The de Young hosts an extraordinary exhibition of more than 100 masterpieces by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) from the permanent collection of Paris’s world-renowned Musée National Picasso. The once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, made possible only because of the temporary closure of the Musée Picasso until 2012 for extensive renovations, comprises paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints drawn from every phase of the artist’s career.

The works on view demonstrate the wide range of artistic styles and forms that the artist mastered, including: Celestina (1904), from the artist’s Blue Period; Two Brothers (1906), from the Rose Period; Expressionist studies for Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); the Cubist Man with a Guitar (1911), the Neoclassical Portrait of Olga (1917), the artist’s wife; the proto-Surrealist Two Women Running on a Beach (1922); Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), the artist’s lover and famed French artist; six Surrealist bronze heads of the artist’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter; the Head of a Bull (1942) fabricated from a bicycle seat and handlebars; the bronze Goat (1950); the six life-size bronze Bathers (1956); and the late self-portrait The Matador (1970).