The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that the landmark exhibition Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 703,256 visitors during its 17-week presentation at the Museum ending Sunday—making it the most highly attended show since 2001. On view from April 19 through August 15, 2010, Picasso became the seventh most highly attended exhibition at the Metropolitan since the Museum first began tracking exhibition attendance nearly 50 years ago. It was the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the remarkable array of works by Pablo Picasso in the Metropolitan's collection.

"We are especially pleased and proud that a special exhibition from the Met's own superb collections has earned such an extraordinary public response.  The heartening attendance at Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a testament not only to the enduring popularity of this iconic artist, but to the richness and depth of the Museum's holdings of his works, as well the fresh scholarship and patient conservation work brought to bear by the Museum's professional staff in order to study and mount this once-in-a-lifetime show.  We are grateful indeed for their contributions, as we are to the public for its extraordinary show of interest and support," stated Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum.

Attendance for Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art averaged some 6,700 visitors per day and frequently reached 10,000 on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The most recent Metropolitan Museum exhibition to attract more than 700,000 visitors over a comparable number of weeks was Origins of Impressionism, 15 years ago (1994-95). 

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured 300 works by Picasso and provided an unprecedented opportunity to view together one of the world's most important collections of the artist's work. The exhibition revealed the Museum's complete holdings of the artist's paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics—never before seen in their entirety—as well as an extensive selection of prints. Among the masterpieces on view in the exhibition were: Seated Harlequin (1901), The Blind Man's Meal (1903), The Actor (1904-05), At the Lapin Agile (1905), Gertrude Stein (1905-06), Standing Female Nude (1910), Head of a Woman (1922), and The Dreamer (1932).