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ISBN 2

Editorial

Binding

Dimensions

Dialogues with Picasso. Collection 2020-2023

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La Coruña, 1884

Portrait of Lola

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París, 1923

Three Graces

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Boisgeloup, 1933

Head of a Warrior

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Vallauris

Insect

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Paris, 1954

Jacqueline Seated

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Vauvenargues o Mougins, 1972

Musketeer with Sword

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Picasso received a solid academic training under the supervision of his father, a drawing teacher. His early education in Málaga was followed by additional studies in La Coruña, Barcelona and briefly in Madrid. Drawn by its avant-garde atmosphere, Picasso moved to Paris in 1904. 

‘An odd thing […] is that I have never done children’s drawings. Never. Even when I was very small.’ 

Pablo Picasso was 13 years old in 1894, the year he painted this portrait of his sister María Dolores Ruiz Picasso, fondly known as Lola. The sophistication of Picasso’s first works, evident in details such as the wisp of hair that passes from behind her ear over her bonnet or the sombre cast of her mouth, invites viewers to search for signs of the artist’s later works, either in style or subject. One could see this as a kind of history of art by divination, in which, as Pierre Daix wrote, ‘we suppose him to have had from the first all the creative virtues which more than 70 years of activity and reflections devoted only to his art have enabled us to perceive.’ However, in 1894, Pablo was not yet ‘Picasso’, as the signature daubed thickly on the top left corner attests: ‘P. Ruiz’ shows the artist taking the first surname of his father, José Ruiz Blasco, a painter himself, who encouraged his son’s talent from an early age.  

The portrait of Lola was completed in La Coruña, where Picasso’s family moved to in 1891 when his father found work there as an art professor. Some years later, when the family went to live in Barcelona in 1895, Picasso continued his academic training in painting in the La Llotja art school. While he would only encounter the works of Zurbarán and Ribera during a trip to Madrid that same year, their tenebrous palette suffuses Picasso’s portrait of Lola, likely through the instruction of his father. In the years that followed, which took Picasso from Barcelona to Madrid and Paris (which he visited for the first time in October 1900), he painted several portraits of Lola that make it possible to trace the artist’s progress from his academic training through a series of styles from Symbolism to Post-Impressionism. 

In 1899–1900 Picasso returned to the subject of Lola in a series of portraits – notably the charcoal and pencil drawing on paper *Lola, the Artist’s Sister* (Museu Picasso, Barcelona) and the oil painting *The Artist’s Sister Lola* (Cleveland Museum of Art) – signed ‘P. Ruiz Picasso’. These works, in which his 15-year-old sister stares fiercely out at the viewer, often dressed as a maja wearing a Spanish mantilla and a rose in her hair, portray Lola through the lens of the late Symbolist painting that prevailed in the cafe culture of Barcelona, with hints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s or Édouard Vuillard’s darkest moments. As Picasso remodelled his sister into a creature of Barcelona’s bohemian life, he also transfigured himself: no longer a ‘child prodigy’ with an innate mastery of academic norms, he appears as a radical artist devoted to subverting them. 

Text: After Trevor Stark, ‘Portrait of Lola’, in Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 50–51. 

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Married to Olga Khokhlova, a beautiful Russian ballerina, and father to their child, Paulo, Picasso borrowed from Etruscan engravings and French Mannerism to create a slimmed-down, modern version of the classical figure. Anticipating Andy Warhol by four decades, he transformed family photographs into haunting compositions of decisive lines floating over a coloured haze. 

‘Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth. The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissi, are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.’ 

Within the remarkable corpus of bathers that Picasso created during the 1920s, three full-length interlaced figures stand out. The theme of the Three Graces reminds us of the painter’s predilection for tripartite compositions and his taste for the grand subjects of classical mythology. In 1923, while sojourning in Antibes, an ancient Greek town once known as Antipolis, Picasso became totally immersed in Hellenism and granted this subject matter unprecedented scale: painting his motif in grisaille on a large-format canvas, the artist adopted the ancient device of the three goddesses of Beauty, alternately presented frontally and from the back, naked and veiled. He delved into the antique citation via a subtle play of drapery which echoed the fashion of the day: that, for example, of Madeleine Vionnet, which the chic, cosmopolitan population of Cap d’Antibes took to wearing. In the company of the American painter Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara, the Picassos partook of the neo-Greek lifestyle, as the amateur snapshots taken on the unspoilt beach of La Garoupe show. 

The absence of perspective and the wavy line which makes the bodies swell more than the faces is a reminder of the technique of trompe-l’œil: vacationing in the town of Fontainebleau two summers before, Picasso probably retained the memory of the *Three Graces* painted by Primaticcio in the ballroom of the chateau, as well as some adjoining paintings in grisaille. According to John Richardson, Picasso’s painting would have been initially conceived to decorate the music room of Count Étienne de Beaumont, present with his wife at Cap d’Antibes that same summer. In the spirit of the *Three Graces* transposed in blue ink onto the walls of La Mimoseraie in 1918, the commission, if indeed it took place, was appropriated by the artist and turned into the subject of a magisterial, autonomous development. Announced by a set of pen-and-ink drawings, and accompanied by engravings on copper or zinc in which the figures observe one another and dance on the sheet of paper, the painting fixes them in a static pose: the dialogue between the figures seems to have been interrupted, their attitudes are serious. A thick charcoal line isolates the shapes, which stand out on a canvas primed in grey: the neutral, uniform background, heightened with thin layers of white paint, dramatises the scene, which has the appearance of a ‘nocturnal theatre’; a Baudelairean concept at the origins of modern poetry, located somewhere between real and imaginary. Although we might recognise Olga’s features in the face of the central figure and, for her confederates, those, perhaps, of Sara Murphy and the Countess of Beaumont, the trio is but little individualised and provides Picasso with the opportunity to inflect the anatomies on the basis of one and the same figure.  

The Ingresque naturalism of the bodies breaks with the synthetic outline of the feet which punctuate the bottom part of the composition and above all of the hands which clasp each other: heavy with meaning, the hands are a symbol, here, of gentleness and protection, formal elements in which the emotion of the painting is concentrated and indices of a future stylistic change: that of the early metamorphoses. As Picasso told Marius de Zayas in 1923: ‘Repeatedly I am asked to explain how any painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot always live in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.’ A comment that a view of the studio published in the June 1926 issue of Cahiers d’art, in which the *Three Graces* majestically dominates over the artist’s production of the last three years, sheds ample light on. 

Text: Cécile Godefroy, ‘Three Graces’, in *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 168–69. 

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Coinciding in time with the political tensions that led to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Picasso appropriated Greek myth to expose the latent violence in human nature. His Minotaur celebrates shared pleasure, commits acts of sexual violence, repents, shows unexpected tenderness. Picasso’s quasi-abstract images of women’s heads evoke both aggression and desire.    

‘Picasso was speaking very quietly now. “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself”, he said. “At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.” He turned to another print, a minotaur watching over a sleeping woman. “He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts”, he said, “trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster.”’ 

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*Still Life with Minotaur and Palette* is the last in a series of four paintings Picasso made in November 1938 (with a fifth painted in December). They chart a wide variety of relationships between objects symbolising culture (a book, candle, palette and brushes) and destruction, which is represented by either the head of a bull or a Minotaur. Attached to a stand, these heads read as both sculptural artworks and real faces.  

This duality presents bestiality as both an aspect of art (along with the brushes and palette) and a force outside culture. Among the five paintings, only the first and fourth portray the Minotaur. […] In this picture the Minotaur appears both vividly alive and benignly human. Although ruddy in colouring, the head is fully fleshed. Not only are its features distinctly human (except for the short horns and oval ears), its skin exhibits none of the thick hair or rough hide of a beast. Moreover, Picasso’s use of black to outline the Minotaur’s chin, lips, eyes and eyebrows emphasises the calm expression and human proportions of the head. Finally, touches of blue on either side of the Minotaur’s lips and yellow in the eyes mix colours of the adjacent still life into the features of the Minotaur. 

In this painting, the conflict between creativity and destruction is largely defused; the Minotaur is nearly humanised as a part of this display of culture. 

Text: After Michael FitzGerald, ‘Picasso’s Minotaurs’, in *Dialogues with Picasso: Collection 2020–2023*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2020, pp. 248–50. 

Still Life with Minotaur and Palette

Professor of Fine Arts, Trinity College, Hartford

Michael Fitzgerald talks about "Still Life with Minotaur and Palette", 1938

Without doubt, portraiture is one of the key pillars of Picasso’s work, from the early academic likenesses that take us back to the intimacy of the child painter’s home to the harsh portraits of imaginary chivalrous knights, swashbucklers and scorned heroines. In this rich concatenation, a group of paintings and engravings made in the late 1930s and early 1940s makes a powerful appearance. Some are implacable for the hardness and energy that transforms them into grotesque visual records of a personal universe in which violence and impotence are exceptional protagonists.  
 
‘“Is this woman with one eye, or three eyes, a development of Cubism?” I asked Picasso. “Not at all”, he answered. “This double profile, as it is called, is only that I keep my eyes always open. Every painter should keep his eyes always open. And how does that arrive at seeing truthfully, one eye or two eyes, you may ask? It is simply the face of my sweetheart, Dora Maar, when I kiss her.”’ 



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Since Picasso began to draw portraits of Dora Maar when he was staying at Mougins in 1936, her face became more and more an obsession at the basis of his inventions and reconstructions of the human head. Among the early versions there are many lifelike portraits, exact studies of the first direct impression of her features. Treating her appearance with great tenderness and often combining her features with poetic fantasies, he explored every line and every surface, watching her expression and her gestures. […] 

For Picasso the subject, ever since the revolution which occurred in the *Demoiselles d’Avignon*, has been the victim of his will to destroy appearances. Vision rather than subject-matter becomes supreme. The cubists had all destroyed the form of objects such as guitars, bottles and even the human body when reorganising their shapes in still-lifes or figure compositions, but none had had the same courage as Picasso to demolish the human head. What is more, he did not confine this disruptive process to his male friends, as he had done in the early cubist days […]. The face of his closest and dearest woman friend was eligible to suffer the same violence.  

Picasso uses the features of a face as raw material. He knows them intimately from long observation and from frequent studies made either from life, or from an equally visible mental image.  

Text: Roland Penrose, *Picasso: His Life and Work*, New York, Schocken Books, 1962, p. 303. 

Head of a Woman (Dora Maar)

The sense of terror in the face of approaching war is palpable during this period. Nonetheless, works such as the present one reveal the strength of Picasso’s resistance as he continued to express his profound appreciation of life in the multifaceted repertoire of his representations: sketchbooks, preparatory studies, drawings, prints and paintings.

‘The next day he said, “You’d be better posing for me nude.” When I had taken off my clothes, he had me stand back to the entrance, very erect, with my arms at my side. Except for the shaft of daylight coming in through the high windows at my right, the whole place was bathed in a dim, uniform light that was on the edge of shadow. Pablo stood off, three or four yards from me, looking tense and remote. His eyes didn’t leave me for a second. He didn’t touch his drawing pad; he wasn’t even holding a pencil. It seemed a very long time. Finally he said, “I see what I need to do. You can dress now. You won’t have to pose again.”’





MPM2.136_PICASSO_Mujer en un sillón (Françoise Gilot)

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This highly stylised portrait of Françoise Gilot (born 1921) differs greatly from the abstract treatments of Picasso’s models from other periods. Although right and isosceles triangles and circles are among the painting’s primary elements, the overall rendition is not abstract. The triangles overlap with such a careful fit that the angles are rarely broken. The impression of continuity thus achieved creates a natural harmonious effect. The figure’s beauty manifests in the clarity of these defined shapes.

Françoise wrote that, when she told Picasso that Henri Matisse also wished to paint her portrait, he replied, ‘Matisse isn’t the only one who can paint you with green hair.’ From then on, ‘the hair developed into a leaf form and once he had done that, the portrait resolved itself in a symbolic floral pattern. He worked in the breasts with the same curving rhythm.’

As unpretentious as Nature itself, Françoise appears as a flower’s corolla with leaflike tresses. Simple, yet regal, she sits proud as a lioness and as dignified as an ancient Egyptian statue. The straight lines of the bulky, awkward triangular arms seem carved into the canvas. Her triangular hands suggest the massive stone paws of a sphinx. The treatment recalls the hands in a series of portraits of Dora Maar from October and November of 1941.

The complementary colours – the blue violet of the background and the yellow orange of the figure – strengthen one another, and their juxtaposition accentuates the harsh definition already imposed by the geometric composition of the woman’s body. Unlike the thick paint on her cheeks and forehead and the back of the chair that frames her head, these light brushstrokes leave areas of the canvas exposed. 

Although she can be identified earlier, in works made during the German occupation, her presence is not fully established in Picasso’s oeuvre until April 1946 and is generally associated with his Vallauris period from 1947 and 1954. 

Text: Robert McDonald Parker, ‘Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gillot)’, in *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*, Madrid, Tf Editores; Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 127.

Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gilot) 

Eduard Vallès, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Vídeo in Spanish

Eduard Vallès talks about "Woman in an Armchair (Françoise Gilot)", 1946

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Picasso loved animals of all kinds. His particular bestiary consisted of birds – doves, roosters and owls – as well as dogs, cats, bulls, horses and goats, all of which appear repeatedly in his works. He also subjected these creatures to constant metamorphoses, giving them symbolic meanings.

‘Picasso may love or hate men, but he adores all animals […]. At the Bateau-Lavoir, he had three Siamese cats, a dog, a female monkey, and a tortoise; a tame white mouse lived in a table drawer. […] In Vallauris he had a she-goat; in Cannes, a monkey. As for dogs, not for one day has he been without their company. […] If it had been up to him, he would always have surrounded himself with a regular Noah’s ark.’


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For Picasso both pigeons and doves were a living reality rather than a symbol. They were a part of his life from childhood. His father was a pigeon fancier and also a painter who specialised in depictions of pigeons and pigeon cotes. A notable example of his work is the oil painting titled *Pigeon Cote*, which Picasso referred to throughout his life in a hyperbolic manner: ‘A cage with hundreds of pigeons. With thousands and millions of pigeons.’ Picasso depicted this subject in his earliest works and at different times throughout his career. 

One of the first birds that he produced was a paper cutout made in Málaga at the early date of 1890. That same year in Málaga he made his first drawing on the subject, a group of pigeons in a pigeon cote, an initial approach to the theme that already includes the motif of one of the birds in an opening of its cote, as in this oil on canvas, *Three Doves*. Picasso’s juvenile sketchbooks are also filled with pigeons and over time they would become his favourite animal in his bestiary, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. It was at this point that the dove became a world symbol of peace through Picasso’s lithograph made for the World Peace Congress of 1949. 

In 1957, in the midst of the taxing process of the creation of the *Las Meninas* series, the artist painted a series of nine oils of young pigeons. Picasso thus abruptly interrupted the claustrophobic series inspired by Velázquez and immortalised the pigeons that he kept in a dovecote on the top floor of La Californie, with its views of the Bay of Cannes. Three years after that series, *Three Doves* makes use of a very similar language with a similar geometrised arrangement based on angular forms. The same day that he painted this work, 18 November 1960, Picasso produced a similar oil of horizontal format depicting a pair of doves guarding their nest with blue sky as the background. That work, the *Las Meninas* series and *Three Doves* all use the same luminous blue in the background. It is here that one of the differences lies with respect to the artist’s childhood memories; from the closed, detailed, ochre-toned compositions of the father, to the formal, chromatic and above all psychological freedom of the son.

Text: Eduard Vallès, ‘Three Doves’, in *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 352–53.


Three Doves 

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During the war years, Picasso painted a series of horizontal nudes as grim and motionless as corpses. His postwar reclining nudes came back to life, unfolding like the fields and hills of a landscape, while his vertical sheet metal sculptures invite the viewer’s eyes to caress their surfaces and crevices. 

‘“Art is never chaste”, Picasso said to me one day. “Ignorant, innocent people should not be allowed to look at it; those who are insufficiently prepared should not encounter it. Yes, art is dangerous. Or, if it is chaste, it is not art.”’ 

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With a folded, dangling arm and cutout features, this representation of Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986), the artist’s second and last wife, is known in three other versions. One example, made of paper, enabled Picasso to decide how and where to bend or ‘crease’ the metal and allowed him to experiment with the size and the placement of the open-work areas. 

The figure of Jacqueline occupies two ‘sections’ of a metal sheet that has been folded into three panels. One panel is solid and has not been worked, serving as a structural support and augmenting the perceived depth of the body. The model’s features have been sliced out of the metal: eyebrows, eyes, ears, mouth and cheeks, a breast and an arm. With the exception of the right arm, hanging from the figure’s centreline, these forms are expressed by hollowed, absent spaces. Viewed from various angles, the sculpture’s flat-metal sections assume volume. Occupying and appropriating these empty spaces into itself, the body acquires depth and mass. 

Metal cutout sculptures of this type were part of Picasso’s production in the 1960s. The first example was a large bird of prey […]. In general, these metalworks recalled the paper cutouts Picasso had made in the early 1940s during the Second World War and the primitive silhouettes, especially those of paper animals and figures that he had made as a child. According to Lionel Prejger, Picasso invented this type of sculpture as a means of giving ‘permanent shape’ to the paper cutouts he had accumulated over time and, nonetheless, became so inspired by the process that he began to ‘cut out new paper shapes every day, in such quantity that it was hard to keep up with him’ (Prejger cited in McCully 1997, p. 259). […] It has also been suggested that the artist’s work in metal developed simultaneously from the metal toys he created for his own children. 

Picasso’s collaboration in the 1960s with the Norwegian sculptor Carl Nesjar (who had discovered a special cement that could cover large flat surfaces) resulted in a number of important public commissions of colossal cement sculpture, some based on this type of construction of cutout and folded forms. 

This cutout sculpture of Jacqueline was made in Cannes in 1961, the year she and Picasso married. 

Text: After McDonald Parker, ‘Woman’, in *Collection Museo Picasso Málaga*, Madrid, Tf Editores; Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 359–60.


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Woman

Unlike the painters known as ‘Orientalists’ who sought out supposedly exotic settings, Picasso, who had been born in the south of Europe, turned light into a major protagonist in his work. When the artist decided to locate his studio and home in a property set among pine trees and bathed by the light of the Côte d’Azur, his paintings and ceramics turned more joyful and his symbolic fields became populated with fauns, nymphs and satyrs who appear to be listening with a smile to the old tales told by the sailors of ancient times on their return from voyages around the classical isles.

‘“For me the role of painting”, says Picasso, “is not to depict movement, to show reality in movement. Its role, for me, is rather to halt movement. You must go further than movement in order to halt an image. Otherwise you’re chasing after it. For me, only at that moment is there reality.”’

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Picasso and his future wife Jacqueline Roque Hutin met in 1952 at the Madoura factory, where she was working in the shop, and his earliest portraits of her date from 1954. In order to escape the small-town atmosphere of Vallauris, they moved in the autumn of that year to his rue des Grands Augustins studio in Paris. In the first two weeks of October he began a series of colourful portraits of his new muse, including Jacqueline Seated.

The placement of the seated Jacqueline in front of three bands of colour – red for the ground or floor, yellow for the space behind her, and blue for the sky above – suggests that she is out of doors in the sunny Mediterranean, although the work was painted in Paris. At the same time, Picasso was surely thinking about his dying friend Matisse, who typically set the women in his paintings against broad areas of flat colour.

Whenever Picasso came up with an image for a new woman in his life, he picked out those features which, for him, conveyed both her physical characteristics and also her temperament. Here, he began with the head, which visible underpainting reveals that he first placed in the centre, facing in the opposite direction. The cool, serene face of the final version, which reflects Jacqueline’s supportive role in their relationship, combines both profile and frontal views, emphasising her large dark eyes and straight nose. Her abundant hair appears to be tied back behind her head, while the blue curve at the right could also stand for her hair gathered in a bun. In this work, in contrast to late, explicit paintings of her naked, Jacqueline’s compact body is rendered as an almost flat rectangular form, with the diamond pattern of her dress following the single curve of her knees.

Text: Marilyn McCully, ‘Jacqueline Seated’, in *Museo Picasso Málaga Collection*, Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 44.

In Picasso’s production of the early 1960s, following his decision to settle permanently close to the Mediterranean Sea surrounded by a small circle of professional friends and family, it is common to see expressions of the fullness of everyday life. Picasso looked at himself in the mirror of longevity searching for the image of an entire life devoted to art, its history and its future. In portraits of this type, which could be seen as projections of a distant self, the painted subject suggests messages written on the face of a man who dissolves in the vulnerability of the gesture.

‘It’s completely different the way other people see you and the way you see yourself in a mirror at certain moments. Several times in my life, I happened to catch an expression on my face that I’ve never been able to find in any of my portraits. And they may have been my truest expressions. Someone ought to make a hole in a mirror so that the lens can capture your most intimate face unawares.’

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A further obstacle to liking these late works is the deceptive clumsiness of their technique. People who should have known better suggested that the artist had become senile and sloppy and that his hand had lost its cunning. [...] No, far from losing any of his cunning, Picasso still had to make things as difficult as possible for himself and, by extension, for the viewer. True, in the past, dexterity, or rather his ingenious attempts to conceal dexterity, had on occasion got the better of him. Seldom, however, in the last paintings. The technique is very much there, above all the infinite variety of the formal invention and the wonderful plasticity of the paint, but it is never an end in itself.

In fact, the clumsiness of Picasso’s very late paintings is disingenuous to the point of deceptiveness. Technique, said Picasso, is important, ‘on condition that one has so much…that it completely ceases to exist.’ There is nothing hit-or-miss about his seemingly hit-or-miss style. The point was to preserve the directness and spontaneity of his first rush of inspiration, to be as free and loose and expressive as possible. In old age Picasso had finally discovered how to take every liberty with space and form, colour and light, fact and fiction, time and place, not to mention identity. 

Text : John Richardson, ‘L’Époque Jacqueline’ (1988), as cited in Martin Gayford and Karen Wright, eds., *The Grove Book of Art Writing*, London, Grove Press, 2000, p. 263. For more information, see the lecture delivered by Richardson on 24 April 1984, *Picasso: Catch in the Late Work*, available at [https://www.guggenheim.org/finding-aids/file/picasso-catch-in-the-late-work-2-of-2-john-richardson](https://www.guggenheim.org/finding-aids/file/picasso-catch-in-the-late-work-2-of-2-john-richardson), and the longer, slightly different talk he gave on the occasion of the *Le dernier Picasso 1953–1973* exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou held from 17 February to 16 May 1988, available at [https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/cyn6Rja](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/cyn6Rja).


Bust of a Man 

In the south of France, Picasso becomes fascinated with the local pottery tradition. Like the artists of the contemporary School of Altamira, he looked back to the prehistoric cave painters who used earth, bone and fire to create art. Other paintings recorded the houses and landscapes that cradled his late work. 

‘Ceramics works like printmaking. The firing is the printing. At that precise moment you realise what you have done. When you receive the proof print, you are no longer the same person who etched the plate. You have changed. You have to go back to the printing plate. But with ceramics, there is no going back.’

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Picasso began his activity in the age-old medium of ceramics at the Madoura factory in Vallauris, the ancient pottery centre where he and Françoise Gilot acquired a villa in 1949. He was attracted to the place, with its old buildings and traditional wood-fired kilns, and to the opportunities and facilities that the owners, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, offered him at their factory. Working alongside the craftsmen, he undertook a variety of ceramic experiments, utilising the plates and jugs that were in regular production, as well as realising some of his own designs with the master thrower Jules Agard. Beginning in 1950 he also collaborated closely with Suzanne Ramié on the shapes that she designed. She was particularly interested in researching ancient or traditional pots, which she then recreated, often on a larger scale than the original sources, for modern decoration. The pot-bellied vessel with six handles (three on either side) and a lid, which is the inspiration for Insect, is known in Provence as a gus, and its purpose was for storing vinegar or water. A rope would be looped through the handles, so that the vessel could be hung on the wall. 

Picasso had a knack for seeing the potential for transformation in ceramic shapes, and, in the case of this *Insect*, he had the idea of turning the whole vessel into a creature by painting the lid as a head with eyes, the handles as arms with little hands extending onto the main body of the pot, while legs are painted at the bottom. Similar features are depicted on either side of the pot, so that the creature actually has eight legs in all. Picasso chose straightforward techniques of decoration, including painting blue slip directly on the white earthenware pot and incising some of the decorative motifs through the blue to reveal the white beneath. 

Text: Marilyn McCully, ‘Insect’, in *Museo Picasso Málaga Collection*, Málaga, Museo Picasso Málaga, 2010, p. 42.

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The terror of impending war is evident in Picasso’s nudes of the late 1930s. Remaining in occupied Paris, the artist continued to work, but a grey veil of despair descended over his paintings. His small sculptures of heads resemble tiny skulls and carved pebbles; despite their size, they powerfully convey the anguish of the times.

‘I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.’ 

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The imminent outbreak of the Second World War led Picasso to leave Paris and move to Royan. Together with his partner Dora Maar, Jaume Sabartés and Sabartés’s wife, the artist settled in this small town on the French Atlantic coast in early September 1939, shortly before the start of the conflict, and remained there until August 1940, occasionally making trips to Paris. Also living in Royan in a clandestine manner were Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya, whom Picasso had decided to remove from Paris too.  

The turbulent international situation was thus further complicated by the artist’s own tangled personal one, sharing space with his new lover, his ex-lover and his daughter. This portrait based on Dora Maar was executed just two months after their arrival in Royan and responds to a lengthy process that is evident in the four preparatory studies which Picasso executed in a sketchbook between 3 and 9 November. The work’s vertical structure, with the face looking upwards so that the nose is located at the top, had already appeared in earlier works but without achieving the synthesis of this oil, which surpasses even the dynamic line of the prescripts and postscripts of this work.  

Absent here are the elements that define Dora, such as her eyebrows and nails, and Picasso only retains the short, greased-back hair and above all the striking and anarchic movement of her arms. In this case, rather than suggesting repose, the arms crossed behind the head evoke the constantly high-strung state in which Dora found herself according to various accounts. One of those who described her was Brassaï, who said that Dora was ‘prone to outbursts and temper tantrums.’ Rather than ignore this aspect of her character, Picasso took it to its extreme in the portraits he made of her between 1939 and 1940. Despite living in a time of war the artist rarely depicted explicit violence and rather expressed it through the distortions of his model’s face.  

The deformed portraits that he made in Royan through the use of a deliberated randomness are not exclusively based on Dora. They also include his secretary Sabartés and the mother of Marie-Thérèse, who likewise moved to Royan at this period. None of those works, however, transmits the degree of violence and turbulence present in the portraits of Dora, which undoubtedly constitute one of the high points of Picasso’s career.   

Text: Eduard Vallès, ‘Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind Her Head’, in *Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017–2020*, Málaga, Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga, Legado Paul, Christine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, 2017, pp. 264–65. 

Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind Her Head

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Portrait of a Bearded Man

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Fruit Bowl

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Portrait of Olga

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Woman with Raised Arms

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Claude in Brown and White

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Still Life with Skull and Three Sea Urchins

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Still Life with Glass and Knife

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Seated Faun

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Head of a Woman

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Head of a Goat

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Bather

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Bust of a faun

Salvador Haro

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Jacqueline Dürrbach (after original painting by Pablo Picasso, 1907)

"Les Demoiselles d’Avignon" by Jacqueline Dürrbach (after original painting by Pablo Picasso, 1907), 1958

Cécile Godefroy

Collection 2020-2023

Dialogues with Picasso

A tour in the galleries

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Guided tour

Knowing the collection

Visita guiada "Conociendo la Colección" en el Museo Picasso Málaga

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The Many Faces of Picasso’s Late Work 

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The Echo of Picasso 

Like the exhibition it illustrates, the catalogue of *The Echo of Picasso* establishes a relationship between Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre and that of more than fifty contemporary artists. All these artists provide a sort of ‘pop-up window on Picasso’ and explore both his extraordinary presence in our imaginary and the mark his constant pursuit of new modes of artistic expression has left on the concerns of the most recent generations.  

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Publisher

Measures

The Echo of Picasso

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Richard Prince (1949) 

Untitled (Picasso), 2011 

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Cy Twombly (1928 - 2011) 

Copy of a Picasso, 1988 

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Brian Calvin (1969) 

Fiore [Flower], 2023 

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Karel Appel (1921 - 2006) 

Personagge [Personage], 1952 

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Farah Atassi (1981) 

Sleeping Dancer 3, 2021 

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Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) 

Massacre en Corée [Massacre in Korea], 18 January 1951 

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Zio Ziegler (1988)  

Creation Figure, 2022 

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Louise Nevelson (1899 - 1988) 

Untitled, 1976–1978 

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Thomas Houseago (1972) 

Minotaur, 2023 

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George Condo (1957)  

The Conversation, 2022 

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Marina Faust (1950) 

While flattening pyramidal hierarchies, 2023 

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Jorge Galindo (1965) y Pedro Almodóvar (1949) 

The blessing painting 2, 2019 

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Curated by Éric Troncy