The Musée Picasso Paris (as it is officially called) first opened in 1985 to great excitement. The elegant seventeenth-century Hôtel Salé had been transformed into a series of pristine, if somewhat awkwardly laid out, exhibition spaces. Hand-wrought metal furniture by Diego Giacometti, Alberto’s brother, provided a sympathetic counterpoint to the exhibited works. The neighborhood of the Marais, once the home of the aristocracy of the ancien régime, was still a little exotic, not yet fully transformed into today’s bastion of chic shops, prestigious galleries, and expensive apartments. There was a sense of discovery and adventure in the quartier, even though many of the once neglected buildings of the Marais, like the Picasso Museum, had already been beautifully restored, and even if the courtyards of those awaiting attention were free of the ad hoc enterprises that had obscured them on my first treks through the district, as an undergraduate armed with a map made by an architectural historian friend.

Most importantly, the Musée Picasso’s collection, the world’s largest assembly of works by the artist, was fascinating, as much for its willful unevenness as for its high points—a splendid portrait of the master, warts and all. There were important paintings on view, but there was also a wealth of revealing, seemingly private works, and some fairly dreadful, self-indulgent ones, interspersed with the major, even iconic efforts, vivid testimony to Picasso’s famous insistence on keeping a vast number of examples of his own work, however inconsequential or