Cleveland Museum of Art

 December 8, 2024, through March 23, 2025

Pablo Picasso’s tireless experimentation with and on paper is the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso and Paper, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Showcasing nearly 300 works spanning his 80-year career, Picasso and Paper explores the artist’s diverse use of paper, a medium he used to challenge and transform the way we see art.

Picasso and Paper: virtual exhibition tour

Originally scheduled to appear at the CMA in September 2020, this highly anticipated exhibition has been reconstituted with an exciting selection of additional works. Picasso and Paper will begin welcoming the public on December 8, 2024, through March 23, 2025, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery.

Women at Their Toilette, Paris, winter 1937–38.  Cut wallpapers with gouache on paper pasted onto canvas; 299 x 448 cm. Musée national Picasso-Paris, Pablo Picasso Gift in Lieu, 1979. MP176. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Adrien Didierjean. © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The exhibition’s highlights include Women at their Toilette (1937–38), an extraordinarily large collage (9 13/16 x 14 1/2 feet) of cut-and-pasted papers, exhibited for the first time in the United States; rarely seen Cubist collages; the artist’s private sketchbooks, including studies for his best-known paintings, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; constructed paper guitars from the Cubist and Surrealist periods; prints that offer an intimate view of Picasso’s complex working process; and an array of works related to the artist’s most celebrated paintings and sculptural projects.

“The CMA is excited to finally bring Picasso and Paper to Cleveland, its only venue in North America,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings. “Although Picasso’s name might most immediately bring to mind his paintings, paper was at the core of his experimentation throughout his entire life. Due to its rich chronological focus and its depth, this exhibition offers an opportunity for visitors to better understand Picasso and his contributions to art history, or for those already familiar to see him in an entirely new light.”

The exhibition presents these works on paper chronologically alongside a selection of closely related paintings and sculptures. 

The CMA’s La Vie (1903), from Picasso’s Blue Period, will be featured with preparatory drawings and other works on paper exploring corresponding themes. 

Head of a Woman (Fernande)

Pablo Picasso Spanish

Clay original: Paris, autumn 1909; Plaster model: Paris, late 1910; Bronze cast: Foundry Désiré or Florentin Godard, Paris, made to order for Ambroise Vollard between July 27, 1926, and March 11, 1927

In the Cubist section, Picasso’s 1909 bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande) (Musée national Picasso-Paris) will be surrounded by a large group of related drawings. Seen together, these groupings highlight the connections that Picasso saw between media, his fascination with the materials that he worked with, and the integral role that paper played throughout his artistic practice. 

“Paper offered Picasso an intimate space in which he could not only respond to events in his personal life and in the world around him, but also carry out radical formal experimentation,” said Salsbury. “Picasso and Paper traces some of the most significant shifts in modern art through his artistic practice with rarely seen artworks from the most internationally significant holdings of his work.”

Exhibition Catalogue

Picasso and Paper is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Royal Academy of Arts. 

How Picasso’s genius seized the potential of paper throughout his career

Picasso’s artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. Picasso and Paper examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper. He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-collé experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional “constructions,” made of cardboard, paper and string.

Sometimes his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were in short supply, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And of course his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings.

With reproductions of nearly 400 works of art and a series of insightful new texts by leading authorities on the artist, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso explored the potential of paper at different stages of his career. Picasso and Paper is published for an exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

The legendary life and career of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) spanned nearly the entire 20th century and ushered in some of its most significant artistic revolutions.

The book features essays by distinguished Picasso scholars and leading authorities in various aspects of technical art history, including William H. Robinson, formerly of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy of Arts; Emilia Philippot of the Musée national Picasso-Paris; and Claustre Rafart Planas of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Specific aspects of Picasso’s engagement with paper are addressed by Christopher Lloyd, an expert on Picasso’s drawings; Stephen Coppel, curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum; Violette Andres, photography curator at the Musée national Picasso- Paris; Johan Popelard of the University of Paris; and Emmanuelle Hincelin, a paper conservator with scientific expertise in the types of paper Picasso used at key moments in his career.