Exhibition to show how Picasso pilfered the classics

The National Gallery is to host a major Picasso exhibition in the New Year, it emerged today.

Seventy paintings, including 10 of his most important works, will reveal how the artist plundered the Old Masters and Impressionists.

Visitor numbers for Picasso: Challenging The Past - which will open in February - are expected to rival the 300,000 who went to see the Velásquez exhibition in 2006-07, the gallery's most successful show.

The gallery's director Nicholas Penny was forced to defend the blockbuster show after previously indicating that he would move away from "box office" exhibitions.

Last February he said major institutions should "show people something they have not seen before".

But today Mr Penny said: "I didn't really mean that I'm against putting on exhibitions of artists you have heard of. I am against putting on an exhibition of an artist simply because it will be popular. I would not be interested in putting on this exhibition if it did not teach us something about Picasso."

Mr Penny's view is that Picasso, who died in 1973 aged 91, is a "very much more uneven artist than many people realise", and he would be happy if visitors left with that impression.

"Picasso was such a radical artist that we forget that his subject matter is very classic and the topical is extremely minimal. Even with Guernica [his depiction of a Spanish town after the Germans bombed it during the Spanish Civil War] the only 20th-century thing in it is a lightbulb."

February's exhibition will include Nude with Joined Hands(1906) from the peak of Picasso's Rose period and Las Meninas, after Velázquez (1957), the first of his variations on one of the most important European paintings.

Christopher Riopelle, one of the curators, said he hoped that the exhibition would be challenging and ask difficult questions about how Picasso took inspiration from existing pieces throughout his career. He said: "Namby-pamby words like 'influence' or 'inform' fall very, very far short of what was an aggressive, thieving relationship with the past. He was cannibalising the European painting tradition."

The painter - also recognised as a draughtsman and sculptor - is best known as a co-founder of the Cubist movement but painted in a wide variety of styles. Among his most famous works are Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937).