Picasso’s use of artistic practice to challenge hierarchies in Western art involved a singular type of historicising. No other painter left such comprehensive proof of his oeuvre – a body of work that clearly evidences his unreserved recognition for the historical process. New discoveries that lie beneath Picasso’s paintings further corroborate that his working processes were akin to the disciplines of science, conservation and archaeology, bequeathing data and painterly traces to history so that his pictures could be later decoded. Evidence that Picasso’s painting involved techniques similar to the process of archiving, begs the question as to what end this historicising served. My paper addresses this question.