Picasso Museum Malaga undergoes transformation to revisit artist's relationship with his father

It all started with a question from a student. If José Ruiz Blasco, Picasso's father, was his first art teacher and taught him the fundamentals of painting, why is he so disparaged when associated with the artist of Guernica? This shift in perspective is one of the core themes of Memory and Desire, the title of the major exhibition transforming the main temporary exhibition hall of the Picasso Museum Malaga (MPM) so it can house 112 pieces from museums across Europe and the United States. The main attraction is the oil painting Studio with Plaster Head (1925) , which captivates visitors upon entering. This canvas, on loan from the MoMA in New York, does indeed allude to his father with that central bust, so reminiscent of his time at the school of fine arts, but it is also a radically surrealist work that influenced contemporary artists such as Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca and Joaquín Peinado.

"José Ruiz Blasco has been vilified by being portrayed as a painter who liked bullfighting and flamenco, as if that were a bad thing, in order to separate him from his son", said Eugenio Carmona, professor of art history at the UMA (University of Malaga) and curator of the exhibition. He has been concerned with reconstructing that father-son relationship, which was not stormy as the critics had depicted it, in order to trace the inescapable artistic influence that the father had on the young Pablo Ruiz Picasso. This recovery of the father's image can be traced in early works by Picasso, in which he tries to capture the academic rigour of the plaster models that also characterise his work from 1925, or in the photographs and portraits of José, among which a small snapshot of the painter and the art teacher in one of his classes, surrounded by white busts, does not go unnoticed. Similarly, in the photographs that Picasso himself commissioned his friend and reporter Lee Miller to take during her visit to Malaga in the 1950s, to photograph the room where his father taught, in what is now the Ateneo of Malaga. These photos also feature artistic plaster casts.

This influence of the master on his son is graphically evident in the exhibition, culminating in the allusion to his father with the bust that occupies centre stage in the headline painting, Studio with Plaster Head. "As Picasso confessed to Brassaï: 'Every time I draw a man, I think, without meaning to, of my father'", recalled Carmona, who, during his tour of the exhibition, also highlighted the Hungarian photographer's images of the Malaga-born artist's studio in Boisgeloup, with the white moulds of his sculptures that are an updated version of the rooms where his father taught. A painter who also passed on his interest in bullfighting to Picasso, whose work would be incomprehensible without this paternal legacy.

Alongside the rehabilitation of Picasso's father-son relationship, Memory and Desire makes Studio with Plaster Head the centrepiece of the exhibition, transforming it into an emblem of the Malaga artist in the 1920s. Once again, the curator returns to this bust to point out how Picasso adopted the tenets of the avant-garde movement, particularly those of surrealism, by "reinterpreting" this figure and breaking it down into three successive faces, the last being a shadow with no light source. "This work began as a still life that was intended as a tribute to his father and his teaching at the school of fine arts, but it exploded onto Picasso's canvas, becoming a convulsive work that unfolded into various profiles", explained Carmona. The curator has further imbued the MPM's temporary exhibition space with this oil painting by replicating the midnight blue of the shadow drawn by Picasso on the very museum walls. A tone that gives the exhibition an imposing corporate colour.

Starting with the central piece, Memory and Desire shows how other international artists, such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and René Magritte also took up this same theme of the plaster cast and multiplicity from their own perspectives, giving special importance to the direct homage that Dalí made the following year in Still Life by Mauve Moonlight (1926). "His appropriation of Picasso is prodigious", stated the curator. Also the homage made by García Lorca in his drawing The Kiss. "The emblem of the bust and the shadow as a new subjectivity was introduced by Dalí into 20th-century Spanish art and reached Moreno Villa and Joaquín Peinado, creators who must be brought back into international projects", stressed Eugenio Carmona, who, after his exhibitions at the Reina Sofía and other international museums, is holding his first curated exhibition at the MPM since its inauguration more than two decades ago.

The Picasso specialist, supported by researchers Pablo Rodríguez and Pablo Salazar for this exhibition, also revealed that the exhibition title directly alludes to the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot: "April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire". This opening verse to the poem, sung years ago by Danza Invisible, and especially for this montage, speaks of memory to allude to the past and of desire to speak of the future. These are two concepts that Picasso also explored and, according to the curator, during the 1920s, he experienced a peaceful period with Olga Khokhlova, in contrast to the turbulent social climate marked by the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe and, simultaneously, the emancipation movements for women and the first anti-colonial protests.

"Picasso was happy during this period but, conversely, his painting became restless because he recognised the sign of the times," said the curator. This atmosphere is also evident in the exhibition, most notably in the last piece on display, Still Life with Minotaur and Palette (1938), which also connects with Studio with Plaster Head. "It is dated at the moment of the defeat at the Battle of the Ebro, when the Spanish Republic had lost all hope of winning the war. Thus, Picasso replaced the bust of his father with an emblem of Spanish culture, the bull", explained Carmona at the end of what is set to be the MPM's major exhibition of the year.

The exhibition also includes an installation based on the preparatory sketchbook for the 1925 canvas, narrated by baritone Carlos Álvarez, as well as international loans from the Louvre, Peggy Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofia, the Picasso museums in Barcelona and Paris, the Malaga Museum and Casa Natal (the museum located at Picasso's birthplace), as explained by the Junta's deputy minister for culture, María Esperanza O'Neill, who was accompanied by Cristina Rico, representing the Unicaja Foundation.

For his part, the director of the MPM, Miguel López-Ramiro, did not hide his enthusiasm for this new exhibition, which he described as a "temple" in two senses: one for the "grandeur" of the open galleries with all the artwork on display and the other being the artistic journey of bringing together over 100 pieces that make up an "artistic encyclopaedia of the 20th century".