Picasso Museum

Museum · El Born (La Ribera)Barcelona,Spain

Five medieval merchant palaces in Barcelona holding Picasso's beginnings and his old age — schoolboy canvases and the late Las Meninas series, almost no Cubism.

The Museu Picasso is a museum of Picasso's beginnings and of his old age, and it holds almost no Cubism. What it has instead is the work from either end of a long life. There are the schoolboy paintings he made after arriving in Barcelona at thirteen, when his father started teaching at the Llotja art school. And there is the work of the old man in Cannes who kept reworking a single painting by Velázquez. The route threads through five adjoining medieval palaces on Carrer Montcada, so you cross stone courtyards and climb open staircases between galleries. The rooms are small and the pictures hang in the order they were painted, so within two doorways you pass from polished academy canvases to the loosened blue paintings that came next. It ends in a long room hung with the whole Las Meninas series. The collection arrived as gifts, first from Jaume Sabartés, a friend from those Barcelona years who became his secretary, and then from Picasso himself in 1970.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Let the group ahead of you go — the rooms are small and one tour fills a doorway completely. Hang back a few minutes and the sequence opens up again.
Look up in the galleries — some rooms keep their painted timber ceilings from the palace years, coffered and beamed above the white walls. Nobody built these spaces for hanging pictures.
The first faces are family — his father, his mother, his aunt Pepa glowering in black. Before he had subjects, he had relatives who would sit still.
Find the friend in the lace ruff — Picasso painted his secretary, Jaume Sabartés, as a sixteenth-century nobleman. The man who filled these rooms hangs in them.
Save room for the clay — Jacqueline Picasso gave the museum his Vallauris pottery: owls, bulls and faces pressed into plates and jugs from the Madoura workshop.

Things to do

1
Follow one white through two rooms
Stand close to Science and Charity, level with the sick woman's sheet, and look only at how that white is built up. Then walk on to the blue rooms and find the same problem — cloth, skin, light — solved with almost no colour at all. Two walls, ten minutes.
2
Walk the Meninas wall twice
Start at the far end and follow one thing along the series: the dog in the corner, which stops being Velázquez's mastiff and turns into Picasso's own dachshund. Walk back following only the light from the window. Then stand in the doorway and take the whole wall at once.
3
Take the courtyard stairs slowly
Step out into the palace courtyard between galleries and climb the open stone staircase, stopping halfway. Below you is where goods and business sat; above you is where the family lived. The whole house was organised around this one shaded, unroofed square.