The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods

Fondation Beyeler presents an exhibition devoted to Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces of his early Blue and Rose periods with Picasso’s paintings and sculptures from 1901 to 1906, each one of which is a milestone on the road to recognition as the twentieth century’s paramount artist.

Picasso’s pictures from this period are counted among the most beautiful examples of modern art and are certainly some of the most valuable art works anywhere in the world. At the age of twenty, the aspiring genius Picasso (1881 – 1973) was already engaged in a restless search for new themes and forms of expression. One artistic revolution followed another, in a rapid succession of changing styles and visual worlds. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler features on the Blue and Rose periods, and thus on a central phase in Picasso’s work. It also sheds fresh light on the emergence, from 1907 onward, of Cubism, as an epochal new movement that was nevertheless rooted in the art of the preceding period.