Paul Smith, Picasso and the Art of Looking Again

In March 2023, I attended the opening of Célébration Picasso, la collection prend des couleurs ! at the Musée Picasso Paris.

The exhibition formed part of the international Picasso Celebration programme marking the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death. What made this particular exhibition unusual was the decision to invite Sir Paul Smith to act as artistic director.

At first glance, the pairing appears unexpected.

Picasso and Paul Smith belong to different worlds. One transformed twentieth-century art. The other built one of Britain’s most recognisable fashion brands. Yet the exhibition demonstrated that both share a fascination with colour, playfulness, reinvention and visual experimentation.

That was the intelligence of the project.

Rather than mounting another chronological survey of Picasso’s career, the Musée Picasso asked a different question: what happens when a contemporary creative mind is invited to look at the collection afresh?

Paul Smith approached the museum not as a curator in the traditional sense but as a designer. His intervention was subtle. He did not attempt to compete with Picasso. Instead, he changed the atmosphere in which the works were encountered.

Colour became a central device.

The exhibition introduced new visual rhythms, unexpected juxtapositions and a lighter, more playful energy than one often encounters in Picasso exhibitions. It encouraged visitors to engage with the collection through fresh eyes rather than inherited assumptions.

This approach felt surprisingly faithful to Picasso himself.

After all, Picasso spent his entire career resisting categorisation. Every time the public thought they understood him, he changed direction. Blue Period, Rose Period, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealist experimentation, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking. Reinvention was central to his practice.

A static Picasso would have been a contradiction.

In that sense, inviting an outsider such as Paul Smith was entirely appropriate.

The exhibition also highlighted something that is sometimes overlooked about Picasso. Beyond the mythology, the market and the masterpieces, he possessed an extraordinary visual curiosity. He absorbed influences constantly and moved between disciplines with remarkable freedom.

Designers have often recognised this instinctively.

Picasso’s relationship with fashion stretches far beyond his famous collaborations with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His work has influenced generations of designers because he understood how form, colour and visual identity could be endlessly reconfigured.

Paul Smith belongs to that tradition of creative cross-pollination.

His career has been built on taking familiar objects and making us look at them differently. Seen in that light, the dialogue between Smith and Picasso felt less surprising and more inevitable.

What interested me most was how the exhibition challenged the idea that museum collections should remain fixed.

Many institutions possess extraordinary collections, yet the question is not only what they own. The question is how they continue to activate those holdings for contemporary audiences.

The Musée Picasso Paris holds the world’s largest collection of Picasso works. The challenge is therefore not acquisition. It is interpretation.

How do you keep Picasso alive for new generations?

How do you encourage visitors to see familiar works differently?

How do you create surprise around an artist whose images have become part of global visual culture?

This exhibition offered one answer.

By allowing a designer rather than a traditional art historian to shape the visitor experience, the museum created a conversation between disciplines. The result felt less like a retrospective and more like an invitation to rediscover Picasso.

Great collectors, artists, designers and museum directors often share this characteristic.

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They remain interested. They continue looking. They continue asking questions.

The exhibition reflected precisely that spirit.

At a moment when many museums are reconsidering how collections are presented, Célébration Picasso demonstrated that innovation does not always require new acquisitions. Sometimes it simply requires a new way of seeing.

Picasso understood that better than most.

Paul Smith reminded us of it.