José Luis Picón I Málaga, (EFE).- Picasso once confessed that the happiest years of his life were those he spent on the Costa Azul, whose climate and landscape surely reminded him of his native Malaga, and there was an Irish photographer, Edward Quinn, who earned her friendship and trust to vouch for that happiness for twenty years.
Quinn’s first retrospective in Spain opens this Friday at the La Malagueta Cultural Center, in the arena where Picasso’s fondness for bullfighting was born during his childhood in Malaga, and this exhibition is part of the commemorative acts of the fifties years of the death of the artist from Malaga.
For Wolfgang Frei, director of the Quinn Archive and the photographer’s nephew, the key to befriending Picasso lay in “not bothering him” and that of his uncle was “a discreet presence”.
“He didn’t have Picasso pose or use artificial light or flash. Edward Quinn preferred more candid and ‘quiet’ photos. Most of them are quick shots, some even seem out of focus and that makes them have a special charm”, adds Frei.
Picasso’s happiest years
His uncle wanted to be at the same time “a good photographer and a good friend” of Picasso, affirms the director of the Archive, who specifies that “we must not forget that he was also a journalist and wanted to portray the scenes objectively, but he did not want the people he portrayed would turn out badly or be compromised by his photo”.
Among the photographs that are exhibited in Malaga, Frei is left with one in which a lithograph created in Vallauris appears and in which Picasso wrote the dedication “For my friend Quinn”, because “what they had was really a friendship”.
As the curator of the exhibition, Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, points out, in those years after the Second World War “everyone was looking for what Picasso captured in a painting he painted in Antibes, ‘The joy of living’, and what better than do it in the sunny south of France.”
“Picasso said that those years were surely the happiest of his life. He went to France at a very young age and Paris was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen, the capital of culture, but his heart was in the south and in the Mediterranean, ”adds the curator.
In that place “he celebrated life in a very special way, because he loved the sea and all his children and great friends, artists and actors were with him, he had new lovers, he rediscovered his passion for bullfighting and created many of his great works , because intense creativity exploded in the south”.
Picasso and the movie stars by Edward Quinn
Carrillo de Albornoz is “sure” that Picasso felt a connection with his origin there, since “he always spoke in general of the sunny south, but in reality he was referring to Malaga, where he had to leave to break internal borders with academicism that he learned from his father, but his heart was always in the south and in the Mediterranean”.
Picasso is the great protagonist of the exhibition, but there are also great movie stars who passed before Quinn’s lens, such as Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Sofía Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper, Alain Delon, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo, Steve McQueen, Alfred Hitchcock, Grace Kelly or Cary Grant.
Edward Quinn, who managed to capture a relaxed and joking Picasso, who dressed up as a bullfighter for his camera or pretended to play the guitar dressed in a Cordovan hat, explained on some occasion that “being alone with Picasso was easy and difficult at the same time ”.
“Easy, because we felt good together; we both let each other work in peace. Difficult, insofar as I had to weigh how far I could go to get the documentary photos I wanted without ultimately disturbing his work,” Quinn stated.