A new Tate Modern exhibition, Picasso 1932, cuts into the artist’s career at one pivotal moment, offering a month-by-month account of his so-called “year of wonders”, 1932.

“By focusing on works from one short period, the show allows you to step into that world with an intensity I’ve encountered in few exhibitions on any artist,” says Mark Hudson, The Telegraph’s art critic. “If Picasso’s ruthless monomania prevents the exhibition from being an entirely comfortable experience, comfort isn’t really what you want from the most challenging artist of the 20th century.”

Where else, if not London, can one enjoy his art? In short, everywhere. The Spaniard’s output was truly staggering. He produced an estimated 50,000 artworks during his long life, including 1,885 paintings, many of which are housed in Europe’s greatest galleries and museums. Here are a few highlights (note that some of his works will have been moved for the Tate Modern exhibition):

Antibes, France

From the terrace below the medieval stone tower of the former Grimaldi Palace, on the Côte d’Azur, you look out over the glittering waters of the bay to the distant grey bulk of Cap Ferrat – it’s an extraordinarily beautiful location for a museum, and here, inside the medieval chateau, the white-walled galleries are hung with some of Picasso’s most hedonistic and untroubled work. He used the chateau as a studio in the autumn of 1946.

He and his lover Françoise Gilot stayed in the little village of Golfe-Juan and spent idyllic days on the beaches, while Picasso worked mainly at night in the high-walled Château Grimaldi. It was a time of frenzied creativity and he produced a new work almost every night – 23 paintings and 44 drawings in all.

The results so pleased him that he donated all the work he had done here to the chateau, on condition that it remained on display. The museum became the first dedicated to the artist, and while it offers only a snapshot of his work, it is a glimpse of a summer holiday infused with warmth, light and optimism. Joie de Vivre, which hangs in the museum, perhaps best captures the mood, with its summery palette of light blues and yellows.

A naked model dances to pan pipes – played by a faun and a centaur – on the beach while a fishing boat bobs on the horizon. This was Picasso at his happiest, and as he put it himself: “If you want to see the Picassos of Antibes, you must see them in Antibes.”

Open: 10am-1pm, 2pm-6pm. Closed Mon; admission €6; antibesjuanlespins.com; note that opening hours in 2018 vary as the museum is undergoing a refurbishment. 

Vallauris, France

Picasso also lived at nearby Vallauris, the seaside village where he learnt the art of decorative ceramics. In 1952, he painted his famous mural on war and peace to decorate the chapel. It remains open to the public.

Open: 10am-12.15pm and 2pm-5pm. Closed Tues and bank holidays; admission: €3.25; 

Paris, France

The Musée Picasso, in the Marais district of Paris, was given a major overhaul in 2014 and more of the master’s works (the museum owns around 5,000 in total) are on display than ever.

They include large Cubist paintings Man with Guitar and Man with Mandolin (1911-13), an extraordinary sequence of Surrealist paintings from 1924-1930, “war paintings” depicting the Spanish Civil War; and diverse paintings and sculptures from the 1950s pop art period.

Open: Tue-Fri, 10.30am-6pm; Sat-Sun, 9.30am-6pm, closed Mon; admission: €12.50; 

Barcelona, Spain

Picasso lived in Barcelona during his formative years as an artist – from the ages of 14 to 24. Although he moved to Paris in 1905, the Catalan city was always close to his heart. The Museu Picasso, which opened in 1963, and has expanded into five adjoining medieval palaces on Montcada Street, was founded on a donation of 574 works by Picasso’s secretary Jaume Sabartes. Most of the paintings are from the artist’s early years - especially those up until the end of the blue period in 1905. In 1970, Picasso left further bequests to the museum, and the total count is now well over 3,000.

However, most of the paintings on display still date from 1890-1917, with the notable exception of the Las Meninas series, which dates to 1957. As well as these homages to Velázquez, highlights include Picasso’s first major works, The First Communion (1896) and Science and Charity (1897), as well as a view of Barcelona’s rooftops and a portrait of his mother and father.

Open: 9am-7pm (extended until 9.30pm on Thu), closed Mon; admission €12; museupicasso.bcn.cat

Madrid, Spain

The Reina Sofia museum displays modern and contemporary Spanish art, and has a holding of about 100 works by Picasso, many of which are studies and drawings for Guernica, which hangs in room 206. His epic homage to the victims of the bombing of the Basque village in 1937 remains an emotive reminder of the conflict, division and suffering of Spain during the civil war and the Franco regime. After a visit to Spain in 1934, Picasso never again returned to his homeland.

Open: 10am-9pm (7pm Sundays); closed Tues and bank holidays; admission: €8 online / €10 on the door; museoreinasofia.es

Málaga, Spain

Picasso’s birthplace – an apartment block in Málaga – has been converted to a foundation (fundacionpicasso.malaga.eu) that organises exhibitions and educational projects in his name. However, there is also a series of rooms displaying mementos of his family life, photographs and some of his prints and drawings. There is a much bigger collection of his works nearby in the Museo Picasso Málaga, which opened in 2003 in the Buenavista Palace. It holds 285 works donated by members of Picasso’s family or held on permanent loan and includes some of his early academic studies, his cubist phase, the classical paintings of the Twenties, and some of his last paintings from the Seventies.

Open: 10am-7pm (or until 6pm in winter and 8pm in July and August); admission: €7; museopicassomalaga.org; see more Malaga attractions here

Lucerne, Switzerland 

The art dealer Siegfried Rosengart (1894-1985), who moved to Lucerne after the First World War, was a friend of many leading artists, including Matisse, Chagall, Klee and Picasso. Together with his daughter Angela, he amassed an extraordinary collection which he and Angela donated to the town of Lucerne. It includes 32 paintings and 100 drawings, watercolours and graphic and sculptural works by Picasso, including five portraits of Angela herself.

Now in her 80s, she still runs the Museum Sammlung Rosengart, housed in a former bank building, and the whole of the ground floor, and several of the first-floor rooms are devoted to the Picassos, plus some remarkable photos of him at work, by David Douglas Duncan. Works from all periods of his life are represented, but the later years are particularly well covered. Apart from the portraits of Angela, among the highlights are the many portraits of his wife, Jacqueline; Dejenuer sur L’herbe (after Manet), Portrait of a Painter (after El Greco) and the Man with Pipe series from the late Sixties.

Open: daily 11am-5pm (10am-6pm in summer); admission CHF 18; rosengart.ch

Cologne, Germany

The extraordinary Museum Ludwig houses works from most of the key 20th-century movements, from pop art to the Russian avant garde and American abstract artists. But it is the holding of 864 works by Picasso for which it is most famous.

This is the world’s third-largest collection of his works after the Picasso museums in Paris and Barcelona. All the key phases of the artist’s paintings are represented, and there is also a large collection of drawings and graphics, ceramics and sculptures, including the plaster Woman with Pram (1950) and the monumental head of his lover of the Thirties and Forties, Dora Maar. Key paintings normally on display include Harlequin (1923) and Woman with Artichoke (1941).

Open 10am – 6pm (extended to 10pm on the first Thu or the month), closed Mon; admission: €11; museum-ludwig.de

Best of the rest

As mentioned above, Picasso was truly prolific. His artwork can be found at dozens of other institution in Europe and beyond, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

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