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The Picasso Erotique show was last exhibited in Barcelona, Spain, after a successful run in Montreal, Canada. The show drew hundreds of thousands of visitors in a handful of cities, and has inspired people the world over. Below is an excellent review prepared by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. For complete coverage (including media reviews of the show) of this show, have a look at our special page.

The selection of more than 350 works - many rarely, if ever, exhibited publicly before due to reasons of censorship - spans the artist's entire career and includes paintings, prints and drawings, sculpture and ceramics. Together, these reveal the profound, persistent and remarkably varied role that erotic imagery, ideas and experiences played in Picasso's work - from the bordello scenes of his youth in Barcelona to the epochal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (sketches for which are included in the exhibition) and the nudes he produced at the age of ninety. As Picasso himself once stated, when asked about his views on art and sexuality, "They're the same thing."

Garnered from more than forty public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition features erotic works representative of virtually all the phases and styles of Picasso's career. Drawn from personal experience, imagination, mythology and earlier art, these images - by turns humorous and melancholic, enraptured and enraged - explore an almost encyclopedic range of sexual impulses, practices and human desire.

"Given the enormity of Picasso's oeuvre and influence, it is remarkable that up to now there has been no full-scale, major museum exhibition devoted to the central importance of erotic subject matter in his art," stated Museum Director Guy Cogeval. "Fascinating and often stunningly beautiful in and of themselves, these works will provide a long-overdue contribution to our understanding of the greatest artist of the twentieth century - and, indeed, of the nature of the artistic process and of creativity itself. It is most appropriate that this historic exhibition should take place at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which in the past has hosted such important displays of Picasso's work as Picasso and Man (1964) and Pablo Picasso: Meeting in Montreal, organized in collaboration with Jacqueline Picasso, the artist's last wife."

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