Picasso visits India for the first time, with ‘Metamorphoses: 1900-1972’. Showing at the National Museum, New Delhi, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, it traces a significant span in the making of a genius. With this show, France and India hope to seal their cultural links, and to pave the way for further dialogue between our nations. We have featured here, significant works from the show and gone beyond, to review the brilliance that made Pablo Picasso the most important artist of the century.

The last great figurative painter of the past century, Picasso embraced, thanks to his diverse output as painter, sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, poet and potter, all of Western art history from the cave paintings of Lascaux to African statues, Iberian sculpture, and Cycladic figurines. The diversity of Picasso’s means of expression, coupled with his own statements, should spur us to consider him more than just a painter, to see him as a total artist-creator.