Spain's Reina Sofia museum will from Wednesday display 430 works by Pablo Picasso on loan from the National Picasso Museum in Paris in what will be one of the biggest ever retrospectives of his art.
"It is the first time that this many works leave the museum in Paris. You can only stage such an exhibition every 30 or 50 years," the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari, told journalists.
The retrospective will feature paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings, photographs and ceramics by the artist from every stage of his career displayed in chronological order in three halls dedicated to temporary exhibitions.
The Reina Sofia museum already has one hall permanently dedicated to works by Picasso which houses his masterpiece "Guernica" depicting the destruction of the Spanish town by German warplanes during the devastating 1936-39 civil war.
The exhibition will run until May 5. The items on loan from the National Picasso Museum will then be put on display in museums in Australia, Canada, Finland, United Arab Emirates and the United States until late 2010.
The French museum will use the period while the works are on loan to carry out building work.
Two-thirds of the work's expected cost of 24 million euros (35.5 million dollars) will be covered by revenue raised by international loans of Picasso's works.
The Spanish government paid 3.5 million euros for the loan of the works by Picasso.