You step out of Merrion Square and into the dim hush of the National Gallery’s Beit Wing, and right away the first display illustrates what kind of story this exhibition wants to tell. It’s not about dates or big art-history milestones. It’s about rooms — the places where Picasso actually worked and lived. Sketchbooks left open, clay drying in corners, paintings stacked against the walls. The National Gallery of Ireland, in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso-Paris, curated Picasso: From the Studio to look like you’re walking through the man’s life from room to room, rather than merely flipping through a textbook of his art. The show runs in Rooms 6-19 from October 9th 2025 to February 22nd 2026 as a quiet map of nine places that shaped him, with paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, and even films scattered like breadcrumbs leading you back into the world of his studios.
That choice gives the whole thing an almost nosy atmosphere, like you’re tiptoeing into someone’s house while they’re out buying orange juice. Many of the loans come from the Musée Picasso in Paris, whose extraordinary donation and archive make it the natural partner for a project about works within the artist’s own orbit. Knowing the paintings and sculptures once lived in his studios makes everything feel personal, like you can still sense his breath in the air. For me, that wasn’t theoretical. I first saw the Musée National Picasso-Paris when I was fifteen. I still remember the way a tide of colour and catalogue text convinced me that art history could be a life, not just something you study. Seeing those same works again in Dublin felt like running into an old friend and realizing they still know my name.
Picasso: From the Studio, is arranged by place and period and, truthfully, by the people around him too. You wander from a cramped Paris studio to sun-soaked rooms on the Riviera, and sometimes you can figure out the year just by which of his lovers’ faces he was painting. This isn’t a scandal — it’s part of the point. The rooms argue that Picasso wasn’t just shaped by art movements but by kitchens, hallways, women, and light. You see how Boisgeloup nudged him into sculpture, how Vallauris pulled him into clay and film, how La Californie became more of a stage than a studio. Small surprises sit next to famous masterpieces, like neighbors chatting over a fence. A 1920 summer landscape of Juan-les-Pins is displayed like a bright postcard from a man who was still testing the balance between Cubist structure and glistening color. The painting is listed among the loans from Musée Picasso and appears in recent surveys of his Riviera work.
The photos and film clips on display are what anchor everything. They make him human, not just a name people whisper in museums. Pierre Manciet’s photos catch Picasso shaping clay in Madoura, Vallauris, during the filming of Nicole Vedres’ La Vie Commence Demain in 1949. These aren’t glamorous “celebrity artist” shots but visual proof that his hands were actually in the work. The National Gallery even screens two short films in the galleries and provides transcripts for the kind of visitors who want to follow every word. Watching the movie is a pleasure you don’t expect in a painting exhibition. There’s one interview where Picasso talks about television and modern life, and for a moment, he’s not “Picasso, the legend”. He’s just a guy trying to make sense of distractions and passion in the same breath.
Of course, the show doesn’t spoon-feed everything. Some rooms feel like opening a drawer left ajar—no explanation, only objects waiting for you to figure out their story. But that’s also part of the pleasure. The exhibition refuses to turn Picasso into a statue on a pedestal. Instead, it keeps circling back to his messy, glowing, cluttered studio as a space where things were tried, broken, loved, and kept. Recent criticism of the show points out how each workspace reveals its own rhythm, ranging from the cold chaos of early Paris to the organized brightness of the Côte d’Azur.
If you go — and I think you should — take the time to sit in front of one painting for a while. Then leave the room and watch one of the films. The two together teach something about Picasso that a single medium can’t. The show is elegant in its modesty and doesn’t attempt a grand revision of Picasso scholarship. Instead, it offers a series of intimate evidences that together feel convincing. If you care about how art is actually made, in rooms where mugs sit half-full and work gets started before breakfast, this exhibition will remind you why the studio matters much more than a profitable display.
