50 Years of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona: The Collection

A small-scale exhibition organised to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Museu Picasso reveals the nature of the museum's permanent collection and how it has steadily grown.

The permanent collection of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona has grown and taken shape over the years, especially thanks to the important gifts initially made by Picasso, and also to the generous contributions of private collectors and the artist's heirs, not to mention the valuable purchases made by Barcelona City Council.

The collection is structured around two main sections: on the one hand, works produced during Picasso's apprenticeship and youth, and on the other, his 1957 series entitled Las Meninas . The two sections afford the museum its distinctiveness, for they enable scholars to study the artist's early works in one and the same centre that, in addition, houses the only complete series of interpretations of the work of another artist, Velázquez, made by Picasso during the fifties and sixties.