Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso

Lovers of art, take note: the exhibition closes 25 March
, with the gallery open until midnight on the final two Saturdays (17 & 24 March), plus a program of free events including music, talks and more

“For me, painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart.”

Pablo Picasso was a great one for aphorisms and the AGNSW’s Picasso expert, Terence Maloon, is particularly fond of that one. “It’s marvellous, because painting, like speech, is made of discontinuity trying to represent a continuum, and Picasso’s work dramatises that.”

Something else that is being split apart during this major exhibition of works from the Picasso Museum in Paris is the gallery itself. The entire ground-floor collection of 20th century Australian art has been cleared out and sent on tour while the area has been renovated, and it’s now hung with priceless works from Picasso’s seven-decade career.

The Picassos – more than 150 major paintings, sculptures and drawings – are in Sydney because the Musée National Picasso is having its roof replaced. The Musée was created after the artist’s death in an 18th-century mansion in the Marais district of Paris and its collection consists of works from Picasso’s personal collection that the French government took in lieu of death duties. “Rather than have the works put in storage the director of the museum, Anne Baldassari, has coordinated a worldwide tour of a large part of the permanent display.”

The most significant Picasso exhibition ever held in Australia will give locals an insight into why the Spaniard remains the most famous artist in the world. There are examples from his Blue and Rose periods, as well as the Cubist, Expressionist, Neoclassical and Surrealist periods. “He set the agenda for modern art for an incredibly long time,” says Maloon, “because he was so abundantly gifted and so astoundingly inventive. There are some forms of art that wouldn’t exist if not for his inventions. The whole basis of art – that there was a proportional system that couldn’t be violated – all of that disappeared because of him.”

Maloon gives the example of a work in the show titled ‘Three Figures Under a Tree’ (1907). “That’s an amazingly interesting work. It’s fiercely primitive, and completely choking up the space of the painting and there are very harsh hatchings and cross-hatchings. It has strange, gaudy colours and the result should be atrocious, but it’s absolutely lucid and completely brilliant.”

The exhibition spans the young Picasso, a technical wizard who could mimic the styles of artists such as Van Gogh, Rodin and Derain; the mature artist, who redefined what art was and could be; and the ageing genius, following his muse in manifold directions. “My metaphor is that he’s like a jazz musician, taking things apart and putting them together in every performance,” says Maloon.

The show is a one-off chance for Australians to view works of massive historical importance without leaving the southern hemisphere. “These works, they don’t pander to taste that already exists – you have to come around to them. Wordsworth said that truly great artists create the taste by which their works are to be savoured, and that’s very important to understand with Picasso.”

Pablo Picasso

1881 Born Málaga, Spain

1907 Paints seminal modern work ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’

1909 Invents Cubism with Georges Braque

1918 Marries Olga Khokhlova, first wife and second of Picasso’s six major muses

1937 Paints anti-war masterpiece ‘Guernica’

1973 Dies Mougins, France

1985 Musée National Picasso opens, Paris

2004 ‘Garcon a la Pipe’ (1905) fetches US$124.3m at auction

2011 Picasso exhibition opens, AGNSW