In honour of this year’s 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, museums and other cultural institutions are pulling out all the stops, with about 50 exhibitions and events in the United States and Europe. Some offer novel perspectives on the celebrated artist’s seven-decade career:
Europe travel: Exploring Picasso exhibitions, events and sites in Málaga, Spain
By Andrew Ferren
New York Times·
11 mins to read
A tapestry version of Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, at the Museo Picasso Malaga. Photo / Emilio Parra Doiztua, The New York Times
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Picasso last visited Spain in the mid-1930s, shortly before the Spanish Civil War, which ended in 1939 with Francisco Franco establishing a military dictatorship that endured nearly 40 years, outlasting Picasso’s own life by more than a year. The artist, who abhorred the repressive regime, never returned to his homeland again.
Were he to turn up in Malaga today, Picasso might be shocked to find a museum bearing his name — the Museo Picasso Malaga opened in 2003 and now draws nearly 700,000 visitors a year. Then again, given his reputation for having an outsized ego, maybe he wouldn’t be surprised at all by the museum, though he’d likely be charmed to find his childhood home, the square where he used to play, the church where he was baptised, as well as the art academy where his father taught — not to mention the city’s famous bullring, cathedral and other landmarks — pretty much just as he left them.
I chose to begin my 2023 Picasso immersion tour in Malaga, though not at the Picasso Museum or even at the artist’s childhood home, itself a charming museum. Instead, I started by climbing the hundreds of stairs that rise from Malaga’s first-century B.C. Roman theatre to the Alcazaba, the Moorish hilltop fortress begun in the 11th century that overlooks the city and port from Mount Gibralfaro. Besides the sweeping views it offers of the entire city, the fortress is emblematic of the layering of Mediterranean history, symbols and mythology that Picasso would employ repeatedly in his art.
The Moors essentially used the Roman theatre as a stone quarry to build the Alcazaba, which appears as a fortress on the outside, but inside shelters a sprawling series of rooms, patios, arcades, lush plantings and countless gurgling fountains. It goes a long way to revealing the idyllic aspects of the Mediterranean lifestyle and reinforces the city’s identity as a truly ancient hub of Mediterranean civilisation, which began with the Phoenicians, who first established the settlement they named Malaka in the 7th century B.C.
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That deeply layered Mediterranean heritage is abundant in Picasso’s many self-referential takes on such classical themes as the Minotaur, Pan and the idealised seaside Arcadian mythology with which he identified, and sometimes employed to portray his family, throughout his life.
My next stop was the Museum of Malaga in its gorgeous new home in the city’s former Customs House, which, while it doesn’t have the name Picasso in the title, offers a fuller picture of the city’s artistic history before its most famous native son arrived on the scene. The museum, which reopened in its new location in 2016, provides an amazingly thorough and detailed chronicle of Malaga from the earliest days of classical antiquity to well into the 20th century. There’s a particularly wonderful display and explanation of the city’s cultural boom in the 19th century, when local artists excelled at portraiture and historical painting, and also depicted Malaga’s social gatherings and revelry. Paintings of elegant garden parties, moonlit festivities on the beach, and raucous celebrations after bullfights offer a delightful snapshot of the city’s ebullient fin-de-siecle social and cultural scene.
“Everyone asks how this creative genius could have come out of sleepy Malaga,” said Ana Gonzalez, a guide who left her job in the museum world to found a tour company, Arteduca Malaga, that works with multiple museums and sites to offer a more comprehensive approach to the city, including Picasso’s place within it.
“The reality is that Picasso was born in the right place, at the right time and in the right context. His father was an artist and teacher of painting, and many of his friends were artists who knew to encourage and foster the young boy’s talent,” she said. “When Picasso showed promise as a draftsman, he was given all the materials he needed.”
Indeed, late-19th-century Malaga was among Spain’s most prosperous cities — second only to Barcelona in industrial might and maritime commerce. A rising and wealthy bourgeoisie was squeezing out the old land-owning aristocracy in the city’s cultural life and rapidly remaking Malaga as a more gracious place with public parks, gardens and elegant boulevards like the Alameda or Calle Larios. They spent money on art, built palatial new homes, and collected and commissioned objects of great beauty.
While not exactly among the city’s new movers and shakers — Picasso’s father often struggled financially — the Ruiz Picasso family enjoyed relative middle-class comfort as evidenced by a visit to Casa Natal, a small museum in the house where Pablo was born. Downstairs, an exhibition space focuses mostly on his prints and drawings as well as several of the artist’s sketchbooks. But it really sets the scene with insightful Picasso quotes — “I have never done children’s drawings. Never. Even when I was very small” — and archival photos covering many aspects of Picasso’s life, from his childhood in Malaga to later candid shots from restaurants and bullfights in the South of France, and wonderful images of him playing on the beach or bobbing in the sea with his young children. Upstairs are period furnishings, family heirlooms and more stories about the family’s life in Malaga.
The house sits at the corner of the Plaza de la Merced, which had an outdoor market in Picasso’s day, so it would have been a colourful and lively place to grow up. Steps from the plaza on Calle Granada is the Parish Church of Santiago Apostal (St. James the Apostle), where Picasso was baptised as a baby. The 16th-century church has a relatively humble facade and a far more ornate interior, with curlicue frosting-like stucco reliefs animating the vaulted ceiling, and a handsomely carved wooden retablo over the altar painted a sombre shade of olive green. The very simple baptismal font stands near the rear of the church and might be missed if one is not on the lookout for it.
A hundred yards or so from the church is the entrance to the Museo Picasso Malaga, which features a chronological and thematic overview of the artist’s career, as well as various special exhibitions each year, some dedicated to the charming ceramics Picasso started creating in Vallauris, France, just after World War II. Another gallery typically displays photographs of the artist and his life made by many of the great 20th-century photographers whom he befriended and who had privileged access to him and his family. The special exhibition Picasso Sculptor: Matter and Body, on now until September, is surprisingly the first major exhibition in Spain to focus on the artist’s sculptures.
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The building housing the museum was a 16th-century nobleman’s handsome stone palace, now deftly expanded by the New York architect Richard Gluckman to seamlessly blend with the city’s whitewashed buildings. With two floors of galleries around the pretty marble courtyard of the Renaissance palace, the museum tells the story of Picasso’s career with about 250 works — many donated to the museum by Christine Picasso (the wife of Picasso’s oldest son, Paulo) and her son, Bernard.
What astonishes many visitors is not merely the chronological sweep of the artist’s career (more than 70 years) but the range and diversity of painting styles (many of which he invented) and the seemingly boundless materials he transformed into art. There are painted roof tiles; charming sculptures made from bits of scrap metal artfully folded into evocative figures; and ceramic platters transformed into bullrings, with the audience “seated” around the plate’s elevated border and the bullfight occupying the centre.
A highlight of the current selection of works is a 1958 tapestry version of Picasso’s groundbreaking 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, woven by Jacqueline Dürrbach. Only one such tapestry was ever made, and Picasso kept it until the end of his life, hanging it over the fireplace at his villa La Californie in the South of France.
As much of a splash as the museum has made in its first 20 years, there was in fact an earlier attempt to display works by the city’s most celebrated artist. In the mid-1950s, Juan Temboury, then Malaga’s fine arts commissioner, wrote to Picasso’s secretary asking for a few exemplary works to include in the city’s museum. Picasso was said to be delighted and was ready to send two trucks full of artwork. But suddenly there was no further communication from Malaga. Picasso’s son and daughter-in-law, Paulo and Christine, rode a motorbike from southern France to Malaga to investigate, only to discover that a local official of the Franco regime had forbidden the display of Picasso’s work in Malaga.
From that point on, “Pablo Picasso had a strong desire to have a museum in his native city to feature a display of his work,” said Bernard Picasso. “My mother and father tried to help my grandfather make it happen in the 1950s, but it ultimately took another 50 years to become a reality.”
Christine Picasso renewed those efforts in the 1990s by offering to donate a portion of her own collection of Picasso’s work to establish a new museum in the city. Her son Bernard aided in the project with a considerable donation of his own and many ongoing long-term loans. Since the Museo Picasso Malaga opened in 2003, it has helped convert the city into a top cultural destination, not just in Spain, but in southern Europe. In addition to local institutions like CAC, a contemporary art centre, and the Museo Carmen Thyssen Malaga, the city has lured satellite branches of the Pompidou and the State Russia Museums. The sidewalks and pretty pedestrian streets of the historic city centre once again bustle with pedestrians amid the palm trees, geraniums and bougainvillea.
It’s a far cry from the decaying city centre of the 1980s and 90s, when Malaga’s airport and railway stations were merely stepping stones on the way to the sun-kissed paradise of the Costa del Sol, which stretches west from the city.
“It was inconceivable at the time this museum started to take shape, back in the 1990s, that the city could possibly be so transformed, but it’s fantastic what’s happened with culture in Malaga in the last 20 years,” said Bernard Picasso. “Evidently, people don’t want to just lie on the beach.”
Checklist
MALAGA
GETTING THERE
Malaga is a short flight from both Barcelona and Madrid; the latter is also less than three hours away on Spain’s high-speed AVE rail network.
DETAILS
spain.info/en/destination/malaga
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
