April 8, 2023
Celebrating Picasso, 50 Years After His Death
In 2023, museums across Europe and the US marked half a century since Picasso's death with dozens of exhibitions — and fresh debate about the man behind the genius.
Pablo Picasso died in 1973, and in 2023 the art world marked his half-century with an extraordinary outpouring: a coordinated 'Picasso Celebration' of around 50 exhibitions across France, Spain, the United States and beyond.
From Barcelona and Paris to Málaga and New York, the shows reassessed every phase of his restless genius — Blue Period, Cubism, ceramics, late explosions of colour — the most influential artist of the 20th century.
But the anniversary also invited harder questions about his treatment of the women in his life, as a new generation looked at both the towering art and the difficult man who made it.
Image: “(Barcelona) Retrat de Picasso - Pablo Gargallo - Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya” — Didier Descouens, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.