Image: Museo Picasso Málaga
The galleries have been renewed to present 144 works that, taken together, reveal Pablo Picasso’s creative personality and his extraordinary capacity to create innovative structures that made him one of the most influential artists of modern times. The presentation was developed through close collaboration between the Museo Picasso Málaga and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA).
Its account of Picasso’s creativity is organized around two apparently opposing sources of inspiration: innovation and retrospection. The interaction between those concepts is presented as defining the creative paths that allowed him to integrate cubism, classicism, surrealism and his other innovations into the unity of a lifetime’s work.
That segmentation is described as obscuring the unity of Picasso’s work, while the arrangement reconnects different stages of his career. By combining works from different decades in the same room, the presentation offers viewers the possibility of perceiving relationships across Picasso’s career.
The presentation brings together paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings and graphic works in a mixture of periods and techniques. These new connections illustrate how the artist’s creativity remained rooted both in his earlier creations and in his latest innovations. It also includes the enormous mural Picasso painted in 1957–58 for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Picasso himself stated that the various methods he used in his art should not be considered an evolution or a series of steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. The statement rejects the idea that the different methods can be understood simply as successive stages leading toward a predetermined destination.
