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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.’ 

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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. 

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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Collection 2020-2023

Dialogues with Picasso

A tour in the galleries

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Guided tour

Knowing the collection

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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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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.


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.

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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. 

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