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“When I was a child, I drew like Raphaël but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child .” Behind this slightly egocentric quote hides the indestructible Pablo Picasso, who is said to have paid for his gourmet meals by quickly scribbling on the tablecloth or directly on the napkin. Founding myth or urban legend? Still, no loose leaf seems to have escaped the Minotaur's pencil. But what exactly was he drawing? This exhibition – the largest demonstration ever organized of his drawn and engraved work – reveals the hidden side of the Spanish painter by revealing a thousand unsuspected treasures, testimonies of his compulsive and obsessive activity.

For this unique dive into the Picassian imagination, the Centre Pompidou shakes up the codes, reverses the chronology and offers us this labyrinthine journey crossed by as many chapters as a diary. Between his Faces and his Saltimbanques, one observation quickly emerges: the artist literally haunts his work, whether in this clear-line self-portrait or in this anthropomorphic vision. Under his pencils, the ogre Picasso becomes Harlequin, bull, minotaur, monster.

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