I don’t think I’ll be anywhere near Barcelona between now and February, but if I were – I’d totally hop over to the Museu Picasso and check out their latest exhibition ‘Secret Images: Picasso and Japanese Erotic Prints‘. So yeah – the grand master of the cubist movement was into naughty octopi. In fact, Room 3 of the exhibition is simply titled ‘Tentacles’.

Over the centuries Japanese erotic prints have been known by different names, such as shunga, makura-e or warai-e. Another related term was higa, meaning ‘secret images’. This catalogue presents for the first time some twenty of these prints which belonged to Picasso. In order to establish a thought-provoking dialogue we have selected a number of Picasso’s own erotic etchings and various works by other artists, both Japanese and Western, which together shed new light on the phenomenon of European interest in Japanese art and on the links between this and the work of Picasso.