The Picasso Museum, Malaga, Spain

Displaying the Painter's work in the town in which he was born.

Apr 11, 2007

The Collection comprises 155 work generously donated by his daughter-in-law and grandson, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and encompasses his wide range of styles.

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in a five-storey building in Malaga’s historic old quarter. This has now become The Fundacion Picasso, the headquarters of the Picasso Foundation worldwide which is a research facility for art historians from around the world. At the moment It houses a temporary collection of Picasso’s work, including ceramics which many people find more attractive than his paintings. From time to time it hosts exhibitions of his work borrowed from other sourses and there is frequently exhibitions of work by his contemporaries (see local press).

Just a stone’s throw away from The Fundacion Picasso is the Museo Picasso Malaga, housed in the stunning 16th century Buenavista Palace, and also in the old quarter of the city. The works donated by his daughter-in-law and grandson, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, has made this one of the most exquisite museums in Spain and one not to be missed by art lovers.

Malaga, major city in Andalucia in Spain, is justly proud of its famous son, and this Museum is one of the most accessible in Spain. Rooms chronologically ordered lead off from each other, each room housing work from one particular period. Paintings, ceramics, drawings, sculptures and prints are attractively displayed to illustrate the breadth of his vision from his first pictorial representation to his later studies in Cubism and Surrealism.

Picasso moved from Malaga to Barcelona and then Madrid, before settling in Paris where he lived for the remainder of his life - apart from brief sojourns in other cities. He experimented throughout this time with a prodigious number of styles, collage, overlapping geometric forms, and the use of paradoxical spaces, but he is perhaps best known for his works in Cubism, merging people and objects, and re-modelling faces and bodies into flickering lines and shadows.

His early painting of Little Girl and her Doll (a portrait of his sister with her toy) show the precocious teenager already proficient with the brush at age 15. This was the first of many portraits of children he was to paint throughout his career and experts remark on the intensity of the girl‘s gaze. In Sala II, is a selection of paintings of Picasso’s son Paulo and his mother Olga, Picasso’s first legal wife. The small painting done in 1923, Portrait of Paulo with a White Cap has this same haunting intensity.

Picasso’s stylistic shifts mirrored his life and the women in his life and the painter’s tortuous relationships are documented in his art’s changing styles. The Museo Picasso Malaga is artfully laid out to reflect this.

There is an excellent little shop on the site selling unusual gifts, a small café and a library. If time allows after a visit, a walk around the area of the Foundation and the Museum is rewarding. Little has changed since the days when the young painter wandered the area.

Until 24th June 2007, the Museum has a special exhibition The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. On display will be the work of Carrington, Balthus, Dubuffet, Chagall, Delvaux, Lam, Giacometti, Magritte, Miro and in particular, Henri-Matisse.

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