The Picassos Are Here!: A Retrospective from Basel Collections

The public reception of Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) art is inextricably bound up with the early support of his first collectors—men such as Raoul La Roche, Rudolf Staechelin, Karl Im Obersteg and Maja Sacher-Stehlin, who were buying his work from c. 1918 on—as well as the Basel art historians Georg Schmidt and Christian Geelhaar, who were among the first to recognize the role Picasso would play in twentieth-century art. This publication accompanies a large-scale retrospective of the artist’s work, the first to unite the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Fondation Beyeler, assembled with donations from the private collections of the above patrons. The Picassos Are Here! allows us to perceive astonishing correlations between the artist’s many periods, from the “Blue Period” to Cubism and the Surrealist-influenced paintings of the 1930s, to the postwar and late works.