In February the new director of the National Gallery signalled a move away from blockbuster art exhibitions, saying that major institutions should “show people something they haven’t seen before”.

Ten months on, the most familiar name of all in popular art is looming over the Trafalgar Square gallery.

Picasso: Challenging the Past will open at the National in February, with visitor numbers expected to rival the 300,000 who went to see Velásquez in 2006-07, the gallery’s most successful show on record.

So when Nicholas Penny disclosed details yesterday of the largest show of his tenure, he had first to defend his right to stage it. “I didn’t really mean that I’m against putting on exhibitions of artists you have heard of,” he said. “I am against putting on an exhibition of an artist simply because it will be popular. I would not be interested in putting on this exhibition if it did not teach us something about Picasso.”

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Mr Penny is convinced that the show will do that by presenting a new view of the artist and demonstrating “as never before, how Picasso fitted into the history of Western art”.

Mr Penny’s own view is that Picasso is a “very great artist, but a very much more uneven one than many people realise”, and he would be happy if visitors left with that impression. “I want it to be controversial,” he said.

The exhibition will feature about seventy paintings ranging across Picasso’s career and includes at least ten of his most important works, according to the curators. They include Nude with Joined Hands(1906) from the peak of his Rose period and Las Meninas, after Velásquez (1957), the first of his breathtaking variations on one of the most important European paintings.

Unlike Tate Modern’s spectacularly successful Matisse Picasso show in 2002, which examined the artist’s relationship to a living competitor, this show will seek to demonstrate how Picasso plundered the Old Masters and the Impressionists for inspiration.

The core of it – about two thirds of the work – is on show in a larger exhibition in Paris, where it has delighted audiences but been savaged by critics for drawing facile or even wrongheaded parallels between Picasso’s work and earlier masterpieces by the likes of El Greco, Delacroix and Manet. The Paris show is spread over three museums and has Picassos exhibited cheek by jowl with the older paintings judged to have inspired them. The London version will be very different, Mr Penny promised.

Picasso “was not a great museum visitor”, Mr Penny said, and was in most cases responding to illustrations of the great works rather than the paintings themselves, so his work will not be hung next to others. It will, instead, be shown across six rooms, each of which will emphasise how the Old Masters in general were reflected in his approach to a traditional theme: the self-portrait, the nude and so on.

“Picasso was such a radical artist that we forget that his subject matter is very classic and the topical is extremely minimal. Even with Guernica [his heat-of-the-moment depiction of the bombing of a town in the Spanish Civil War] the only 20th-century thing in it is a lightbulb.”

Concentrating on the links between Picasso and the artists who came before “does not reduce Picasso’s radical character at all, but I am sure that there will be a reappraisal of what he was trying to do and his stature as a result of this exhibition”, Mr Penny said.

“When we are mesmerised by a living artist we just think: this is great. When we are a little bit further away we can look at the work in the light of what went before. This is a great moment to do that for Picasso.”

The artist died in 1973, aged 91. Christopher Riopelle, one of the curators, said he hoped that the exhibition would be challenging and ask difficult questions about how Picasso the rebellious innovator mined art history throughout his career. “Namby-pamby words like ‘influence’ or ‘inform’ fall very, very far short of what was an aggressive, thieving relationship with the past,” he said. “He was cannibalising the European painting tradition.”

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