Picasso Museum Barcelona

The Museu Picasso opened in 1963, making it one of the first museums dedicated to the artist established during his own lifetime, and — significantly — it happened with Picasso's active cooperation and eventual major donations, despite the fact he never lived under Franco's Spain again after the Civil War and refused to allow his work shown publicly in the country while the dictatorship lasted. The museum instead focuses overwhelmingly on his formative years, when as a teenager and young man he lived and trained in Barcelona, making it a fundamentally different collection from the Paris or Málaga Picasso museums, which lean more on his mature and late-career output.

With over 4,000 works, the museum's real strength is showing the astonishing speed of Picasso's technical development — academic figure studies and portraits from his teenage years at Barcelona's fine arts academy sit alongside his first Blue Period paintings, made in the city during the early 1900s while he was still processing the suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas, before he'd fully transitioned to his mature Parisian career. A substantial section is devoted to "Las Meninas," a series of 58 paintings from 1957 in which an older Picasso reinterpreted Velázquez's famous royal portrait obsessively, canvas after canvas, offering a rare documented look at how he worked through a single idea.