30 Works by Picasso

The first anniversary of the Museum’s opening marks the start of a second loan of artworks, which the Museum will enjoy for a one-year period – from October 2004 to October 2005 – thanks to the generosity of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and the Fundación Almine y Bernard-Ruiz Picasso.

This new loan to the Museo Picasso Málaga consists of a group of thirty paintings, drawings and sculptures executed by Picasso between 1901 and 1972. Several of these pieces were produced during the first decades of the master’s career. Both The Death of Casagemas and Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto are on view in the first room alongside portraits painted by Picasso in La Coruña and Barcelona. This arrangement shows the artist’s evolution from his apprenticeship with his father, José Ruiz Blasco, in La Coruña and Barcelona to his early years in Paris. The varied influences of artists and styles are clearly discernible in this group of works – from the nineteenth-century academicism of Portrait of a Man to the influence of symbolism, very much in vogue in Barcelona at the end of the century and subtly perceptible in Girl and her Doll.

The second room contains several portraits of Olga Kokhlova and Paul Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s first wife and first-born son respectively. This room was chosen from the outset to exhibit the portraits of two people with a very close emotional connection with the establishment of this museum: they are respectively mother-in-law and husband, as well as grandmother and father, of the donors of the collection, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The works on paper exhibited in Room III cover the period from 1906 to 1934. The large room VIII contains Susanna and the Elders, a painting which is unique in Picasso’s oeuvre because of its biblical background but reveals an interest in voyeurism that became powerfully present in Picasso’s artistic production of the last two decades. Rooms IX–XI feature canvases created in the artist’s last decade.

Located throughout the Museum’s twelve galleries, the thirty works that make up this new one-year loan attest to the complexity and genius of Picasso’s oeuvre.