Pablo Picasso Museum in Malaga

He was born in 1881 in a five-storey building in Malaga’s historic old quarter, a building that has now become The Fundacion Picasso and headquarters of the Picasso Foundation, a research facility for art historians worldwide.  It houses a unique collection of the artist's work including ceramics which many people find more attractive than his paintings.   The Collection in this often overlooked Museum comprises 155 works encompassing his wide range of styles, arranged throughout the many rooms of the house.  All the works were generously donated by his daughter-in-law and his grandson, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.

Picasso was a restless figure, moving from place to place as the mood took him.  He moved from Malaga to Barcelona and then to Madrid before settling in Paris where he lived for the rest of his life - apart from a few brief sojourns in other cities. He experimented throughout this time with a prodigious number of styles, collage, overlapping geometric form 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.

Unfortunately, Picasso's work is still under copyright so it is not possible to reproduce any to illustrate this article, but they can be easily be found in art books, or even downloaded from the web (for your own use, of course).

 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 there is a selection of paintings of Picasso’s son and his mother Olga, Picasso’s first legal wife. The small painting 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. The Museo Picasso Malaga is artfully laid out to reflect this, and the painter’s tortuous relationships are documented in the changing styles of his art. 

The opening of the Picasso Museum in 2003 triggered the city's cultural rebirth but despite increased tourism the city manages to retain its authentic Andalucian feel.  

Malaga has more museums than any other city in Andalucia – over 30 with new ones opening regularly.   There is an opportunity to learn about the wines of the area at the Wine Museum and to pick up information on its social history and customs from the 19th-century paintings at the Carmen Thyssen museum.  There are museums of contemporary art, archaeology and glass along with museums covering cars and fashion.  Malaga my have a past but it also looks to the future.

If and when the culture gets too much Malaga’s delightful beaches await you, family-friendly ‘El Palo' or ‘La Malagueta’ with restaurants and bars lining the Promenade de Pablo Ruiz Picasso. There are seven main beaches in Malaga including a Nudist beach and one specifically designed for wheelchair users, and thanks to year-round good weather, on most days you can avail yourself of these warm sands.