The driving force behind the Picasso Museum, Christine Ruiz-Picasso dies at 97

If there is one protagonist at the Museo Picasso Málaga (MPM), besides the painter who gives it its name, it is Christine Ruiz-Picasso. The daughter-in-law of the Malaga-born artist was the first ambassador of Picasso's return to his hometown. In the 1950s, she arrived with her husband Paul - the painter's eldest son - to explore, at Picasso's own suggestion, the possibility of creating a museum in Malaga. Under the dictatorship, that wish never came to fruition.

It was not until the 1990s, with democracy restored, that she returned to Andalucía determined to make it the museum a reality.

Christine, the great driving force behind the MPM, passed away on Monday at her home in Provence, France, at the age of 97.

Honorary President of the museum since its creation in 2003, she was honoured with numerous distinctions, including the Gran Cruz de Alfonso X El Sabio and the titles of Hija Predilecta (Favourite Daughter) of Andalucía and Hija Adoptiva (Adoptive Daughter) of Malaga province.

On the museum's twentieth anniversary in 2023, the MPM named its theatre after her. Then, her son Bernard said, "This museum very well represents my mother's wish to honour her father-in-law and my father."

Christine Pauplin was born in Paris in 1928. Trained as an artist, her life was shaped by Picasso from the moment she visited his studio in the 1950s. She went looking for the father but found the son, meeting Paul, Picasso's eldest child by Olga Kokhlova.

The two married in 1962, though they had already been together for years and had become parents in 1959 to Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, who today chairs the executive board of the MPM.

Christine never forgot the wish Pablo Picasso had expressed to her and Paul: to donate works to his hometown of Malaga. That was the reason for their 2,500-kilometre drive there in 1954, which Christine described as "a honeymoon before the wedding".

On their return, Picasso was moved by what they told him and exclaimed: "If it is possible, I will send two truckloads of paintings." But those works, along with the dreams, were set aside.

The second chapter came in the 1990s. After lending pieces to two landmark exhibitions at the Palacio del Obispo, Christine declared willing to donate part of the collection she had inherited from Picasso to make the museum dream a reality. In 1998 she donated and loaned a total of 233 works spanning almost all periods and techniques, personally selecting the Palacio de Buenavista as the future gallery's home.

She accompanied the Spanish monarchs at the MPM's inauguration and maintained a close bond with the museum throughout its first decade, famously saying: "This museum is like a child to me."

In 2011 she found herself at the centre of controversy when she refused to open the exhibition Viñetas en el Frente, calling it an "opportunistic political use" during an electoral period, and called for the director's resignation - though the dispute was resolved.

At 75, Christine turned a borrowed dream into her great cultural legacy. Like her son Bernard, she learned to live in the long shadow of the Picasso name - one that even overshadowed her own identity as a ceramicist who once wandered into the master's studio in search of inspiration, and ended up finding an entirely new life.