Picasso Museum opens vast online archive

The Picasso Museum in Paris launched an online portal on Monday, providing access to tens thousands of little-seen photos, artworks and other memorabilia from the iconic artist's archives.

It comes ahead of a study centre dedicated to Pablo Picasso, due to open later this year near the museum in central Paris for researchers and artists-in-residence.

The digital portal opens up access to the museum's vast collection of artworks, essays, conferences, podcasts and interviews.

Many have never been accessible to the public, including some 19,000 photos.

In the coming years, some 200,000 texts from Picasso's workshops will also be digitised and uploaded.

Picasso was born in 1881 in Spain and lived almost all his life in France, where he died in 1973. The family entrusted his archives to the French state in 1992.

Meanwhile, the Paris museum opens a new exhibition on Tuesday, "Picasso: Consuming Images".

It places dozens of famous works by Picasso alongside the historical masters that inspired him -- including Poussin, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Goya and Matisse -- and many other images and concepts that he drew from.

"Picasso grew up with a flood of new images and works that he went to see in person in Paris museums," said curator Cecile Godefroy.

But his absorption of images went way beyond the academic, she added, saying that his fascination with postcards, art magazines, photographs, television images, cinema, comic strips and advertising presaged the torrent of images we consume in the age of social media.