Picasso Museum Malaga undergoes transformation to revisit artist's relationship with his father

Friday, November 21, 2025 at 9:23

The whole thing started with a student’s question. If José Ruiz Blasco, Picasso’s father, was his first art teacher and taught him the fundamentals of painting, why is he so disparaged when associated with the artist of Guernica? Memory and Desire, a major exhibit that will transform the main temporary exhibition room of the Picasso Museum Malaga into a space to display 112 pieces of art from museums throughout Europe and the United States, is based on this shift in perspective. Studio with Plasterhead, a 1925 oil painting that captivates the visitor upon entry, is the most impressive. This canvas, on loan from the MoMA in New York, does indeed allude to his father with that central bust, so reminiscent of his time at the school of fine arts, but it is also a radically surrealist work that influenced contemporary artists such as Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca and Joaquín Peinado.

“José Ruiz Blasco has been vilified by being portrayed as a painter who liked bullfighting and flamenco, as if that were a bad thing, in order to separate him from his son”, said Eugenio Carmona, professor of art history at the UMA (University of Malaga) and curator of the exhibition. The curator of the exhibition, Eugenio Carmona, has spent his time reconstructing the father-son relationship that was not as turbulent as the critics have portrayed, to trace the unmistakable artistic influence the father had on young Pablo Ruiz Picasso. This recovery of the father’s image can be traced in early works by Picasso, in which he tries to capture the academic rigour of the plaster models that also characterise his work from 1925, or in the photographs and portraits of José, among which a small snapshot of the painter and the art teacher in one of his classes, surrounded by white busts, does not go unnoticed. In the 1950s, Picasso asked his friend, the reporter Lee Miller, to take photographs of the classroom where his father had taught in the Ateneo of Malaga. These photos include artistic plaster casts.

The influence of Picasso on his son can be seen in the exhibit, which culminates in the reference to his father in the painting Studio with Plaster Head, the main title. “As Picasso confessed to Brassaï: ‘Every time I draw a man, I think, without meaning to, of my father'”, recalled Carmona, who, during his tour of the exhibition, also highlighted the Hungarian photographer’s images of the Malaga-born artist’s studio in Boisgeloup, with the white moulds of his sculptures that are an updated version of the rooms where his father taught. Picasso’s work would not be understandable without the paternal influence of a painter who passed on to him his love for bullfighting.

Picasso’s surrealism

Memory and Desire transforms Studio with Plaster Head into an icon of Malaga’s artist of the 1920s, along with the rehabilitation of Picasso and his father. The curator revisits this bust once again to show how Picasso adopted avant-garde principles, especially those of surrealism. He “reinterprets” the figure, breaking it into three faces with the final one being a dark shadow without light. Carmona said that this work started as a portrait of his father, a tribute intended to pay homage to the teacher at his school. However, it became a convulsive piece that unfolded in various profiles. This oil painting was used to enhance the temporary exhibition at the MPM by the curator, who matched the dark blue of Picasso’s shadow on the walls. This tone lends the exhibition an impressive corporate colour.

Starting with the central piece, Memory and Desire shows how other international artists, such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and René Magritte also took up this same theme of the plaster cast and multiplicity from their own perspectives, giving special importance to the direct homage that Dalí made the following year in Still Life by Mauve Moonlight (1926). “His appropriation (of Picasso) is prodigious”, said the curator. Also the homage made by García Lorca in his drawing The Kiss. “The emblem of the bust and the shadow as a new subjectivity was introduced by Dalí into 20th-century Spanish art and reached Moreno Villa and Joaquín Peinado, creators who must be brought back into international projects”, stressed Eugenio Carmona, who, after his exhibitions at the Reina Sofía and other international museums, is holding his first curated exhibition at the MPM since its inauguration more than two decades ago.

The Picasso specialist, supported by researchers Pablo Rodríguez and Pablo Salazar for this exhibition, also revealed that the exhibition title directly alludes to the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot says: “April, the cruelest of months, is when lilacs are born out of a dead land. Memory and desire mix together”. The opening verse of the poem, which was sung by Danza Invisible years ago, is a reference to the past, while the desire to speak about the future is a reference to the present. Picasso explored these two concepts as well. According to the curator, Picasso experienced a peaceful time with Olga Khokhlova in the 1920s. This was in contrast to a turbulent social climate characterized by the rise in totalitarian regimes and simultaneous emancipation of women and anti-colonial protests.

The curator said that Picasso was happy in this period, but his paintings became restless as he recognized the signs of the time. This mood is evident throughout the exhibition. Most notably, the Still Life with Minotaur and Palette from 1938, which has a connection with Studio with a Plaster Head. It is dated to the time of the Spanish Republic’s defeat in the Battle of the Ebro when they had given up all hope of victory. Picasso replaced his father’s bust with an icon of Spanish culture – the bull – at the end of this year’s MPM exhibition.

The exhibition also includes an installation based on the preparatory sketchbook for the 1925 canvas, narrated by baritone Carlos Álvarez, as well as international loans from the Louvre, Peggy Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofia, the Picasso museums in Barcelona and Paris, the Malaga Museum and Casa Natal (the museum located at Picasso’s birthplace), as explained by the Junta’s deputy minister for culture, María Esperanza O’Neill, who was accompanied by Cristina Rico, representing the Unicaja Foundation.

For his part, the director of the MPM, Miguel López-Ramiro, did not hide his enthusiasm for this new exhibition, which he described as a “temple” in two senses: one for the “grandeur” of the open galleries with all the artwork on display and the other being the artistic journey of bringing together over 100 pieces that make up an “artistic encyclopaedia of the 20th century”.