With no doubt the most famous and important painter of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso has achieved such popularity that any Museum or Foundation that organizes an exhibition about his oeuvre is risky of fall in the repetition or the topic. To avoid it, the Prado Museum and the Art Centre Reina Sofia -both in Madrid- have organized an exhibition entitled "Picasso: tradition and vanguard" that -instead showing exclusively works by the Spanish artist- exhibits his works contrasted with other by the earlier masters that he admired.

"Dialogue" is here the key word. These "pictorial dialogues" are focused in two different blocks: while the Prado recurs to the traditional form of exhibition, showing works by Picasso since the blue and rose period to the cubism and surrealism, the Reina Sofia is centred in Picasso's masterwork -the famous " Guernica" - celebrating the 25 anniversary of the return of this important painting to Spain (also the 125 anniversary of his birth).

The painting is surrounded by other works that showed the concerns of many painting for the war: " Korea , 1951" by Picasso himself (a work that was considered "anti-American" and prohibited in South Korea for many decades) and the famous " The executions of May 3 rd" by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, and "The execution of Empereor Maximilian" by Edouard Manet.

For this exhibition, the Prado and the Reina Sofia have counted on the collaboration of many museums for all over the world, such as the Metropolitan of New York, the Centre Pompidou from Paris, and -of course- the Picasso Museums from Paris and Barcelona.