THE Catholicism that Picasso practised until young adulthood, demonstrated by his first large-scale painting, First Communion (1896), rarely features in the numerous exhibitions devoted to him. Even in 1969, the year of Ireland’s first ever Picasso exhibition, at Trinity College, when 95 per cent of the Republic’s population identified as Roman Catholic, the 100 paintings, ceramics, and sculptures displayed in the college’s new library were curated through a secular lens.

Fast forward five decades, when only 16 per cent of Ireland’s population attend mass regularly, and it is reasonable to expect Picasso in the Studio at the National Gallery of Ireland to be faith-free. But religious imagery remains in the works. Woman Reading (1935) has a religious feeling, with its dominating, church-like, stained-glass window. The female figure in the centre is reading a book, echoing artistic traditions of depicting the annunciation.

Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s then partner, was the inspiration for the reading female figure. Her striking profile and almond-shaped eyes feature in Portrait of Marie-Thérèse (1937), the painting with a half sky-blue background providing the poster image for the show. Walter’s strong features are echoed in the Tête de Femme sculpture series, in which eyebrows form a T junction with the nose, creating a half-halo around the head. These biomorphic forms were influenced by Surrealism and recently excavated palaeolithic sculptures.

Picasso was working in Château Boisgeloup in Normandy when he began creating substantial sculptures rather than the earlier assemblages associated with Cubism. Purchased in 1930, the house’s barns and outbuildings offered the spatial, loadbearing capacity to work with heavy materials on a massive scale. The artist’s wife, the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and their son, Paul, lived in the attic rooms; Picasso maintained that the lack of electricity and heating kept him alert. Olga and Picasso separated in 1935, after Walter gave birth to a daughter. By 1937, Picasso was also in a relationship with the surrealist artist Dora Maar.

Musée National Picasso-Paris © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2025 © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée National Picasso-Paris) / Adrien DidierjeanPablo Picasso (1881-1973), Woman Reading (1935)

Maar was instrumental in Picasso’s returning to Paris and working in a studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, near Notre-Dame. The studio was reminiscent of his workspace in Montmartre, when he first arrived from Spain in Paris, as a hopeful young artist.

The curator of “Picasso in the Studio”, Janet McLean, says that, as Picasso was an entirely studio -based artist, not working outside in the mode of the Impressionists, his succession of studios chart how he chose to live, work, and respond to his times. “Throughout the exhibition, we relate how events beyond the stillness of the studio shaped Picasso’s art. War and occupation, exile from his native home, changes in fortunes, the beginnings and endings of relationships, all had an impact on his work and on where and how he made it.”

The Grands Augustins studio where he painted Guernica (1937) is the most central to the Picasso story. Guernica, a response to the bombing of civilians by Italian planes at Franco’s request, during the Spanish Civil War, was completed in less than four weeks. A slideshow of Maar’s series of photographs of Picasso, sometimes on a ladder, completing the monumental work, is one of the highlights of the exhibition. Guernica’s images of innocent suffering continue to resonate. In 2023, the American artist Mickalene Thomas observed: “Guernica, it seemed to me like a fitting reference to represent the physical and socio-political realities of the modern era and familiar histories of black and brown people, especially mothers, face today.”

While contemporaries left for America, joined the army, or even had shows in Berlin, Picasso spent the war years in his Paris studio, classified as a degenerate artist by the occupying Nazi forces and unable to exhibit. His work in the late 1940s employed skull and sea-urchin motifs, reflecting the lasting effect of the occupation on his work.

Bust of a Woman in a Blue Hat (1944) is one of the last paintings that he made of Maar. While Walter was always shown as serene, Maar exudes sadness. With its stiff pose, and one palm hand holding fruit, Bust of a Woman in a Blue Hat echoes court paintings of enthroned queens. Maar’s blue Schiaparelli hat and tightly ribbed blue suit reference depictions of the Mother of Sorrows and Stabat Mater. Rarely posing for Picasso, apart from a few drawings, Maar commented: “All Picasso’s portraits of me are portraits of Picasso.”

Musée National Picasso-Paris © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2025 © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée National Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu RabeauPablo Picasso (1881-1973), The Studio at La Californie (1956)

Grands Augustins may be most freighted studio that Picasso occupied, but La Californie, in Cannes, is most prolifically represented, the subject of about 30 paintings and several series of drawings during the mid-1950s. The Studio at La Californie (1956) has church-like Gothic arched windows in the background, and objects including a lamp featuring a Cross, arranged in the foreground, as if laid out on an altar. The blank canvas at the centre of Studio Californie embodies all the work to come, for the then 75-year-old artist.

Substantial loans from the Musée Picasso give this Dublin exhibition a European, not Anglophone, perspective. And the tour of Picasso’s studios succeeds in demonstrating how he used art and image to evolve and cement his reputation. Picasso comprehended how communication in the 20th century would work in a way that, 50 years after his death, others have yet to match.

“Picasso in the Studio” is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square, Dublin 2, until 22 February. Phone 00 353 1 661 5133. www.nationalgallery.ie