Image: Musée Picasso, Paris ; Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous
The Musée national Picasso-Paris will introduce a renewed presentation of its permanent collections on 29 September, adding three focused displays devoted to the history of Picasso’s reception and practice. The rehang will include a dossier marking the centenary of the art journal ‘Cahiers d’art’, a substantially revised presentation of Picasso’s Cubist period, and a dossier examining the artist’s relationship with writer and politician André Malraux.
The initiative will be presented within the museum’s permanent-collection route at the Hôtel Salé, the 17th-century Parisian hôtel particulier that houses the institution at 5 rue de Thorigny in the Marais. The museum holds what it describes as the largest collection of Picasso’s work in the world, providing the setting for a display that links individual works to the publications, ideas and cultural networks that shaped their circulation and interpretation.
On the first floor, the ‘Cahiers d’art’ dossier will explore the role played by the journal in disseminating Picasso’s work. Founded by Christian Zervos, an editor and friend of Picasso, the review became an important vehicle for presenting and discussing the artist’s production. The dossier is timed to the centenary of the publication, although the museum’s announcement does not specify an end date for the display.
A neighbouring room will offer a renewed account of Picasso’s Cubist period. The presentation brings together paintings, sculptures and tableau-reliefs, tracing what the museum characterises as a progressive conquest of volume through experimentation. By placing works in different media within a single display, the rehang will address Cubism not only as a pictorial language but also as an investigation of objects, surfaces and three-dimensional form.
The third floor will feature a separate dossier on Malraux, whose relationship with Picasso is presented as central to the writer’s theories of the ‘Musée imaginaire’. The display will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Malraux’s death and will assemble Picasso works that Malraux either saw or described. It will also refer to Malraux’s personal collection, which was extensively discussed in his book ‘La Tête d’obsidienne’, published one year after Picasso’s death in 1974.
Through that selection, the museum frames the Malraux dossier as a dialogue between art and literature, with written accounts placed in relation to the images and objects they interpret. The three-part renewal therefore combines a history of critical mediation with a close look at one of the defining phases of Picasso’s career.
The new collection display and accompanying dossiers open on 29 September 2026. No closing date has been stated.
