The National Portrait Gallery and the Museu Picasso de Barcelona are organising a major exhibition exploring the place of caricature in Picasso’s portraiture, a subject that has not previously been explored in detail. The exhibition will contain paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from all periods of the artist’s long career. It is being curated by Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Edinburgh University, and an independent scholar and exhibition curator. Encouraged by his father and when still only in his early teens, Picasso made numerous portraits from life of members of his family. By the late 1890s he had become adept at catching a likeness and in 1900 held a breakthrough exhibition of portrait drawings of the vanguard artists and writers in his circle in Barcelona. Many of the same people were, however, the subject of shrewd and amusing caricatures, and periodically he subjected himself to the same unsparing treatment. For the rest of his life, portraiture and caricature were among Picasso’s favourite genres, and the nature of their relationship within his oeuvre is a key theme of the exhibition.

Elizabeth Cowling, Professor Emeritus of History of Art at Edinburgh University, and an independent scholar and exhibition curator.