The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Picasso in Fontainebleau, held in New York from October 2023 to February 2024, focused on one of the most concentrated and revealing episodes in Pablo Picasso’s career. During the summer of 1921, Picasso spent several months in Fontainebleau, working in an improvised garage studio at a rented villa. In that unlikely setting, he produced a body of work that appears almost impossible to reconcile within a single artistic identity: on one side, the fragmented language of Cubism; on the other, monumental figures rooted in classical tradition.

The exhibition brought together paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings, photographs and archival material connected to Picasso’s brief stay in Fontainebleau. At its centre were two monumental works created during that period: Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring. MoMA’s presentation was especially compelling because it placed these works into dialogue, allowing the viewer to see how radically different Picasso’s artistic languages could be even within the same summer.

This question also returned during the Picasso Symposium at UNESCO in Paris, which I attended in December 2023 as part of the international Célébration Picasso programme marking fifty years since the artist’s death. One of the sessions was devoted to Picasso in Fontainebleau, with Anne Umland, MoMA’s Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, presenting the exhibition. Seen in the context of the symposium, the MoMA exhibition became more than a museum show. It became part of a larger scholarly conversation about Picasso’s resistance to categorisation.

Fontainebleau reveals a Picasso who was not moving neatly from one period to another. Instead, he was working across several visual systems at once. Three Musicians belongs to the world of Synthetic Cubism, with its masks, signs, flat planes and theatrical compression of space. Three Women at the Spring, by contrast, appears to look backwards towards antiquity, monumentality and classical figuration. Yet both works emerged from the same place, at the same time, within the same artistic mind.

This simultaneity is what makes the Fontainebleau period so important. Art history often tries to organise artists into clear phases: early, middle, late; radical, classical, mature. Picasso resists that logic. In 1921, he was not choosing between modernity and tradition. He was testing whether both could coexist. The result is not inconsistency, but extraordinary freedom.

MoMA’s exhibition made this freedom visible through the surrounding works. Studies such as Head of a Woman and Two Women with Hats showed Picasso working through the formal problems of the figure, while the monumental canvases demonstrated how those investigations could expand into very different pictorial worlds. The exhibition did not simply present finished masterpieces; it revealed an artist thinking through alternatives, revising forms and moving between historical references and modern invention.

What struck me most was how contemporary the questions still feel. Must an artist have one recognisable style? Is innovation only possible through rupture? Can an artist return to the past without becoming conservative? Picasso’s Fontainebleau works suggest that these oppositions are too simple. For Picasso, the classical and the modern were not enemies. They were materials to be used, dismantled and reimagined.

The UNESCO symposium reinforced this point. Fifty years after Picasso’s death, curators and scholars were still returning to the instability of his practice: the way he unsettled categories, absorbed traditions and repeatedly transformed the terms of modern art. Fontainebleau is a particularly clear example because the contradictions are so visible. One does not need to choose between Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring. The force of the exhibition lies in seeing them together.

In this sense, Picasso in Fontainebleau was not simply about one summer in 1921. It was about the larger question of how artistic identity is formed. Picasso’s importance does not lie only in the invention of Cubism or in the creation of individual masterpieces. It also lies in his refusal to be reduced to any single achievement. Fontainebleau shows an artist who understood that the past could be reactivated, that style could be provisional, and that modernity itself could contain contradiction.

Seen at MoMA, and then reconsidered through the discussions at UNESCO, the Fontainebleau period becomes one of the clearest windows into Picasso’s working mind. It shows him not as a fixed historical figure, but as an artist in motion: testing, returning, contradicting himself and expanding the possibilities of painting. More than a century later, that remains one of the reasons Picasso continues to occupy such a central place in museums, scholarship and art history.