Museu Picasso. Five Palaces, Forty-One Ceramics

Carrer de Montcada, the same narrow lane as the Moco. The Museu Picasso occupies five adjoining Gothic palaces here and opened on 9 March 1963. The initiative came from Jaume Sabartés, Picasso's boyhood friend and later secretary, who had wanted the collection in Málaga. Picasso insisted on Barcelona.

Anyone expecting the famous paintings is in the wrong building. The emphasis is on the beginnings: most of the paintings date from between 1890 and 1917, along with the Blue Period. It is a museum about becoming rather than about world fame, and that makes it more interesting than the greatest-hits houses. The great outlier is the series of fifty-eight works on Las Meninas from 1957, which came to the museum after Sabartés died in 1968: the old Picasso working his way through Velázquez.

The second outlier stands in a display case. Forty-one ceramics, all unique pieces, given to the city by Jacqueline Roque in 1982. They were works Picasso had given her over two decades, made at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris in the south of France, where he had worked from 1947 at the invitation of Suzanne and Georges Ramié. Two anthropomorphic pitchers stand side by side, one with figures against a dark ground, the other with a face set in a medallion. Utilitarian forms that stop being utilitarian without ever quite becoming sculpture. The donation was announced unexpectedly at the time, at the opening of a ceramics exhibition for which Jacqueline had only agreed to lend the pieces.

On the floor above, Créixer entre dos artistes was running, a tribute to Claude Picasso, from 25 July to 26 October 2025 and driven by Paloma Picasso. It tells the story of the two siblings' childhood with Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot in Vallauris, through photographs, toys, ceramics and everyday objects, and for the first time in Spain gives Gilot's own painting a large room of its own. What is striking is where both point: the case downstairs and the exhibition upstairs lead to the same place, the same house in southern France. The museum carries the name of a century's artist and is, at its best, a story about family and craft.