not only demonstrate the artist's flexibility and humor in the field of ceramics but also reflect his continuous expansion of materials and forms—explorations that, in turn, nourished his contemporaneous painting and sculptural practice.

The exhibition also features thematic sections including "An Artist in Vogue," "Assemblages and Collages," "Classical Painter," "Wartime," "Picasso's Striped Sailor Shirt," "The Late Period: 1969–1972," and "Picasso on Show," offering multiple vantage points on Picasso's evolution in medium, technique, subject and style. Collectively, these sections underscore Picasso's pivotal place in international art history and his sustained influence on contemporary visual culture.

A Shared Language Shaped by Two International Masters

As Artistic Director of the exhibition, British designer Sir Paul Smith approaches the project not as an art historian but with a designer's intuition, a fashion-driven sensitivity, and the curiosity of an observer of everyday life—qualities that infuse Picasso's works with a distinctly contemporary spirit. This approach, grounded in personal perception and lived experience, mirrors Picasso's own lifelong practice of drawing inspiration from ordinary objects and transforming the everyday into enduring artistic symbols.

In terms of exhibition design, Sir Paul rejects traditional approaches, instead creating an abundant and theatrical atmosphere. Since opening his first store in 1970, Sir Paul Smith has become renowned worldwide for his unceasing inventiveness and bold use of colour and stripes. In this exhibition, with his sharp visual intuition and playful wit, he reframes the artist's diverse identities and creative possibilities, allowing the public to approach this revolutionary from another angle: not only as an artist who reshaped tradition but also as a maverick passionately absorbed in restless play and experiment with colour and form.

The exhibition walls themselves act as conduits for cross-disciplinary discourse. In the "Classical Painter" section, drawings are densely hung in a manner inspired by the historic Paris Salon walls, while simultaneously echoing the "art wall" concept found in Sir Paul Smith's shops, creating a parallel conversation between tradition and modernity. In the "Stripes" section, linear elements from Picasso's works overlap with Sir Paul Smith's signature multicolored stripes, generating an interplay of patterns. Other sections adopt the Parisian "flyposting" technique, covering walls with historic Picasso exhibition posters whose direct, repetitive layering heightens visual impact. These scenographic choices blend the visual vocabularies of both creators, turning the viewing process itself into an immersive journey of rhythm, emotion and discovery.

Sir Paul Smith has expressed his aspiration to establish a visual style that emphasizes sensory perception and intuitive response, with the objective of inspiring younger audiences and those new to Picasso through the use of colour, optimism, and lateral thinking. He considers the exhibition space itself to be a "work" in its own right, serving as an engaging social backdrop where visitors can feel the shared spirit of the two creators through direct pleasure. This makes "the unconventional, boundary-breaking spirit" a vivid reverberation of Picasso in the present.

Continuously Expanding Cultural Narratives: MAP's International Vision and Urban Cultural Energy

Following MAP's recent program—Paths to Modernity: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the concurrently presented Louvre exhibition The Wonder of Patterns: Masterpieces from India, Iran and the Ottoman World—this collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris further affirms MAP's role in fostering East-West cultural dialogue and advancing Shanghai's international cultural profile. By presenting a core pillar of modern art within a local context, MAP enables Shanghai audiences to engage directly with multiple dimensions of international art under one roof. The joint presentation of the Louvre and Picasso exhibitions at MAP offers a broad, multilayered urban cultural narrative that spans civilizations and historical periods.

To broaden public engagement and cultivate young audiences, MAP is recruiting, for the first time, "Young Audio Guide Narrators" aged 6–15. Under professional guidance, participants will deepen their understanding of Picasso and contribute to behind-the-scenes recording for the exhibition, gaining hands-on exposure to exhibition production and interpretation. A program of workshops, the exhibition catalogue and a range of cultural and creative products will accompany the show to extend its public reach.

Picasso Through the Eyes of Paul Smith not only presents the creative arc of a master across half a century but also demonstrates how the classics may be reinterpreted and reactivated in contemporary contexts. At the Museum of Art Pudong, this cross-temporal, cross-disciplinary dialogue brings a fresh way of seeing to the city's cultural landscape.

Sponsors

Wall paint provided by Nippon Paint China.

About MAP

Located at the heart of Xiao Lujiazui, Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) broke ground on September 26, 2017 and opened to the public in July, 2021.

Invested, built, and managed by the Lujiazui Group and designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel (AJN), MAP is primarily set out to present world-class exhibitions to its audience as well as showcasing domestic artists. The four major functions of MAP include: to hold exhibitions, to promote art education, to develop cultural merchandises, and to advocate for international exchange. MAP aims to become a new cultural landmark of Shanghai and an important platform for international cultural exchange.

About the Musée national Picasso-Paris

Housed in one of the most splendid 17th-century mansions in the historic heart of Paris, the Musée national Picasso-Paris boasts the world's largest public collection of Picasso's works. The majority of these holdings came directly from the artist's studios, entering the French national collections soon after his death on 8 April 1973. It holds an unparalleled collection of over 5,000 works and about 200,000 items in Picasso's personal archive, covering the full sweep of his artistic career. As the world's foremost institution devoted to Picasso, it is the only one to cover all of his production—painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Through sketches, studies, notebooks, print series, photographs, illustrated books, films, and documents, the museum offers a comprehensive overview of Picasso's artistic journey from his earliest to his final years.

About Paul Smith

Paul Smith is Britain's leading independent design company and a true fashion institution. Beginning in 1970 with a single three-by-three metre shop in Paul's hometown of Nottingham, it has grown into a global enterprise, with more than 130 shops across 60 countries. All throughout this, the guiding principle has been Paul's design philosophy of 'classic with a twist,' with every piece reflecting his irrepressible spirit.