José Luis Picón I Málaga, (EFE).- The Mediterranean and the sardine skewers are two of the memories of his native Malaga that Pablo Picasso kept in his retina throughout his life until it went out forever on April 8, 1973, fifty years ago now.
“The proximity of the Mediterranean and having been born in a coastal city is the most important thing, something fundamental to understanding his life and his work,” says Rafael Inglada, one of the main researchers on the figure of Picasso, in an interview with EFE.
But in the artist’s plastic work, and especially in his texts, there are also references to sardine skewers, when he speaks of “the banderillas of fire stuck in the black sand” characteristic of the beaches of his city.
“Perhaps a foreign researcher does not know what it is or may think that it is a subject of bullfighting, but reading Picasso many clues related to Malaga emerge”, highlights Inglada.
In his first 9 years of life, when he lived in this city, he also became familiar with pigeons, because his father, José Ruiz Blasco, also a painter, “had a devotion to painting them.”
His love for bullfighting was also born in the La Malagueta bullring, as Picasso remembered how he used to go as a child “to see Frascuelo, Cara-Ancha and other bullfighters of that time who were already established masters”.
The earthquake of Granada and Malaga in 1884
His childhood in Malaga was also marked by the family environment, “and more specifically the matriarchy, because he grew up in a family in which women predominated, and this is very important to understand Picasso’s position as a man and as a child who is growing up and it’s forming.”
He was also impressed, as he recounted many years later to his secretary, Jaime Sabartés, by the devastating earthquake in Granada and Malaga in 1884, when his mother “wrapped him in a blanket and they ran out of the house.”
As a child he was in contact with the gypsies who lived near the family home, in the Mundo Nuevo area, who taught him to dance flamenco and to smoke through his nose, and Inglada also notes an influence from childhood in his 1943 sculpture “El man of the lamb”.
“Many meanings have been given to it, religious or academic, but Picasso talks about lambs tied with colored ribbons and bells, and he had experienced that at the Guadalmedina river cattle fair, where families went with their children and the sheep loved them. they put colored ribbons”.
That child, who curiously attended a kindergarten located on Calle de San Agustín, near where the Picasso Museum was opened in 2003, assimilated Mediterranean gastronomy in other works where “dishes with chorizos, fried eggs and fish” appear.
For Inglada, “the authentic Andalusian and Malaga Picasso is found in his writings”, the artist “never forgot his roots” and proof of this is that in the sketch of one of his great works, “Las señoritas de Avignon”, he included the word “Malaga”.
Picasso would not return to Malaga during the Franco regime
“He began writing poetry in 1935, a troubled year in which he had almost stopped painting and sought to create in another way, through words. They are texts plagued with themes from Malaga, anchovies, sardines, the black sand of the beach and many allusions to Spanish traditions”.
Picasso was in Spain for the last time in 1934, when he visited cities such as Toledo, Burgos, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao or Zaragoza, “and what he least thought then was that he would never return to his country.”
Two years later the Civil War broke out, he went into exile in France, in the neighboring country he moved to the south “to be close to Spain” and promised not to return “while Francoism lasted.”
In France, he attends bullfights and eats paella with his friends on some Sundays, in addition to frequent winks at flamenco or taking photos dressed as a bullfighter or with a montera.
Picasso never returned to Malaga, but some friends and artists did travel to see the city where the genius was born, as is the case of Salvador Dalí in 1930.
“It is very funny what Ian Gibson tells in his biography of Dalí, who said that in Malaga he was seeing Picassos everywhere. Picasso had a very Málaga physical appearance, and you can find someone like him in a tavern having a drink”, points out Inglada.
After that Sunday, April 8, 1973, still in the midst of Francoism, the Malaga press “devoted many pages to Picasso’s death, because it was impossible to silence him in his homeland.”
The Picasso Museum in Malaga
On the following day, La Hoja del Lunes, published at the time by the Malaga Press Association, opened its front page with the headline “Picasso has died. Painful surprise around the world.”
He was accompanied by a teletype from Agencia EFE dated in Paris that stated that the artist “continued to paint until the last days of his life”, that he “died of a heart attack” and that “his wife Jacqueline and the people close to the painter found next to the corpse.
In Malaga, the idea encouraged by the Franco regime had spread that Picasso did not love his city, something “that continues to permeate, unfortunately, but that is false”, emphasizes Inglada, who regrets that this capital “did not have a mayor like Barcelona had to Porcioles, who opened the Picasso Museum in 1964“.
“Here it was always late to rescue the figure of Picasso,” adds this expert, and the people of Malaga also had doubts about whether the artist really wanted a museum in their city, despite the fact that he expressed it this way in a private conversation: “I plan to give a large part of my works to Malaga, to my home town”.
Shortly after uttering these words at lunch, diners were startled by the crash of a painting falling from a sideboard. “This one already wants to go to Malaga”, said Picasso laughing. EFE