CLEVELAND, OH.- The long-anticipated exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and Paper, offers a groundbreaking new look at Pablo Picasso’s lifelong experimentation with paper. Opening Sunday, December 8, 2024, and on display through March 23, 2025, in both the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery spaces, Picasso and Paper showcases nearly 300 works spanning Picasso’s almost eight-decade career.

The artist’s diverse use of paper is the subject of this blockbuster exhibition, which was organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris. From expressive prints and drawings to colossal collages, Picasso’s works on and with paper showcase his extraordinary capacity to innovate and reinvent himself using a material with limitless possibilities. These are juxtaposed with some of the artist’s celebrated paintings on canvas and bronze sculpture.

“To create the innovative works for which he is remembered today, Picasso returned again and again to paper, ultimately producing thousands of prints and drawings,” said Britany Salsbury, CMA curator of prints and drawings. “We’re excited to be able to feature these works alongside experimental paper cutouts, Cubist collages, and even torn and burned shapes created for his closest friends. Together, the artworks in Picasso and Paper offer an opportunity to see the artist at his most radical. They also allow us to better understand the collaborative relationships—with printers, publishers, dealers, models, and partners—that contributed to his canonical reputation.”

The exhibition opens with paper cutouts made by Picasso at the age of nine, then proceeds chronologically, covering his long, rich career. Endlessly fascinated with new and varied types of paper, Picasso used traditional materials, but also others that were unusual, including mass-produced wallpapers and daily newspapers.

The numerous highlights in Picasso and Paper include Women at Their Toilette (1937–38), an extraordinarily large collage (9 13/16 x 14 1/2 feet) of cut-and-pasted papers, exhibited for the first time in the United States; other rarely seen Cubist collages; the artist’s private sketchbooks, including studies for his best-known paintings; constructed paper guitars from the Cubist and Surrealist periods; prints that reveal Picasso’s complex working process; and an array of works related to the artist’s most celebrated paintings and sculptural projects.

“Paper offered Picasso an intimate space in which he could not only respond to events in his personal life and in the world around him, but also carry out formal experimentation,” said Salsbury. “Picasso and Paper traces some of the most significant shifts in modern art through his practice and features rarely seen artworks from the most internationally significant holdings of his work.”

The exhibition also includes the CMA’s La Vie (1903), from Picasso’s Blue Period, featured with preparatory drawings and other works on paper exploring corresponding themes. In the Cubist section, Picasso’s bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909) (Musée national Picasso-Paris) will be surrounded by a large group of related drawings. Seen together, these groupings highlight the connections that Picasso saw between media, his fascination with the materials that he worked with, and the integral role that paper played throughout his artistic practice. Picasso and Paper was originally scheduled to open at the CMA in September 2020 but was delayed due to the global pandemic.

“We are eager to share Picasso and Paper at its only North American venue,” said William M. Griswold, director and president of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “This exhibition offers an opportunity for visitors to better understand Picasso and his influence on modern art, or for those already familiar with the artist to see him in an entirely new light. The innovative focus of this exhibition allows for numerous surprises and encourages us to see Picasso’s genius in a new and thought-provoking way.”