Picasso Museum
Listed under Art Collections in Paris, France.
An elegant mansion in the Marais, housing the definitive collection of works by Picasso ' thousands of paintings, drawings, sketches, sculptures and other artworks. They span the artist's career and show the development of his style. The museum also shows Picasso's own collections of paintings (Cezanne, Rousseau, Braque, Derain, and Miro) and African tribal art.
A Bit of History- Picasso Museum.
Written by 
amoore.
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Musee Picasso
To me the building isn’t quite as impressive as the art it contains, but to many it may be. This museum used to be the Hôtel Salé – first the home of a farmer then a general then later a school of art – and has been stripped back to bare pale stone walls and pillars, checkered marble floors and white painted spaces. To that simple canvas has been added some reflective walls with bared wooden backs which partition rooms up purely to present the art in a more interesting way. A huge piece of this reflective panel runs through the museum from front to back. I’m not sure why, but it does look impressive and interesting against the 17th Century base and I think, especially from what I learned inside the museum, that Picasso would have quite liked it.
The art probably deserves to be written about first, but you don’t see it until after you’ve been made totally aware of how unique the building is. Even once you get inside you have to hike up to the top floor before you see any paintings – then you turn a corner and suddenly there they begin, first works by artists who influenced him, then his own work, arranged in around about chronological order. Picasso’s work was much more varied than I had understood it to be – it’s not till you see so many works from different periods of one man’s life that you begin to think about how many different ideas a painter can have over a life time – which is the thought that I couldn’t get out of my head for a couple of days after visiting this museum. Here are Picasso’s ideas and slightly less successful attempts. Pre sculpture sketches and mock ups of larger works are interesting to see if not always great works of art on their own – though some people would argue that they are.
If you can’t read French you’ll get no more information than the date the work was created and what materials it was made from, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it leaves you to pay more attention to the influences you can see hinted at and reoccurring and the ideas Picasso seems to go back to a refine gleaned from his own work and that of other painters – or at least that’s what I saw.
Almost totally irrelevant but it’s nice to see the shop at the beginning of the route and not at the end so you can skip it if you want to.