You may not like Picasso very much. You may even agree with the American who said, "If I can do it, it ain't art!" But you would have to be very thick-skinned to remain unmoved by "Picasso's World of Children."

This important exhibition, at the National Museum of Western Art, shows the breadth and depth of Picasso's talent through over 140 paintings and sketches. More than that, it reveals something of the man behind the myth. Though his style changed greatly over a career spanning 80 years, he was always attracted to the mystery of childhood.

According to Shuji Takashina, director general of the museum, "The story of Picasso is the story of 20th-century art. He said that when he was young he could draw like Raphael; he had to unlearn that in order to draw like a child. As adults we lose the ability to see the wonder of ordinary things. Picasso never lost that curiosity."

Pablo Picasso Ruiz was an exceptional child, the son of an art professor, born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He had his first show at the age of 13, and three years later won a national honor for his highly accomplished painting "Science and Charity" at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid. The first gallery of the current exhibition shows work from these early years, including a preparatory oil sketch for "Science and Charity," which shows a doctor and nun attending a sick mother.

Studies of Picasso's family, such as his sisters going to school, show his precocious draftsmanship and calm powers of observation. Not surprisingly, his parents hoped he would have a distinguished career, and enrolled him at the Royal Academy in Madrid. But, skipping lessons, he took his sketchbook into the streets and museums. There, his discovery of Spanish artists such as Velazquez and El Greco had a profound effect, which surfaces several times in the exhibition. By the age of 18 he decided to break away from academic training altogether, and in 1900 took his first trip to the Mecca of art: Paris.

The second gallery shows the rapid development of a new style that we now recognize as his own. These were the early 1900s, when he was mourning the suicide of a close friend, and painting in sober blues. There are several paintings of mothers and children by the sea, a timeless symbol of change and renewal, and also part of the artist's Spanish childhood. Compared to the earliest paintings, we can see here the emotional insight wrought by the young man's "sentimental education."

These works, in the tradition of the Spanish masters, are monochromatic yet vivid. How can a plain painting of a woman giving a girl a bowl of soup be so rich with emotion? Partly it is through the gestures of mother and child, which Picasso freezes in an eternal moment of pity.

Mostly, however, the magic can be felt but not explained. "The Soup" came from his sketching visits to the women's prison of Saint-Lazare, and it is interesting to see a study sketch here too.

His "rose period" describes the change around 1904 from somber blues to earth tones. There is a lightening of emotional tone too: Here are some of his famous studies of acrobats. In "The Acrobat Family With an Ape" he creates a mood of remarkable tenderness. How interesting that this young painter, on the brink of modernity, was exploring the ancient Christian subject of the Holy Family in secular form. These wandering players, the "despised and rejected" of men, were also apt symbols of the artist's role in society. Picasso sometimes pictured himself as the harlequin.

A dramatic change of style occurs in the last harlequin canvas, painted in 1908. This clearly shows the link between Cezanne and the birth of cubism. Think of the older painter's studies of Mont Sainte Victoire and you will immediately recognize his style in the planar brushwork and angular forms.

Next, we leap-frog the experimental cubist years with Braque to the time of Picasso's marriage to the Russian ballerina, Olga Kokhlova, and the birth of his only legitimate child, Paolo, in 1921. Now come the monumental studies of motherhood. The father figure is no longer a harlequin: In fact, he is not in the scene at all. Here are simply mother and child absorbed in their own world. As Paolo grows, he is the subject of several charming paintings, playing with his pet lamb, or wearing a harlequin costume. None are sentimental. Whether he is painting his own children or strangers, Picasso's pictures are as serious as the child's expression is here.

From the early 1930s are some dreamlike etchings of a little girl leading a blind Minotaur, doubtless a new persona for the artist influenced by Surrealism. With his new mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, he had a real little girl, Maya, who would become a favorite child. There are several lovely sketches of his first daughter, and his colorful, triangulated painting of "Maya With a Toy Boat" is wonderful. Try to view it from the other side of the room.

Just a year after her birth he took up with another mistress, the photographer Dora Maar. It was 1936, and the disturbing images in the fourth gallery include the "Dream and Lie of Franco," a series of etchings that Picasso sold to help the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. There are also some studies for his famous "Guernica" mural, an urgent commission by the Republican government to commemorate the Fascist bombing of the town.

The broken agony of these images is especially harrowing after the idylls of motherhood we have just seen. Fourteen years on, there is more rage against war atrocities: "Massacre in Korea." On one side of the canvas are the soft forms of women and children, on the other are machine-hard men and the "monstrous anger of the guns."

Scattered throughout the fractured, increasingly child-like paintings are realistic sketches of his children, showing that Picasso continued to use his pencil and hone his powers of observation throughout.

In his late 60s, he returned to the masters, reworking paintings such as Velazquez's "Spanish Infanta" in his own, obscure style. Picasso believed that work would keep him alive and the final pictures were drawn when he was 90. However, even genius fades in the end, and the earlier images of Paolo with his lamb, or Paloma with tadpoles, linger more happily in the mind's eye.

As the museum's Director General Takashina said, "There are still many children's problems today, but in Picasso's world of children, there is always hope."