Moments from Museu Picasso

Barcelona's Picasso museum, which opened in 1963, deliberately tells a different story than most Picasso collections worldwide: rather than concentrating on the mature Cubist and late-period work most associated with his name, it focuses on his formative years, his teenage and young adult period in Barcelona, when he was still developing rather than already famous, giving the collection an unusually deep run of Blue Period paintings and early academic studies that trace exactly how his technique and vision formed. The museum is spread across five connected medieval and Gothic palaces on Carrer Montcada, a street of grand merchant houses in the Born district, so the building itself is worth as much attention as the paintings.

Its single most unusual holding is a series of fifty-eight paintings Picasso made in 1957, all variations on Velazquez's Las Meninas, an old master he'd studied obsessively as a student, reinterpreted and dissected from every conceivable angle in a single sustained late-career project. Seeing that series here, rather than at the Prado where the original hangs, is a genuinely useful way to understand how deeply Spanish art history sat inside Picasso's own work even at his most radical. Book ahead in high season, the museum's popularity regularly outstrips its relatively compact, historic-building capacity.