On a recent, rainy Friday afternoon, I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Picasso exhibition. The show is officially titled “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris,” although in promotional materials,it has been dubbed “Picasso’s Picassos” — a name which suits it far better. Displayed are the works that Pablo Picasso chose to keep for his own benefit and for the sake of posterity: a diligent and comprehensive survey of a lifetime at the forefront of the avant-garde.

“Masterpieces” is the largest Canadian showing of the modernist icon’s works since 1964’s “Picasso and Man,” a landmark in Canadian art history to which the AGO has devoted a nostalgic corner of its gallery. The AGO’s own modest collection of Picasso’s works is tucked away here, along with snippets of rave reviews from critics, and photographs of the installation process and lengthy admission lines. Picasso’s ability to draw a crowd appears to have endured; on the day of my visit, the gallery was packed.

The exhibition is remarkable not for any one of the masterpieces advertised in its title but for its sheer scope, covering the whole of Picasso’s virtuosic career. About 150 pieces have been arranged chronologically across seven rooms. Each room is dedicated to a phase of the artist’s life, often paired with a particular style: “Classicism, Marriage, and Family: 1914-1924” or “Cubism, Collage, and Constructions: 1909-1915.”

The show’s curator, Anne Baldassari of the Musée National Picasso, has forgone explanatory wall texts. She interprets with a minimalist touch, opting for brief quotations from Picasso himself printed above the doorways; “Painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart,” viewers are cautioned before they enter a room of stereophonic cubist assemblages.

Sequential ordering may well be the most sensible method of organizing such a mass of artworks, but Baldassari is at her best when she is inspired to break her own rule. A chief example of this is room four, where she pauses from a stated focus on Picasso’s classicism to display five paintings of remarkable thematic unity, all undertaken within the span of a single decade but rendered in an array of styles. The memorable arrangement defies our art-historical predilection for sorting Picasso’s disparate oeuvre into tidy categories, attesting to the artist’s ability to work contemporaneously in several styles.

Personally, I preferred to chart Picasso’s progression in terms of his many mistresses. “Art is never chaste,” goes another of his epigrams, and the same goes for the artist. In the room where this quotation can be found, some of the most exhilarating work is on display. Paintings like the colourful “Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table,” within which Picasso hid a jumbled portrait of his mistress, were undertaken at a time when Picasso maintained a secret affair with Maria-Therese Walter.

The show’s tagline “Picasso’s Picassos” also cleverly if unintentionally invokes the transformation of Picasso’s works of art into a vulgar noun (as in “a Picasso—a recession-proof asset classification that can fetch in excess of $100 million dollars at auction). To my mind, the pervasive commercialization of Picasso calls for a heavier curatorial hand in exploring his groundbreaking career than Baldassari seems willing to provide.

One group moving through the show with me breezed past countless worthy pieces, only to pause in front of “Ball Players on a Beach” to ask if it was the same painting featured in a scene of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” If Baldassari’s light touch has an upside, it is that the show seems to channel the spirit of the collection as Picasso himself might have intended.

Picasso once gloated that his was “the greatest collection of Picassos in the world,” and the AGO has, for better or for worse, decided to let the show speak for itself.