Paris show blends happiness and melancholia of young Pablo Picasso

More than 300 works from two key periods in Pablo Picasso’s early years go on display in Paris on Tuesday, the first time they have been brought together in the city where the Spanish master took his first steps toward revolutionary new territories of modern art. “Picasso: Blue and Rose” delves into the formative days from 1900 to 1906 when the young artist was living the Bohemian life in a Montmartre studio, at times burning his works to ward off the cold. “The strongest walls would open before me,” he would proudly write while absorbing the influence of Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh. The exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay was conceived with the Picasso and Orangerie museums in Paris as well as the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which will also show the works early next year. Curators managed to secure exceptional loans of works from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and institutions in the US, Switzerland and Russia as well as from private collections rarely open