“To me there is no past or future in art. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”

— Pablo Picasso

This quotation greeted visitors to Picasso and Antiquity: Line and Clay at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. It also provided the key to understanding the exhibition itself.

Picasso is often presented as the artist who shattered tradition and transformed modern art. Yet the exhibition argued that one cannot fully understand Picasso without understanding his profound engagement with the ancient world. Far from rejecting antiquity, Picasso returned to it repeatedly throughout his career, drawing upon Greek mythology, ancient sculpture and classical forms as sources of inspiration.

The exhibition brought together paintings, drawings, ceramics, photographs and archaeological objects, placing Picasso in direct dialogue with the cultures that helped shape his imagination. Rather than treating antiquity as a historical backdrop, the curators presented it as an active force within Picasso’s work. Ancient Greece was not something Picasso looked back upon. It was something he continuously reinterpreted.

The exhibition’s curatorial team reflected this ambition. Curated by Nikolaos Chr. Stampolidis and Olivier Berggruen, the project brought together expertise from both archaeology and modern art. This mattered because the exhibition was not simply asking how antiquity influenced Picasso. It was asking how Picasso himself might be understood within a much longer Mediterranean history of image-making. Rather than positioning ancient works as historical precedents and Picasso as the modern successor, the exhibition encouraged visitors to see both as participants in the same visual conversation.

One of the most compelling sections focused on the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull creature of Greek mythology that became one of Picasso’s most enduring symbols.

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was born from an unnatural union between Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, and a sacred bull sent by Poseidon. Ashamed of the creature, Minos ordered the construction of the Labyrinth, an immense maze designed by Daedalus, where the Minotaur was imprisoned. Young Athenians were periodically sent into the Labyrinth as sacrifices until the hero Theseus entered the maze, killed the Minotaur and escaped with the help of Ariadne’s thread.

The myth has traditionally been interpreted as a story about the struggle between civilisation and instinct. The Minotaur is both human and beast, trapped between reason and animal desire. Imprisoned within the Labyrinth, he embodies forces that society fears yet cannot entirely eliminate: violence, sexuality, irrationality and excess. Theseus’ victory represents the triumph of order over chaos, reason over instinct and civilisation over the darker aspects of human nature.

For Picasso, however, the Minotaur became something far more complex. Ancient representations of the creature appeared alongside Picasso’s own interpretations, revealing both continuity and transformation. While the mythological Minotaur was often presented as a monster to be defeated, Picasso gradually turned it into a symbol of desire, power, creativity, vulnerability and contradiction.

The Minotaur became one of Picasso’s most powerful alter egos because it allowed him to give form to opposing forces within himself. It was human and animal, creator and destroyer, vulnerable and violent, trapped yet forceful. Through the Minotaur, Picasso could explore desire, masculinity, artistic instinct and moral ambiguity without reducing them to a single meaning. The figure was never merely mythological. It became a psychological self-portrait.

This is why the Minotaur appears so insistently throughout Picasso’s work of the 1930s. At times it is aggressive and erotic; at others, wounded, blinded or led by a young girl.

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Picasso used the figure to explore the contradictory nature of the self and perhaps also the contradictions of artistic creation itself. The Minotaur was not simply a symbol borrowed from Greek mythology. It became part of Picasso’s own visual language.

A particularly memorable juxtaposition placed an ancient sculpture of the Minotaur alongside a photograph of Picasso wearing a Minotaur mask. The pairing captured one of the exhibition’s central ideas. Picasso was not merely borrowing from mythology. He was inhabiting it. The Minotaur became an alter ego through which he explored aspects of his own identity and artistic practice.

One quotation displayed in the exhibition made this relationship unmistakably clear:

“If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.”

The image is revealing. Picasso did not describe the Minotaur as a subject he painted. He described it as a figure that embodied the complexity of his own journey.

Yet the exhibition extended well beyond the Minotaur. Ancient gods, satyrs, fauns, nymphs and mythological narratives appeared throughout the galleries. Works such as Silenus in the Company of Dancers demonstrated Picasso’s fascination with the Dionysian world of instinct, transformation and excess. These themes would remain central to his work for decades.

Equally striking were the dialogues between Picasso’s ceramics and ancient sculpture. In several galleries, classical objects stood beside Picasso’s vessels and ceramic forms. Despite being separated by more than two thousand years, the works appeared unexpectedly comfortable in one another’s company. Picasso’s ceramics do not imitate antiquity. Instead, they engage in conversation with it. Ancient forms are transformed through modern eyes while retaining a connection to their origins.

The exhibition also explored Picasso’s engagement with classical sculpture and the human figure. Throughout his career, he repeatedly returned to ancient models while simultaneously reinventing them. His figures often possess the monumentality and timelessness of classical art, yet they remain unmistakably Picasso. Antiquity provided a framework, not a constraint.

What emerged most clearly was Picasso’s refusal to recognise the boundaries that art history often imposes. For him, ancient and modern were not opposing categories. Classical sculpture, Egyptian art, Old Masters and contemporary experimentation all belonged to the same visual conversation. The past was not a museum. It was a living resource.

This idea feels particularly relevant today. Contemporary discussions often position innovation and tradition as competing forces. Picasso’s work suggests otherwise. His greatest achievements emerged not from rejecting the past but from transforming it. Antiquity became raw material for invention.

Leaving the exhibition, I was struck by how accurately Picasso’s own words describe his relationship with history. The ancient world was never something distant or closed. It remained alive within his imagination, continually generating new possibilities. The exhibition demonstrated that Picasso’s dialogue with antiquity was not a side note to his career. It was one of its foundations.

More than fifty years after his death, that dialogue continues. The questions Picasso asked of mythology, sculpture and the ancient world remain remarkably contemporary. Perhaps that is why his work continues to feel so alive. As Picasso himself understood, great art does not belong to the past. It continues to exist in the present.