On February 20th a monographic room dedicated to Picasso was opened at the MNAC, thanks to the fact that the State has purchased and loaned the Museum a painting by the artist, and to the generosity of Catherine Hutin, the painter from Málaga’s stepdaughter, who has temporarily loaned eight of his works. This group of nine paintings, illustrative of some of Picasso’s finest periods, enriches the discourse of the MNAC’s collections of modern art and, especially, of the avant-garde period. Moreover, they bridge one of the most significant gaps in these collections, both because he was the most important artist of the last century and because of the ties that Picasso kept with Barcelona and, by extension, with Catalan art.

Woman with Hat and Fur Collar (Marie-Thérèse Walter) (1937) is the painting that the State has acquired for the Museum, through a donation by the Abertis company. It is one of the many portraits that Pablo Picasso did of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his partner between 1927 and 1935. With this work, the artist carries out an exhaustive analytical exercise in which the youth and the personality of Marie-Thérèse are subjected to a thousand metamorphic transfigurations.