Shanghai Picasso Art Center

Today, I had originally planned to visit the Shanghai Museum. But when I arrived at the entrance, I discovered that starting May 6th, the museum had closed for renovations and wouldn't reopen until early July. So I pulled up the Amap app on my phone and started searching for nearby art galleries worth exploring. That's when the "Shanghai Picasso Art Center" caught my eye.

It's a century-old Western-style townhouse nestled in the bustling heart of Shanghai. I noticed from the plaque at the entrance that the building is also listed as a "Shanghai Outstanding Historical Structure," built in an overall Renaissance architectural style. Interested readers are welcome to browse the photos I've attached.

But let me get to the exhibition first. The art center is currently hosting Back to the Origin: Picasso and Africa, a Sino-African art and cultural exchange exhibition. What was supposed to be a backup trip turned out to deliver quite a surprise. The Zimbabwean woodcarvings, stone sculptures, rustic musical instruments, and oil paintings on canvas — with their bold color blocks, highly saturated palettes, and exaggerated facial structures — shared the same rooms as Picasso's classic paintings, especially those in his Cubist style, and the pairing felt remarkably natural.

The exhibition spans six galleries, and Gallery No. 3 was my personal favorite. It displays postage stamps from around the world featuring Picasso's paintings—reportedly the most comprehensive collection of its kind—framed in vintage frames and hung on walls over a hundred years old. It truly evokes a sense of time slipping quietly by. This gallery also features an information panel that systematically charts every creative period of Picasso's life. Among them, the "Primitive Period—African Art" is presumably the inspiration behind this exhibition's theme, and it happens to fall just before the Cubist period. I was astonished to discover that the very founder of Cubism had such deep and intricate ties to African art. I plan to write a dedicated article exploring this topic, so I won't go into detail here.

All in all, compared to the professional, sprawling conventional art museums, the Picasso Art Center—its architecture, its décor, and its overall qiangdiao (a word Shanghainese love to use, meaning "vibe" or "style")—is wonderfully quaint, elegant, and distinctly evocative of old Shanghai. I encourage everyone to take a good look at the photos I've taken. Currently, admission is 39 RMB per person, and a visit takes about an hour. The creative merchandise shop is well worth browsing, or you could order a coffee or a sparkling water and take a pleasant rest in the courtyard; both are lovely options.