PARIS - ART lovers and night-owls will be offered a round-the-clock chance to see a major Picasso exhibition in Paris next month, when it stays open all night for three days.

'Picasso and the Masters', which explores the Spanish painter's kinship with the great masters of Western painting, will be open 24 hours a day from 12am on January 30 until the 8pm on February 2 - when the show ends.

Organisers said the initiative, a first in France, was a response to the success of the show at the Grand Palais, which has attracted 450,000 visitors since October and is fully booked up until February 2.

More than 200 works, from Picasso himself to El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Titian and Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Delacroix and Manet, were brought together to explore Picasso's lifelong urge to rework and subvert the works of the masters.

Half of the artworks come from the Paris Picasso Museum, with masterpieces loaned from a dozen museums including the Prado in Madrid, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Gemalde Galerie in Berlin and London's National Gallery. -- AFP