Yan Lei, a sculptor from Beijing, was halfway through the show when he peered into a plexiglass case with one of the artist’s trailblazing works, “Violin.” The blue, brown and white mélange of metal sheets and iron wires was created in 1915, when World War I was raging, and Picasso was 34, about the same age as Mr. Yan.

He was blown away by the originality from so long ago.

“We are doing this today, and think it is very modern,” said Mr. Yan, who keeps a studio on the outskirts of the city. “He was doing this 100 years ago.”

Boliang Shen, a 34-year-old content director of a podcast, was riveted by a sculpture of Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s early girlfriend. In some places, the rough-hewed wood looked as though it had been hacked with a penknife.

“You can feel Picasso,” Mr. Shen said as he circled the work. “He’s looking for himself, his own voice.”

Picasso has long been accepted in China. His onetime membership in the Communist Party helped. When the Communists grasped victory in 1949, an image of a dove by Picasso hung as a symbol of peace at an international conference in Beijing alongside portraits of Stalin and Mao.

He was blacklisted during the Cultural Revolution, like almost all other artists dismissed as a not-to-be-tolerated bourgeois influence. But in the early 1980s, a small show of 30 works marked his comeback, attracting an eager audience hungry for European art after China’s decades in the wilderness.