Paul Smith – interview: ‘I'd often look up and ask the boss, “Mr Picasso, would you like that?”’

To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, the Musée National Picasso, Paris, commissioned a re-presentation of its extensive collection and invited the designer Paul Smith to be its artistic director. Studio International caught up with him at the resulting exhibition, Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light

The leading British fashion designer Paul Smith is well-known for his use of bright colours and combinations of patterns in his clothing and his shops, and he has brought that same design skill to bear in this new exhibition, for which he was given a free hand in which works to include and how to display them. Banishing the white cube, he has drawn out Picasso’s own colour and patterns in unusual ways. It was a risk, he admits, to place masterpieces by one of modern arts most famed artists on walls of brightly painted stripes and floral wallpaper, but it works. Smith is, in his own field, a master of putting a creative twist on tradition and he has done it again here, fulfilling his brief to show Picasso “in a new light”.

Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, installation view, Musée National Picasso-Paris. Copyright Musée National Picasso-Paris, Voyez-Vous (Vinciane Lebrun) and Succession Picasso 2023.

Smith didn’t just design the show. He also selected the works from the thousands of pieces in the museum’s collection – the world’s largest holding of Picasso’s work – and decided what would go where. The designer shares Picasso’s eclectic taste in influences, his endless willingness to experiment, and his love of seeing one thing in another. Smith’s approach is at once serious and playful, respectful and fun. And it is proving a hit with everyone from children and students to top international curators.  

Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light
The Musée National Picasso-Paris
7 March – 27 August 2023

Interview by JULIET RIX
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, installation view, Musée National Picasso-Paris. Copyright Musée National Picasso-Paris, Voyez-Vous (Vinciane Lebrun) and Succession Picasso 2023.

Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, installation view, Musée National Picasso-Paris. Copyright Musée National Picasso-Paris, Voyez-Vous (Vinciane Lebrun) and Succession Picasso 2023.

Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, installation view, Musée National Picasso-Paris. Copyright Musée National Picasso-Paris, Voyez-Vous (Vinciane Lebrun) and Succession Picasso 2023.