Paul Smith, the renowned British fashion designer, has taken on a unique role as the artistic director for a Paris exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death. The collaboration places Smith at the helm of a project housed in the National Picasso Museum, inviting visitors to view Picasso through a fresh, design-forward lens. The setup moves away from traditional white-walled galleries and instead envelops Picasso’s masterpieces with striped walls that echo Smith’s signature print and a nod to vintage wallpapers and collages—an intentional visual language meant to resonate with today’s audiences on social media.
In his own words, Smith grappled with how Picasso might have felt about such a contemporary presentation. He wondered whether this approach could be seen as a modern means of showcasing Picasso’s ideas. The designer conveyed this curiosity during an interview, expressing hope that the display would feel modern and relevant to current viewers (WWD). The project’s curators selected Smith specifically for his ability to shape an exhibition space that invites people to capture and share striking images for online platforms, turning the gallery visit into a visually engaging experience that thrives in the digital age.
Smith explained that his goal was not to position himself as a scholar of Picasso but to craft a visually oriented experience that translates Picasso’s legacy into a contemporary, camera-ready form. The emphasis is on making the exhibition feel like a slice of the modern world—where nearly everyone carries a phone and where every moment can be recorded and reshaped into a narrative shared across networks. The result aims to spark new lines of thought about Picasso’s work while offering a lively, image-first encounter that encourages visitors to explore the artist’s ideas through a fresh, design-inspired lens (WWD).
The project unfolds as a dialogue between Picasso’s enduring influence and the visual culture of today, inviting viewers to observe how color, texture, and rhythm can illuminate familiar works in unexpected ways. The striped backdrop acts as a visual voice, guiding attention not just to the paintings themselves but to the way each composition interacts with space, light, and movement. By foregrounding display as much as object, the exhibition invites conversations about interpretation, context, and the evolving role of museums in a digitally connected world (WWD).
As this collaboration unfolds, it signals a broader trend in museum presentation: the fusion of fashion sensibility with art history to create experiences that feel immediate and shareable. The National Picasso Museum’s choice to engage a fashion designer as artistic director reflects a growing openness to cross-disciplinary collaborations that enrich how audiences engage with canonical works. The result is an installation that balances reverence for Picasso with a bold, contemporary aesthetic that resonates with a global audience, encouraging visitors to see classic masterpieces through a modern, visually expressive lens (WWD).