This twinned pair of exhibitions attempt to side-step the difficulty, if not impossibility, of surveying Picasso’s long and prolific career by restricting their focus to ceramics and works on paper.

Unfortunately, Picasso: Fired With Passion at the National Museum is not a success. The show centres the artist’s time at Vallauris in the South of France, when Picasso devoted himself to ceramics. It also attempts, through timelines, information panels, collected ephemera and a smattering of paintings, drawings and posters, to offer insight into Picasso’s wider practice, and his famously tumultuous private life. The result is an odd admixture of wooly generalities - Picasso was fond of the ladies, invented Cubism, was rather upset by the bombardment of Guernica - and a studied focus, that, misleadingly, takes it as a given that Picasso’s ceramic work is on a par with his wider practice. Sure, there are moments of wit, as in Mains au Poisson, a plate which shows two matte black hands crushing the life out of a shiny, slippery fish, and fine pieces, too - the vase from 1950 that opens the show is decorated with gloriously kinetic classical figures. But, given the choice between endless iterations of still lives on plates and the work that lines the walls, from simple linocut exhibition posters to a print like The Banderilles, which captures the tense elegance of a bullfight in full flow, there is no contest - the pots and plates are undeniably lesser works.

In this respect, Fired With Passion is best seen as an appetiser for Picasso On Paper, inspiring a desire to see more posters, prints and drawings.

And, thankfully, the Dean Gallery offering doesn’t disappoint, offering 120 works, from a pastel piece made when Picasso was still in his teens to an ink drawing made in 1971, two years before his death.

In contrast to the heavy-handed interventions at the National Museum, the Dean show offers loose groupings and informative, but never didactic notes, quietly hinting that Picasso, perhaps more than any other artist, resists conventional curation. His restless experimentation makes a nonsense of even simple chronological ordering. Group of Female Nudes, a classically-inspired pastel from 1921 might suggest that Picasso’s sudden volte face in 1914, when he sought to distance himself from Cubism, inspired a line of realistic work. But on the wall opposite are prints that confuse and combine styles, as if, for all that Picasso’s work is divided into periods - the Blue and the Rose, the various modes of Cubism, the neoclassical works and near-Surrealist - he saw these movements, once conceived, as modes to be layered, choices to be made.

In Faun Unveiling a Sleeping Woman, Picasso plays with the possibilities. The creature is drawn in a distinctly classical style, the object of its desire is sketched out in a few hasty lines. Given Picasso’s constant presentation of dualities - the artist and his model, the bull and the horse - it is hard to resist reading the work as a piece of concise autobiography and self-criticism, with Picasso the faun, his gaze drawn, as always, to a woman, but also to his work itself, at once out of time and out of place, but within a tradition.

A series of eleven lithographs, each titled The Bull, show a similar urge to slip free of the constraints of genre. The first print is painterly, representative, the third sees fluid washes replaced with finicky detail. Next comes a marking out of shapes, like a diagram of butcher’s cuts. The final image is a set of economical lines that emphasise the bull’s bulk, its huge body supporting the tiny horned circle of its head, and call to mind the powerful economy of the prehistoric cave paintings found near the artist’s birthplace at Málaga.

The rest of the exhibition offers shock upon shock, as Picasso flits between modes and essays new techniques. There is the bawdy cartooning of Dreams And Lies Of Franco, which both lampoons the General, depicted as a sort of priapic vegetable, and condemns him with silently screaming heads. By way of contrast, Minotauromachie offers an unreadable iconography of a mythic creature, candle-bearing girl and wounded horse. Picasso, never short on ego, stands up to the Old Masters, reworking Cranach the Younger and borrowing from Rembrandt. Naive, simple portraits - including Paloma and Claude, Vallauris, daubed in haste with a fingertip - are followed by intellectual exercises, like the hinting arrangement of shapes in the papiers collés developed with George Braque on the eve of the First War. Early, precise works like The Frugal Meal display the dismal themes of Blue Period paintings, but also hint at the repeated divisions of the most recent, in which impotent homunculi leer at voluptuous, fecund women.

This is a show to set the pulse racing, then, a comprehensive survey of work by an endlessly inventive artist whose twists and turns are little short of alarming. By the end of it, the disappointments of its sister show at the National Museum are forgotten, and faith in Picasso is restored.

This review was first published in The Herald on July 13th, 2007.