Following last year’s unprecedented exhibition in Paris, in which the Grand Palais, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay teamed up to display almost 200 works by Picasso, the National Gallery’s offerings may appear trifling by comparison. The Parisian offerings were quickly termed the “art sensation of the season,” making the advent to the National Gallery’s own showcase of the artist all the more nervous.

The National Gallery’s first major display of Picasso’s works has already proved a hit with critics nationwide, and is fated to draw the crowds in vast hoards. Examining the process by which the artist established a dialogue with some of the great European masters, including Velasquez, Delacroix, Goya, Rembrandt and Manet, “Picasso: Challenging the Past” is a triumph.

Where the National Gallery lacks is where it also gains

Given Picasso’s daring assurance that the 20th Century was worthy of a pivotal place in the canon of great Western art, the dialogues set up are complex. Looking back at such artists as Picasso, Bacon, Dali, Pollock, Matisse and Duchamp, however, and at modes of art stretching from Fauvism and Dadaism to Bauhaus and Pop Art, we can see Picasso’s conviction was right. The 20th Century was a period of great upheaval for the art world, and seminal to this process was the man himself, proclaiming “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

The exhibition features some of the legendary artist’s most formative works, focusing on the most enduring themes of European art history: the self-portrait, the female nude, masculine identity, and still life. Following Picasso’s career from end to end, and including examples from all of his major periods his “Blue Period,” “Rose Period,” African-influenced period, and his later movement into Cubism, then Classicism and Surrealism the showcase benefits from loans from throughout Europe and North America, from the world’s leading private collectors as well as public galleries.

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“Picasso: Challenging the Past” begins its exploration by tackling the artist’s response to what is perhaps the most fraught mode of painting in the Western canon, the self-portrait. Picasso’s complex images confirm a deep fascination with the artists he admired from the past, celebrating his predecessors and yet also transcending their barriers. The very first painting we are alerted to is also one of Picasso’s earliest works, “Self-Portrait with a Wig” (1897), painted when the artist was only seventeen. In this, Picasso depicts himself as an 18th Century dandy dressed in a powdered wig, evoking Goya in the figure and yet echoing Velasquez in the nature of the apparently random strokes of paint in the backdrop. Evidently, even at these early stages, Picasso was already confident to take on the masters of the past. In another piece, “Self-Portrait with Palette” (1906), Picasso’s work stylistically, and deliberately, mirrors that of Cezanne’s own self portrait completed between 1885 and 1887, bearing (as well as the same title) the same flattened palette, the same patchy background and even the same vacant gaze. Picasso was developing his style rapidly and showing a profound exploration into new ways of representing the human form within space, a preoccupation that would later develop into his most heightened forms of Cubism.

Picasso’s later self-portraits reveal him taking up past traditions and challenging them with a welcome touch of humour. In this way, the simple charcoal drawing, “The Artist in Front of his Canvas” (1938), defines Picasso as both an individual and an artist. With eyes and nostrils drawn onto one side of his face, turned in profile, and with the figure defined by only sharp geometric lines, the work is identifiable as Picasso’s at a mere glance, marked crucially by the characteristic double profile present in many of his most famous works. Furthermore, while Picasso conforms to tradition in depicting himself at an upright easel (he is known to have generally painted upon canvases on the floor), he breaks the mould by wearing not a suit as many artists did when painting their self-portraits, but the striped sailor’s jumper that became his hallmark. Even in a simple line drawing, then, Picasso is saying much more than is initially apparent. And in “Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone,” produced in the same year, Picasso bears the hallmark of another artist the straw hat of Van Gogh. The bold translation of a previous master is all in the ice cream cone, as Picasso applies a dab of light-heartedness even when in dialogue with one of history’s most notoriously tortured artists.

Picasso is no less liberal with his wit in dealing with subjects other than himself. Room 3, dedicated to “Characters and Types,” takes into account the flip-side of the female nude, which will be discussed, that is, the notions of masculinity, and what it means to be a man in society. Taking subjects from Gustave Coquiot (1901), the writer, critic and bohemian celebrity of Paris at the time, to Cardinal de Richelieu (1969) in the guise of a musketeer, and then even “El Bobo” (“The Simpleton”, 1959), smiling ridiculously while frying some eggs, Picasso is able to censure a Parisian roué, glorify a cardinal, or simply draw amusement from a fool at his feast.

Stepping back into Room 2, “Models And Muses: Nudes,” Picasso’s interaction with his subjects is at stark variance. The depiction of the female nude was a motif picked up by Picasso very early in his career and maintained right up to his death in 1973. In this vein, his art is far more sensitive to the naked female than it is to the clothed male. From the primitive style of his “rose period,” exemplified by “Nude with Joined Hands” (1906) with her inaccurate anatomy and simplistic outline, to the complex Cubism in his 1969 “Reclining Nude,” the artist’s abilities and references are ever clear. In the latter painting, Picasso points towards a work of art that he greatly admires, Ingres’s “La Grande Odalisque” (1814) in the Louvre, yet still can’t help himself from trying to outdo his forerunner. Picasso’s form fills the whole canvas, dominating it in a way that Ingres’s demure subject did not. Picasso also flips the figure around, making Ingres’s rear-view, which leaves the woman’s breasts well hidden, into a bold perspective from the front, square on, and charges the expression with a double profile. Both the scale of the nude and the influence of Ingres is apparent again in “Sleeping Nude with Blonde Hair” (1932), in which Picasso’s vision of the 17-year-old subject, Marie-Thérèse Walter, manifests the voluptuous yet organic quality for which Ingres’s swooning eroticism was renowned. The sheer volume of the nude in Picasso’s painting is a recurrent theme, which we observe again in “Large Bather” (1921). Imitating the posture of Renoir’s “Blonde Bather” (1881) almost exactly, and attempting to achieve the effects of Classical Greek sculptural nudes, but in the contrasting medium of paint, the bulk of Picasso’s bather works to underline both the physicality of her body and her overwhelming presence. This was the precise reverse of Cubism, and reveals how Picasso eluded his contemporaries, rebelling and reviving the Neo-Classical style just as the avant-garde scene of Paris thought they had figured him out. “I thought we were having fun,” Picasso said, “but it’s becoming boring.”

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Picasso did later revert to the very height of his Cubist years, producing a painting that took on some of the most extreme strategies of the mode. “Women at their Toilette” (1956) has the female form twisted and exploiting it to such a degree that if we look at the woman on the left we can see both her buttocks and breasts head on. The Venus-type figure had always been one of interestin the Western canon, but such unlikely perspectives had typically only been achieved through the use of everyday props, such as mirrors and other reflections. Here, the Cubist forms appear as planes and facets of colour, form occupying space in a completely revolutionary manner.

Throughout Picasso’s life, the past acted as an effective springboard from which he could let fresh invention arise. The influence of Ingres on his nudes was equalled by that of Degas, El Greco and Jacques-Louis David on his clothed, pensive sitters. In his earlier works, “The Absinthe Drinker” and “Le Divan Japonais” (1901), both the situation and the paint strokes are reminiscent of Degas’s dancer scenes. In his 1923 “Portrait of Olga,” a meticulous study of his first wife, the work is almost unrecognisable as Picasso’s own. Far from the palette and style of his famous Cubist “Red Armchair” masterpieces of Marie-Thérèse, here Picasso works in a Neo-Classical mode, absorbing the austerity of David’s 18th and 19th Century figures and populating his canvas with all the marks of that era: the Louis Quinze-style armchair, the draping of the fabric over the figure’s limbs, the pose of the arm over the back of the seat. Where Picasso exceeds David is in the rendering of the statuesque and three-dimensional in a figure David left decidely flat. For Picasso, the female subject was not simply a physical and sexual form, but a highly complex intellectual and psychological being.

With so much going on here, you want to do the exhibition justice. The inattentive world seems to have decided it already knows the artist back to front, but “Picasso: Challenging the Past” is guaranteed to be an enlightening experience, proving there is much more going on in his paintings. That Picasso was a mould-breaker goes without saying. That his dialogue with his predecessors was one of both reverence and rebuke is often overlooked.

To make all this plain, the show’s closing pieces draw together in their crux all the primary themes in a satisfying final act of cohesion, re-affirming Picasso as a genius in his own right while at the same time reminding the viewer of his perpetual debt to the whole history of Western art. The climax of the final, and central room is dedicated to Picasso’s “Variations,” which exhibits Picasso’s large-scale canvases of the 1950s, based on one painting each of Delacroix (“Women of Algiers,” 1834), Manet (“Luncheon on the Grass,” 1862), Poussin (“The Rape of the Sabine Women,” 1634-35), and Velasquez (“Las Meninas,” 1656). During this period, Picasso had radically switched the way he responded to the old masters. Spending months focused on a single work of art, he would create his own pieces from that single source. He had already shown a keen awareness of the European tradition throughout his life, but rarely had he pointed at specific influences so directly. Here, then, in Room 6, it is made startlingly clear just how Picasso had used the great canons of Western art in a fresh and audacious way (“That bastard, he’s good,” Picasso had famously remarked of Delacroix). The boy who had watched his artist father at work, who had grown up surrounded by the overwhelming presence of artists he greatly admired, was now as a man approaching the masters of the past with skill and experience. Picasso proved that he could not only nod towards them in his own work, but that he could overcome the limitations they established, transcending them absolutely and inventing something unparalleled.

London’s rendition of the great Master, in “Picasso: Challenging the Past,” may not be a showcase of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Poussin or Ingres. It may not boast the smug wealth of its Parisian model. But where the National Gallery lacks is where it also gains. The sheer abundance of masterworks in the Paris showdown was doubtless a great privilege for any eye to behold, but it was also a great distraction from the chief impetus for attending: Picasso. It is a privilege in itself to have so many of his art in view; the fact that here the visual focus rests solely on Picasso (with the help of interactive headsets to draw the relevant comparisons) is its undisputed strength. National Gallery curators were shrewd in keeping Picasso separate from his predecessors. The Old Masters permeating the permanent collection reside only one storey away, and can be viewed at leisure. This is highly recommended. Even beyond the Sainsbury Wing, the ferocious impact of this Modern Master, arguably the most influential painter of the 20th Century, can still be felt. Having risen like a tsunami, Picasso leaves his undercurrents still flowing.