At the heart of Barcelona’s Museu Picasso this summer, a quietly powerful exhibition opens a new window onto the private world of one of art history’s greatest figures. “Growing Up Between Two Artists – A Tribute to Claude Picasso”, curated by Paloma Picasso, serves as both homage and emotional excavation. Running from 25 July to 26 October 2025, the exhibit marks Claude, who passed away in 2023 at age 76, as the connective tissue between Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot, his decade-long partner and mother of Claude and his younger sister Paloma. In situ at Museu Picasso, housed in five adjoining medieval palaces on Montcada Street in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter, the exhibition enriches and complements the institution’s permanent holdings, which already include early Picasso works from his Barcelona and Málaga periods and pieces gifted by his long-time friend Sabartés. Delivered under the sensitive stewardship of Paloma Picasso, also president of the Picasso Administration, this exhibition feels equally familial and museum‑quality.
The exhibition moves beyond the grand sweep of Picasso’s public life into the domestic rituals that shaped his creative outlook. It presents toys not as childish ephemera but as embryonic art; it positions Gilot not just as mother but as cocreator; and it transforms Claude from legacy administrator into central character. The exhibition offers an intimate journey into his family life in the postwar years in Vallauris, in the south of France, a place where every day routines were suffused with artistic invention. The museum presents about one hundred pieces, many never before on public display, drawn from the Picasso family’s private collections. These include paintings, ceramics, photographs, drawings and, notably, the handmade toys Picasso created for his children, synthesising the domestic and the creative world. One of the exhibition’s most poignant highlights is the 1951 sculpture La Guenon et son petit (often referred to as Baboon and Young), created from toy cars intended as gifts for Claude, but reimagined by Picasso into delicate, expressive ceramic form even before the child could play with them. Alongside this stands a suite of whimsical creations: a toy bus built from painted wood with bottle‑top wheels, felt‑pen and pencil drawings of musketeers, and shadow puppetry silhouettes titled Four Shadow Silhouettes, made for a 1952 exhibition invitation that promise playfulness entwined with familial affection.
Although Picasso’s reputation as a pioneering modernist often eclipses his role as a father, the exhibition reframes him as a parent whose creative impulse infiltrated everyday parenting. Paloma Picasso reflects, “My father was never one to separate the ‘important’ from the ‘everyday.’ To him, every moment was an opportunity for creativity.” In this display, that ethos finds literal expression: ordinary moments become artistic vignettes, toys become sculptures, costumes become portraits. Perhaps equally compelling is the spotlight on Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s artistic partner and a notable painter in her own right. For the first time in Spain, the Museu Picasso dedicates substantial space to her work, more than a dozen paintings, many less known in Europe despite her recognition in the United States and beyond. This inclusion helps to balance the narrative, elevating Gilot from subject to subject-maker in her own right.
Emmanuel Guigon, museum director, describes the exhibition as an emotional arc that traces childhood in Vallauris, underscoring the lightness and creativity of that time. Yet it also gestures toward darker currents: the 1953 separation of Picasso and Gilot, the latter’s 1964 memoir Life with Picasso, and the ensuing estrangement between Picasso and their children Claude and Paloma. Though critical narratives exist, Paloma's curation proves capable of celebrating both the flaws and warmth of her father, describing him as “affectionate, inspiring and fun,” even while acknowledging the abusive dimensions of his personal life uncovered in Gilot’s book. This bittersweet tone gives the exhibition much of its emotional resonance. Visitors may encounter Claude in vivid early portraits, one painting from 1948 shows him dressed in a traditional Polish costume, life-size and scornfully confident, ball in hand and jacket elaborately embroidered. Paloma notes that Picasso always kept it in his studio- part proud father and part myth‑maker. The exhibition is thus both portraiture and family mythos, weaving memory and art into a shared tableau.
As summer unfurls into autumn, visitors and art lovers can wander through rooms echoing with laughter, conflict, play and reflection, through the world of a child who grew up literally between two artists. When Claude died in 2023, his absence marked the final closing of that chapter. Now that chapter is reopened in visual form, to give us a clearer view not only of Pablo Picasso’s life, but of how that life shaped the human beings who lived inside it.
