How does the prologue of Romeo and Juliet begin? “Two households, both alike in dignity”? Substitute “Picasso exhibitions” for “households” and we might be describing this spring’s more or less concurrent shows, “Picasso’s Guitars 1912–1914,” at the Museum of Modern Art and “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.[1] The two exhibitions are both alike not only in “dignity,” but also in the artist they focus on and in ambition. Yet as their titles indicate, in most other respects, they are diametric opposites—in motivation, conception, realization, and intended audience. One is a deliberately limited, scholarly investigation aimed at fairly sophisticated museum-goers; the other is an exuberant, expansive celebration designed to attract habitual, casual, and first-time visitors in equal numbers. Comparisons between such avowedly disparate projects in widely separated locations are obviously pointless, but I’m afraid they are made irresistible not only by the overlapping of the two shows but also by my having seen both of them within the same week.

“Picasso’s Guitars,” at moma, organized by Anne Umland, the Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Blair Hartzell, the Curatorial Assistant, is small and tightly focused. Meticulously researched and impeccably selected, the show is designed to set the record straight about a very specific group of works, and to sharpen and perhaps even alter our perceptions of Picasso’s practice. Comprised of about seventy modest-sized works made during an intense two-year campaign, the exhibition will