A Picasso reinvented

Rather than creating a traditional retrospective dedicated to Pablo Picasso, The National Art Center seeks to transform the Spanish artist's work into a traversable environment, immersed in the colors, patterns, and geometries conceived by Paul Smith. Picasso, Through the Eyes of Paul Smith is born from the encounter between two figures who, despite belonging to different eras and disciplines, share a free relationship with color, visual play, and the construction of the image. The exhibition brings together approximately eighty works from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, following a deliberately fluid chronological path that spans the artist's entire career: from his early years to his late works, passing through Cubism, neoclassical works, and the continuous formal experimentation that redefined twentieth-century art. Among the announced works are also Portrait of a Man and Paulo as Harlequin. What distinguishes the project, however, is not only the selection of works, but above all the manner in which they are presented. Paul Smith conceived the entire exhibition as a visual space constructed through bright colors, wallpapers, decorative elements, and unexpected juxtapositions that directly recall his own stylistic language. Far from the neutrality of the museum's white cube, the exhibition thus takes on the character of a theatrical and immersive environment. The project stems from the exhibition Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light!, organized in Paris in 2023 for the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death. The Tokyo version represents a new international stage of that journey, adapted through Smith's creative lens and designed specifically for a Japanese audience. After Shanghai, Tokyo will be one of the main Asian venues of the international tour. In recent years, many institutions have attempted to reinterpret Picasso through contemporary perspectives, challenging the traditional format of the monographic exhibition. In this case, the dialogue with design and fashion becomes a way to observe how the artist's work continues to circulate within contemporary visual culture well beyond the strictly museum context. The encounter between Picasso and Paul Smith is not simply a celebration of two famous names, but rather an attempt to create an exhibition that explores perception, visual energy, and the pleasure of the gaze. More than a lesson in art history, the exhibition presents itself as a space where modernism, design, and popular culture continue to intersect.