The primary charm of this museum lies in the environment that has been created by stringing together five gothic buildings and filling them seamlessly with a series of white cube galleries. It is not the encyclopedic collection of the “other” Picasso Museum (the one in Paris), since the artist left Barcelona as a teenager, so most of what stayed behind is art school work. Pace yourself going through the first galleries of these paintings and drawings and reserve your energy for the real treasures toward the end. These include a collection of whimsical painted ceramics donated by Picasso’s widow Jacqueline Roche in the 1980s, and the artist’s version of Las Meninas. The museum did a disservice to its visitors by removing a helpful installation explaining the source of Picasso’s inspiration for Las Meninas, Velazquez’s 17th-century masterpiece in the Prado, but if you do some homework before coming here, there’s great joy in viewing Picasso’s abstracted renditions of these princesses, dwarves and dogs, all painted during the summer of 1957. The museum hosts a series of lively temporary exhibitions related to various aspects of the life and work of the Spaniard who was arguably the greatest artist of the 20th century.