New Picasso Portraits exhibition revealed for The National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery has announced that it will be staging a major exhibition of portraits by Pablo Picasso this autumn.

Picasso Portraits will run from 6th October until the 5th February 2017 and will showcase over 75 portraits by the artist who was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Portraits will range from well-known masterpieces to works that have never been shown in Britain before.

The exhibition will represent all phases of the artist’s career, from realist portraits of his boyhood, to canvases of his old age.

Featured works will include a cubist portrait from 1910 of the German art dealer and early champion of Picasso’s work, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and a portrait of Nusch Eluard, acrobat, artists and wife of Paul Eluard. This portrait in particular was executed in 1938 and is from a private collection.

The exhibition will be the first large-scale exhibition devoted to the artist since Picasso and Portraiture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Grand Palais, Paris in 1996.

The exhibition will also include revealing self-portraits as well as works of Picasso’s friends, loves, wives and children.

Complementing these images of Picasso’s intimates will be portraits and caricatures inspired by artists of the past, with whom he identified most closely, such as Velázquez and Rembrandt.

Dr Nicholas Cullinan, director, National Portrait Gallery, London, commented, “We are delighted to stage Picasso Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, a collaboration with Museu Picasso, Barcelona, which focuses on the artist’s reinvention of time-honoured conventions of portraiture, and his genius for caricature.

“The exhibition gathers together major loans from public and private collections that demonstrate the breadth of Picasso’s oeuvre and the extraordinary range of styles he employed across all media and from all periods of his career.”

For more information visit www.npg.org.uk/picasso.