Museo Picasso Málaga

Museo Picasso Málaga was created in response to Pablo Picasso’s own desire for his work to be present in the city where he was born on 25 October 1881. The museum was created thanks to Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s daughter-in-law and grandson, whose donations constitute the core of the collection. It was also made possible thanks to the efforts of the Junta de Andalucía, which coordinated the major project of setting up a museum devoted to the artist whose styles and techniques changed the course of modern art.

The initial idea for the museum arose in 1953, as a result of the contact between Pablo Picasso and Juan Temboury Álvarez, who was the Provincial Delegate for Fine Arts in Malaga. However, the project fell through shortly afterwards.

Christine Ruiz-Picasso, the widow of the artist’s eldest son, Paul Ruiz-Picasso, resumed contact with Malaga in 1992, during the exhibition Picasso Clásico (Classic Picasso), and again in 1994, during the exhibition Picasso, primera mirada, (Picasso, the first glimpse). In 1996, she rekindled the 1953 project, which finally came into being 50 years later on 27 October 2003, when the museum was officially opened by Their Majesties King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía of Spain. 

There are 233 works in the MPM collection. 43 further works by Pablo Picasso are on temporary loan, through a fifteen-year agreement with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA). This group of works covers Picasso’s revolutionary innovations, as well as the wide range of styles, materials and techniques he mastered. From his earliest academic studies, to his personal take on the Classics; from the overlapping perspectives of Cubism, to his experiments in ceramics, and from his re-workings of the Old Masters, to his late paintings in the 1970s.