Current ExhibitionsExhibition
Picasso: Human Figures

Dates

Saturday, 28 June - Sunday, 5 October 2025

Hours

9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Fridays, Saturdays 9:30 am – 8:00 pm
Admission ends 30 mins. before closing time

Closed

Mondays, 22 July and 16 September（Opens on 21 July, 11 August, 12 August, 15 September and 22 September）

Venue

Prints and Drawings Gallery, New Wing

Admission Fees

Adults 500 yen (400 yen), college and university students 250 yen (200 yen)

• * Admission is free for Special Exhibition or The Collection ticket holders.
• * Numbers in parenthesis indicate discount fees for groups of 20 or more.
• * Free for high school students, under 18, seniors (65 and over), "Campus Members". Please show your ID upon entrance.
• * Disabled visitors admitted free of charge, with one attendant. Please present your disability identification upon arrival.
• * Free admission of this exhibition and The Collection on 13 July, 10 August and 14 September 2025 (Kawasaki Free Sunday).
• * Lively Saturday! -- an event-filled day when chatting in the galleries is encouraged -- will be held on 23 August (Sat.). Free admission to Permanent Collection Galleries.（Admission fees apply to Special Exhibitions.）

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Organized by

The National Museum of Western Art

It can be said of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the great master of 20th-century art, that he was first and foremost a painter of “people.” He was constantly creating human figures exuding a strong presence, in the process confronting universal themes and emotions such as life and death, war and peace, love and desire. By focusing on Picasso’s figure works, this exhibition seeks to penetrate to the heart of his art.

Picasso’s formal training in drawing from an early age in his native Spain provided him with the basic skills necessary to accurately grasp and reproduce the human form. To this he added a self-taught technique of caricature: humorous exaggeration, simplification, and deformation in the depiction of figures. Subsequently, his invention of Cubism upended the traditional ideal of human beauty, turning figure painting into a new arena for artistic experimentation.

His journey in figure painting traversed a wide range of interests, including socially marginalized people (in his early period), subjects from classical antiquity (between the wars), and “the painter and his model” theme (in his later years). Throughout his career, however, portraiture held center stage. Many of his portraits were not conventionally commissioned works but personal projects: representations of family members, friends, or lovers. Above all, he repeatedly depicted the women closest to him, adopting different techniques and styles, building up multifaceted impressions that also expressed changes in his own feelings for them, impossible to convey in a single image.

This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to showcase an important component of our Picasso collection, which has expanded due to the depositing of numerous additional works with the museum in recent years. Supplemented by several pieces sourced from other Japanese institutions, the 34 figure works on display—paintings, drawings, prints, and documents—illustrate, in all their innovative power and diversity, the many themes and forms of expression pursued by the artist from his youth to his maturity.