A Free Outdoor Sculpture Park Dedicated to Pablo Picasso Is Coming to Paris
The Picasso Museum will build the open-air park by 2030. The nearly $60 million expansion will also include a new wing designed to house temporary exhibitions
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To mark its 40th anniversary, the Picasso Museum in Paris announced that it will add a new wing and open-air sculpture garden by 2030.
Officials have been planning the expansion project, called “Picasso 2030,” in collaboration with the artist’s daughter Paloma Picasso. The Picasso family and corporate sponsors will fund the expansion, which is expected to cost nearly $60 million.
The new wing will house temporary exhibitions, doubling the amount of space currently available for such shows. Meanwhile, the sculpture park will be the “first open-air museum” dedicated to Picasso, as museum director Cécile Debray tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). Visitors will be able to access the park for free.
To create the sculpture park, the museum will merge its own garden with Square Léonor-Fini, a public park next door. When the project is finished, visitors will be able to walk among artworks such as Picasso’s life-size bronze statue The She-Goat (1950).
“We are taking inspiration from Scandinavian gardens, where it is possible to touch the sculptures,” Debray explains to Le Monde’s Roxana Azimi. The director tells AFP that the park will be a “magical” respite from the commotion of France’s capital, where the public “will be able to interact with the works.”
Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, but he lived most of his life in France. After visiting Paris for the first time when he was 19, the artist spent much of the following decades living and working in the city, where he developed his style and collaborated with French artists. He regularly returned to his home country until the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936.
Quick fact: How prolific was Picasso?
The artist created about 50,000 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics and sculptures throughout his career.“Picasso never forgot Spain, but he needed Paris to become a great artist,” wrote the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones in 2015. “His genius is so tangled up with the streets and garrets, palaces and attics of Paris, a city … whose artistic life he would take to new heights.”
Founded in 1985, the museum houses nearly 300 paintings from throughout Picasso’s artistic career. Its collections also include more than 1,700 of his drawings and notebooks, as well as hundreds of his sculptures and other three-dimensional works./https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/29/2e/292ef5f2-1585-421e-88eb-b6a0d518d8f9/salon_jupiter__musee_national_picasso-paris.jpg)
In addition to art by Picasso, the museum holds many works from the painter’s private art collection. Throughout his life, he acquired Iberian statues, African masks and paintings by the likes of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. The museum tripled its exhibition space just a decade ago. Still, “visitor traffic constantly intersects,” Debray tells Le Monde.
The museum plans to break ground on its new wing and sculpture park in 2028, and it will remain open throughout construction. Paloma tells AFP that the project will be a “beautiful” tribute that’s “full of life—like my father.”
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