Here they spent the first ten years of his life, until in October 1891 the family moved to La Coruña and later to Barcelona. They returned to Malaga in the summers of 1895, 1896, 1897 and 1899. His last stay, accompanied only by his friend Casagemas, was between the end of December 1900 and January 28, 1901.
Rooms 1,2 and 3
The tour begins in room 1 on the ground floor, which with the title Pablo, growing up in the workshop, recalls Picasso's artistic training, which began as a child under the guidance of his father, José Ruiz Blasco, a drawing teacher at the School of Fine Arts Artes de Málaga, and in contact with the painters of his close circle. On display are original works by Denis Belgrano, Emilio Ocón and Joaquín Martínez de la Vega, whom Picasso referred to as his "baptismal godfather as a painter", some plaster pieces and photographs from the School, Picasso engravings related to the same and an oil portrait of Picasso's father, signed by José Ponce Puente.
Rooms 2 and 3 (The Model and The Artist and the Model) are an immersion in the Picassian universe through one of the keys in the training of the artists of his time: the relationship with the model and the female nude. To illustrate it, original drawings belonging to notebook no. A video screen allows you to see the complete album, page by page. And a series of engravings by Picasso shows his creative display when dealing with the subject of the model and his relations with the painter himself in the studio.
Rooms 4, 5 and 6 The first rooms on the first floor evoke the familiar and vital environment of Picasso's years in Malaga. This is the story I was born to a white father and a small glass of Andalusian brandy (...). These are words from one of his first poems, dated 1936.
They are reproduced in room 4 (The Family), where you can see his photographs as a child and those of his parents, some family objects, a brief genealogy and the portraits that Picasso made his parents and sisters in a facsimile copy of a sketchbook dated 1895. A QR link offers further information on the Picasso family.
Room 5 (Lifestyle), with balconies overlooking the Plaza de la Merced, would correspond to the main living room of the house. Its walls are adorned with a collection of oil paintings that for the most part originally belonged to the Picasso family, including some specially dedicated to his father. The room, furnished with pieces from the 19th century, also houses the bust of a Sorrowful Virgin, who was also always in the Ruiz Picasso home. The set invites you to imagine life in this corner more than a century ago.
When entering room 6, the visitor finds a large-scale reproduction of an autograph signature of the artist: "Picasso de Málaga", which reaffirms his original identity. Through an illustrated chronology, the various stays in this city are explained, from his birth to his last days in 1901. In a display case, a facsimile of his baptismal certificate is shown and clothes and other personal objects from his childhood are preserved: a baby's shirt, his umbilical sash and his Christian dress, one of the shoes with which he learned to walk and a collection of lead figurines with which he played as a child. Several photographs dated between 1895-1896, which bear witness to Picasso's visits to the estate of his godparents in the Montes de Málaga, complete a section that aims to make clear the painter's biographical and vital links with his city.
Room 7. Doves The most common theme in José Ruiz Blasco's paintings were doves, and his son adopted them as one of his recurring iconographic motifs. One of his first drawings, dated in Malaga around 1890, shows several pigeons in a dovecote. The theme reached a universal dimension by becoming a symbol of peace. The writer Louis Aragon chose the lithograph of a white dove for the poster of the Peace Congress in Paris in 1949 and the image had an enormous popular success, which the artist welcomed with enthusiasm, multiplying its variants in successive years. In addition, he personally participated in the peace movement after World War II, which, although sponsored by the Soviet Union and the communist parties, attracted millions of people from other fields, supporters of peace between the blocs and the elimination of nuclear weapons. In November 1950, at the World Peace Congress held in Sheffield (England), Picasso gave a short speech in which he began to explain how he had learned to paint doves thanks to his father. This section shows oil paintings by José Ruiz Blasco and Picasso's engravings on the dove of peace, as well as fragments of documentary films in which the artist is seen attending pacifist congresses.
Room 8. Mediterranean This section, dedicated to the Mediterranean in Picasso, begins with the reproduction of a small oil painting, made in Malaga between 1888 and 1890: The port of Malaga. Picasso told his daughter Maya that he did this small work in secret, with paint taken from his father's palette. It is a version made from memory of a painting by Don José that he hung in the living room of his house, a copy of View of the Twilight of Malaga (1878), by Emilio Ocón. "It's the oldest of all, the first thing I did," said Picasso. The Mediterranean, Malaga's window to the world, runs through the artist's veins. The Mediterranean of naked bathers like goddesses, of nymphs and fauns. The sea of Greco-Roman mythology, which is appropriated to recreate personal and universal experiences. Picasso first approached Mediterranean Antiquity in 1906, when he made nudes reminiscent of archaic Greek sculpture, and returned to it in 1917, when he visited Pompeii in the company of the Ballets Russes, for whom he prepared sets, curtains and costumes. Engravings and ceramics illustrate the influence of the Mediterranean on Picasso's work, while a photographic sequence on two video screens reveals the man who enjoyed the beach in the company of family and friends.
Room 9. Bullfights Another of the things that Picasso owes to his father is his love for bullfighting. The dazzle that caused him can be guessed in his early children's works with bullfighting scenes, such as the small oil on wood El picador amarillo (Málaga, 1889 -1890). His passion for this show is reflected in a huge production populated by bulls and horses, picadors and bullfighters. Sometimes he treated the subject as an aesthetic pleasure, but other times, in the arena a life or death struggle is shown that reveals internal tears, a primordial confrontation that reaches Guernica. Picasso identified with the minotaur in the sand, and he always felt right-handed when facing and defeating the blank canvas, the void, the lack of creativity, and death every day. In this room, ceramics and engravings with a bullfighting theme are exhibited, with the series El toro being especially noteworthy, a milestone in Picasso's lithographic production in which we witness the absolute purification of the figure of the animal. The last state of this series was the only one that had a commercial circulation of 50 copies. Of all the others, only 18 author proofs were printed; the difficulty of gathering all the pieces, along with its emblematic value, make it one of the key series in the collection of lithographs at the Museo Casa Natal. After the civil war, Picasso swore not to return to Spain as long as the Franco dictatorship continued. The bullfights in the south of France were from then on his greatest link with the lost country, the country of youth and childhood, whose yearning was growing stronger. In these circumstances, his friendship with Eugenio Arias, a former Republican combatant living in Vallauris, where he opened a hairdresser's with his wife, takes on special significance. Picasso, a resident of that town, met him in 1947. They went to the bullfights together many times, but they also shared a love of literature and flamenco, political activism and the memory of Spain. A testimony of that friendship is shown in the room: two press pages with original drawings by Picasso. They are part of the set of fifty bullfighting journalistic chronicles intervened with notes and drawings dedicated to Arias, unpublished until 2019, when the Museo Casa Natal made it known. Along with these works, a QR code allows you to hear."
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