Picasso’s childhood in Malaga (1881-1891)

It has been written of Picasso that he felt resentment towards Malaga, and that he had consciously forgotten everything relating to that city. In spite of a number of obscure areas in the relation between the artist and his native city, it is difficult to lend any support to this thesis after listening to the words of his daughter Maya, or after reading the many testimonies of the people who were close to him commenting on how much he used to enjoy recalling his childhood in Malaga and reasserting his origins.

In the prologue to the Malaga-Picasso, Picasso-Malaga Dictionary, compiled by Rafael Inglada (Arguval, 2005), Maya writes: “Malaga. I have heard these three syllables resonate throughout my life like the galloping step of a thoroughbred horse. Malaga: the days of my youth…..And this is how, to the delight of a little girl, the stories of my father’s childhood began.” Countless were the times I heard the stories of Picasso’s early years, which he recreated and embellished with great detail. “When I was 15 or 16 years old my father decided that I should know his family, his native land, his home. During the course of our conversations that was to become our family, our native land, our home. I could not but love the aromas, the food, the songs, the dances”. And she signs the text La Boquerona, “ the nickname by which my father referred to me all his life”.

In 1962, Picasso recommended to his eldest son Paul, and his wife Christine Pauplin, that they spend their honeymoon in Malaga. As Christine says: “he used to reveal to us his fondness for Andalusia. At the dinner table, he found nothing that could equal his memory of the taste of an Andalusian stew, the variety of aromas or the flavour of the fruit […] He called us ignorant: we knew nothing of the drought, the aridity of the land, nothing of the dignity and generosity of the Andalusian people. Flamenco was his favourite music. He always asserted his claim to his Andalusian origins and complained when a badly informed journalist referred to him as “Picasso, the Catalonian painter”. But what angered him most was the idea that his work might not be exhibited in Andalusia.

In 1957, a group of young Malaga born painters set off to visit him at his home in Cannes; the reception he gave them was warm and emotional. Picasso enquired, “How is the Plaza de la Merced?” Does it still have the marble benches and the pebble stone paving? How often I skinned my knees trying to remove them! And the pigeons? And what about that song “good bye to the prison yard, to the place where the barber’s shop stands..? Do they still sing it?”, he asked, humming along in the style of el Piyayo. And Picasso organised an impromptu exhibition of “Malaga Artists” in the garden of his villa, counting himself as one of them by including his own works amongst the ones of those young men (who from that moment took on the name “the Picasso Group”).

Palau i Fabre relates (Querido Picasso [Dear Picasso], Barcelona: Destino, 1997), that he was present at a conversation in which Jacqueline – Picasso’s last wife reminded her husband that he had said that “he would like to be buried in the Plaza de la Merced in Malaga, beside her”. It is worth recalling that, finally, in the days following the painter’s death the only flowers his widow accepted were those offered by the filmmaker Miguel Alcobendas on behalf of the city of Malaga.

The birth

Tuesday, 25th October 1881. When Maria Picasso began to note the birth pains, her brother-in-law, the doctor Salvador Ruiz, made his way to the first floor flat of nº 36 Plaza de la Merced (today, nº 15). The double bedroom had to be set up in one of the rooms that gave onto calle de la Merced – today part of the permanent exhibition hall of the birthplace museum-. At the birth, which had all the signs of being a difficult one, several family members (the Ruiz Blasco, the Picasso and the Alarcon families) were present. At a quarter past eleven at night, the first son was born to José Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso Lopez, whom they were to call Pablo, in memory of an uncle who had died two years before, the priest Pablo Ruiz Blasco. During those first moments after birth, the child was hardly breathing and there was a risk of death. The story goes that the doctor revived him by blowing smoke at him from a Havana cigar. It was also claimed that he was born with an umbilical hernia, which explains why later on in quarrels between the children, his sister would retort that he had “his belly button sticking out” (the Foundation has conserved, in connection with this peculiarity, an article of clothing that was typical of the period: a corset used by the child Picasso, with a P embroidered in red by his mother).

There was a special joy about the addition of a male child to a family in which, in spite of being eleven siblings, there had been few descendents. Following the tradition of the age to give newly born children a long string of names, so that they would be protected by the saints, Picasso is recorded on his birth certificate as having seven names: Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, Crispiniano and de la Santísima Trinidad (of the Holy Trinity); almost all of which were taken from family and close relations. The christening took place on the 10th November at the parish church of Santiago, and the godparents were his father’s cousin, Juan Nepomuceno Blasco Barroso, and his wife Maria de los Remedios Alarcon, who had also attended the wedding of José Ruiz and Maria Picasso to give away the bride and the groom. The Christening Certificate differs from the Civil Register Certificate: one name was added (Maria de los Remedios, by his godmother), and the name Crispiniano was mistakenly written as Cipriano.

Physically, the boy bore a greater resemblance to his mother’s side of the family, although curiously, in his youth a visible inheritance from his father was his beard of reddish hue. According to the biographer Pierre Cabanne, from an early age Picasso showed himself to be inventive, authoritarian and very independent. Françoise Gilot quotes these words of her companion: “When I was a child my mother used to say to me ‘If you become a soldier you will be a general. If as an adult you are a monk, you will become the Pope’. But, instead of all that I was a painter and I ended up being Picasso.”

The problem of the Birth Places

It is frequent to find among Picasso’s biographers a certain confusion regarding the identification of the place where he was born; the artist’s memories barely serve to help in this task. In 1972, following a municipal project to acquire the birth place and convert it into a museum, the press questioned the location of this house. Rafael Leon, at that time the deputy mayor of the city council responsible for Culture, wrote a series of articles in which he tried to get to the bottom of the question, and was the first to discover that there were “two Picasso birthplaces”, since in December 1883 or at the beginning of 1884 the family moved to the nearby address of nº 32 (3rd floor), today nº 17, in the same Casas de Campos block. From the original construction of the interior of the dwelling few identifying elements remain: the details having been eliminated by the successive tenancy of several families and the conditioning of the building as headquarters of the Picasso Foundation since 1988. What we do know is that the kitchen was at the end of the corridor, next to the bathroom, and the spacious dining room and reception room were in the part of the building that is today occupied by the “historical reconstruction” of the museum.

The first memories

Genevieve Laporte, a friend of Picasso’s, has written that the painter often talked about his childhood. This is confirmed by the scholar Pierre Cabanne: “How often he must have referred to that period of his life! A single word in the middle of a conversation, or a reference was sufficient to trigger the mechanism of his memory. When he spoke, Picasso was truly seeing his childhood and the way in which he unwound the film of his life was no different to the way he painted: the same creative impulse gushing out of an impression, an idea, a memory”.

Picasso remembered the lullabies of his childhood and how he started to walk by pushing a small chair or a box of ‘Olibert’ biscuits; he lent great importance to those first steps of his and still kept the shoes in which he had made them, giving them years later as a present to his daughter Maya (Sabartès, Picasso’s secretary, said that he still kept the tie he used to wear when he was small, the first drawings, the first paintings…). Picasso’s mother recalled that his first uttered sounds were “piz, piz”, when asking for a pencil (in Spanish ‘lápiz).

Picasso’s sisters and aunts

Picasso had two sisters. The birth of the first of these, Lola, almost took place at the same time as the great earthquake of the 25th December 1884, which caused great devastation and a great number of victims in the provinces of Malaga and Granada. The quake caught Picasso’s father, José, by surprise in the pharmacy Antonio Mamely, at the corner of the Plaza de la Merced and Calle Granada. When he felt the tremor he fetched his family and they all went to the house of Antonio Muñoz Degrain, the painter, in the nearby calle de la Victoria, which they considered to be safer. Picasso would later say to Sabartès: “My mother was wearing a head scarf. I had never seen her like that before. My father took down the cape that was hanging on the hook, wrapped it round himself, took me in his arms and covered me with the folds of it, leaving just my head free”. In the upper section of the monument erected in honour of Torrijos in the Plaza de la Merced, the prismatic stones shifted several degrees from their position, as we can see today. On the 28th December, in the house of Muñoz Degrain, Maria Dolores Ruiz Picasso was born. For some time afterwards, both as a result of the events described and because of her character, she would be given the nickname “La Terremotica” (“the Earth Trembler”). At the christening of Maria, her godparents were the wife and son of Muñoz Degrain.

The second of Picasso’s sisters was born on the 30th October 1887. Maria de la Concepción, whose image is conserved only in 2 drafts made by Picasso (and perhaps in a third), died at an early age in 1895, in La Corunna, having contracted diphtheria. Understandably, the event greatly affected the adolescent Picasso, who in 1935 would give his first daughter the same name (better known as Maya).

In the second house that the family occupied, also lived his grandmother Inés and his maternal aunts, Eladia and Heliodora. These women helped to look after Picasso, who would always remember the fantastic stories his grandmother told him and which he would later reinvent. The only male child in the house was to be surrounded by female figures, being the centre of attention as well as the attentive spectator of all the daily occurrences (there are those who see this theme running through some of his last engravings, when he depicts children crowned and bearing sceptres in the centre of the composition, surrounded by the other figures). The aunts also worked in the house sewing the braids onto the railwaymen’s uniforms; apparently Picasso was able, as an adult, to draw these lustrous arabesque forms from memory. The boy would take his aunts’ scissors and with great dexterity cut out the shapes of animals, flowers, and garlands, responding to the requests of his sisters or his cousins: “and now, what? Where do you want me to start?”

The influence of his father : painting and painters, doves, bulls…

José Ruiz Blasco, who was 43 years old when Picasso was born, was Assistant Draughtsman at the Malaga School of Fine Arts and Curator of the Municipal Museum. His influence was the determining factor behind Picasso’s decision to paint. Through him, he became familiar with the artistic circles in the city: many of the friends of José Ruiz were painters, and in the Plaza de la Merced itself and its neighbouring districts lived many artists and intellectuals…This was how Picasso described to the photographer Roberto Otero his relationship with one of these artists, Moreno Carbonero: “He would often visit my house, every summer, when I was a boy, and I will always remember the commotion his arrival caused. It was a real celebration. Everyone would be shouting: “ Pepito Carbonero is here! Pepito Carbonero is here!” as if it were some great event…To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I remember it with such affection…He was probably one of those who wrote to my father to inform him that I never turned up for classes..” (in reference to his period in Madrid as a student of the San Fernando School of Fine Arts). Talking about the same painter, Jaime Sabartès said that Picasso remembered the day in which he saw him paint an enormous canvas in the bull ring at La Malagueta, surrounded by horses and models in disguise – in all probability the painting in question was the oil “the Entry of Roger de Flor in Constantinople” (1888)-. Of Bernardo Ferrandiz, one of the main figures among the artistic community in Malaga, he was able to reproduce from memory a painting in which he admired the transparency of an ear in the sunlight.

Picasso became his pupil of his father, who made it his business to teach him the techniques of drawing and, later on, guide him through his promising career. He often cited him as an example (“My father did this...” “My father said that...”), and he always kept the palette and brushes that his father had given him that day in La Corunna. The artist was to tell Brassaï, in 1943: “every time I draw a man, unconsciously it is my father that comes to mind…For me, the man is “don José” and that is the way it will be all my life. He wore a beard…All the men I draw appear to me to have those features to a greater or lesser degree.” In 1971, in the so-called Suite 156, Picasso produced a series of engravings of scenes in brothels, in which he repeated the scene of a voyeur or a simple observer who Richardson identifies as “don José” dressed as Degas” (according to the biographer, Picasso’s father was a regular client of the Malaga brothel and cafeteria run by Lola “ la Chata”). Sabartès transcribes the memories Picasso had of his father’s workshop in the Municipal Museum: “like any other, without any special characteristics; a little dirtier, perhaps, than the one he had at home; but there he was more relaxed…” The child would accompany his father on occasions and would learn the routines and secrets of the profession. “My father painted pictures of “dining-rooms”, of those that have partridges or pigeons, hares or rabbits. His speciality was fowl and flowers. Above all doves and lilacs. Lilacs and doves. He also painted other animals; for example, a fox. I still remember it”. The doves, which the boy would copy as well, would always be linked to the memory of his father; when, in 1961, Picasso sent a postcard to Malaga to Juan Temboury, he would draw a dove and sign it with the inscription “Drawing made by the son of Jose Ruiz Blasco”. “Once I painted an enormous canvas which depicted a dovecote bursting with doves…Just imagine a cage filled with hundreds of doves. With thousands and millions of doves…They were placed in rows as in a dovecote: a huge dovecote. This painting was in the Malaga Museum. I have not seen it again […]”. The picture, painted in 1878, before the birth of Picasso, was immediately purchased by the City Council, thanks to the mayor Jose de Alarcon y Lujan, a relative of Jose Ruiz Blasco. In December 1971, the Town Hall sent it to Picasso in Mougins, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, but he never went to collect it, and finally the mayor’s office of the French village returned it in April 1973, after the artist’s death. Since 2002 it has been on show at the Picasso Foundation.

Another work on show at the Birthplace Museum is the curious image of Our Lady of Sorrow: originally it was a plaster mould of a classical Greek bust that Jose Ruiz reconverted by painting the face, sticking eyebrows and tears on it, wrapping it in a glued paper and placing it finally on an 18th Century table.

Here we must again refer to the cut out shapes that Picasso like to make to show off and to play with his cousins and sisters. He learnt that technique from Jose Ruiz, who used it to place the figures on a canvas and calculate the space they would occupy. According to a note made by Dora Maar – Picasso’s companion in the nineteen thirties – in her diary, Picasso told her that he had invented collage based on the technique learnt from his father.

There is no doubt that Picasso’s love of flamenco and bullfighting were due to the influences of his father. As a child, he would go to the bullfights at the Malagueta bullring. In an interview given to Antonio D. Olano in 1971, the painter said: “Obviously, the first bullfights I saw were in Malaga with my father…who taught me verses dedicated to Lagartijo”. The journalist added, “and he repeats them as if he had just heard them…” On the same subject he told Roberto Otero, “I must have been eight years old when my father took me to see the bullfighter Lagartijo. I remember his hair was white, brilliantly white…Because the bullfighters of before did not retire young like those today. Well, the bulls were also different, huge…and they charged at the horses up to twenty times. And the horses died like flies, gutted. It was horrible. Those were different times and different bullfights.” According to a report, in 1886 at a bullfight in the Malagueta bull ring twenty horses died. It was not until the nineteen twenties that the bullfighting rules decreed that the horses should wear protective covering. In many of his works Picasso depicted horses gutted, charged by bulls or lying stretched out on the arena.

Once again, Otero transcribes some words relating to this theme: “ I also met Cara Ancha, although I never saw him fight in the bull ring. I was very small and my father, a great enthusiast of bullfights, took me one day to the room in a hotel in Malaga where the bullfighter was staying, I don’t know whether it was before or after the bullfight. It is one of the memories of my childhood that made most impact: there was I, seated on his knees, looking at him captivated.” In another account he said: “My uncle Salvador told me one day that if I didn’t go to communion he wouldn’t take me to the bullfight, and that is how I went to communion. I would have gone to communion twenty times in order to see the bull fight!” Apparently, he even imitated the matadors when he played.

“It is my passion”, Brassaï confessed. Referring to the bullfights in the south of France which the artist went to see in the company of his son Paul, Christine Ruiz-Picasso writes: The bull ring was, for both father and son, a privileged place in which they felt their Spanish blood coursing through their veins.” (Picasso, Primera Mirada [A First Look] Malaga, 1994).

The first works

What Picasso most liked to do as a child was to draw, he could spend hours doing it. He often told his friends that he did his first drawings in the sandy ground of the Plaza de la Merced, recreating the sugared pastries known as “torruelas”.

The first oil painting known to have been painted by him may have been in the year 1888 entitled Vista del Puerto de Malaga (View of Malaga Port), a version of the copy made by his father in 1887 of the original oil by Emilio Ocon y Rivas (dated 1878). It would appear –according to Maya Picasso – that he painted it from memory (his father’s picture was hanging in the living room), by the light of a small candle, hidden under the bed of his sister Lola, who had supplied him with paint scraped off their father’s palette.

El picador amarillo (The Yellow Picador) would be painted around 1889 and already shows one of the themes that were to recur in his future work, that of the bull fight. Three of the figures had their eyes perforated: “My sister did it with a nail; she was very small, perhaps five or six years old…things children do” (Picasso to Cabanne). Another two significant works are the drawings he made in 1890, Palomar (Dovecote), which follows the thematic example set by his father and Hercules con una maza (Hercules wielding a club), which was to prefigure the constant recourse to classical myths in his work.

Although these works reveal many logical imperfections given the age of their author, they are not “childish”, but rather show application and desire to achieve perfection. Several biographers make mention of Picasso’s comments about him never having done “typical children’s” drawings: “when I was twelve I already drew like Rafael”; his drawings “were not the clumsy and innocent efforts typical of a child. I quickly surpassed the period of that marvellous vision […] I did academic drawings. Their detail, their exactness, horrified me. My father was a drawing teacher and it was probably he who pushed me from an early age in that direction”.
On the other hand, we need to continue to attach importance to the cut out paper shapes referred to in previous paragraphs. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona keeps the only two examples remaining: Paloma (Dove) and Perro (Dog), which we can date at 1890. He was to repeat this technique later on: making some figures that he dedicated to his children, others were kept by Dora Maar, and there is a portrait of Françoise Gilot made by assembling different cut outs … And if it is true that Picasso developed the idea of the collage on the basis of this technique, learnt from his father, then these childish games take on a special significance; certainly we can agree that the influence can be detected, not only in the collages but also in the tin-plate sculptures he made in 1954.

Reflections of Malaga in the work and the writings of Picasso

The origin of many of the keys to understanding the work of Picasso can thus be traced to his childhood years. On the one hand, there is the surprising relation between some of his techniques and the cut out paper shapes. On the other hand, we find early signs of the appearance of certain themes: mythology, bulls, and doves. We can perhaps add other animals that he used as motives: goats and lambs. Regarding the former, Picasso may well have been impressed by the herds of goats of the dairymen that, on occasions, crossed the Plaza de la Merced (he even had one of these animals as a pet, in his villa La Californie, in Cannes). In the case of lambs, we are referring to the sculpture “El hombre del cordero” (The man with the lamb) (1944) and the preliminary sketches, that Rafael Inglada suggests may be rooted in a childhood experience: at that time in Malaga there used to be a Cattle Fair where people used to buy children as an Easter Resurrection present, a lamb dressed up in showy adornments (with which it was customary to go for a walk before the banquet was served). In 1937, Picasso gave his daughter Maya a lamb decorated with coloured ribbons, probably in memory of this custom.

Picasso grew up in a profoundly Catholic environment, with several of his relatives strong devotees; however, this religious atmosphere appears to have left little impression on his life or his work (although there are plenty of scholars who believe they can detect in it a “non-Christian” religious connotation). In the works of his adolescence and youth we find the odd religious theme, following the fashion of that time, at times confused with social themes; but this does not re-emerge except in very specific cases such as his “Crucifixions” of 1927, 1930 and 1932, or in the figures of Christ related to bull fighting scenes in 1959. Frank D. Rusell makes a link between the works depicting weeping women painted in 1937-1938 and a carving of Pedro de MENA, “the Grieving Woman”, which was destroyed during the war. In truth, the influence may well have come from the baroque Andalusian imagery in general; a closer influence, in any case, could have been the impression caused by that bust handled by his father (previously mentioned), which he so observed so often in his house.

Picasso’s youthful work often depicts (on occasions for commercial reasons) Andalusian themes: men and women flamenco dancers, bullfighters, scenes reflecting customs and manners of the time…Particularly typical of Malaga are the figures painted in 1899 of the ‘Cenachero’ (The emblematic Malaga Fishmonger) and Lola “la Chata” (well-known prostitute and local Madame), as well as references to the coat-of-arms of the city in his two drafts of female flamenco dancers dated between 1900 and 1901. In this period of his life, two Cubist oil paintings are particularly noteworthy: “Spanish Still life with bottle from Ojén” (1912) and “Still life with bottle from Malaga” (1919), which are the most explicit references to his origins that we find in his later work.

In contrast, it is in Picasso’s writings, a facet to which he devoted himself from the nineteen thirties onwards, that we can trace a multitude of references to Malaga, which Rafael Inglada has compiled in his anthology “La llave de su ojo malagueño” (The Key to his Malagueño Way of Seeing). There is a profusion of references to meals and kitchen utensils: “wine flavoured dough rings plum honey and pickled spicy sausage and chestnuts […] mixture prepared in a mortar for garlic soup which is hard diamond without the testimony of clams on the beach with squid ink […] vocabulary confection of raisins and dried figs of hazel nuts and dried almonds and the chestnuts split their sides laughing at seeing themselves so fat that they will think themselves thin”; “and he gives a first class burial to a box of raisins stuffed with bullfighters”; “he moves on the tip of a prickly pear smiling even more than ever”; “twisted visions snail shaped buns and typical Malaga churros (crispy fried dough) and necklaces of bunched fried anchovies”; “now the past is no more than the freshness of a summer afternoon and the table is festively laid with flowers and fruit and anchovies and green peppers and tomatoes cucumbers aubergines and lettuces and green and black olives…”; “a swallow coursing through her veins announcing the hour and making her Andalusian style breadcrumb casseroles […] the death-defying leap of the prickly pear”; “music of the small dishes of anchovies and handfuls of fried anchovies from the clam soups”; “borrachuelo (typical Christmas pastry) made with liqueur flour aniseed sugar and olive oil […] facing the mirror of family memories evoked for me by this taste and which my mother sometimes sent me knowing how much I liked these things when I was a child such a long time ago and which now, at eight minutes past one in the morning on the twentieth of January nineteen thirty six, lying on my bed in my room which looks out onto the garden in rue La Boétie number 23 in Paris, I don’t know why I remember all this”.

But we also find popular Andalusian expressions: “anda fandango salta bonita dile a tu madre que soy dinamita”; [hurry along with that gracious gait of yours, my pretty girl, and tell your mother that I’m dynamite]; “pero mira gachó que hay que ver lo que pasa que no es más que una nube de verano”; [come on, mate, can’t you see that it’s just fleeting fancy]; “caminito de la Andalucía por qué no quieres tú que te vean que me sigues y te escondes detrás de las violetas”; [Oh you little Andalusian path, why don’t you want them to see that you are following me and why do you hide venid those violets], texts about the beach and fishing :“un domingo duerme cogido a la quilla del ojo abierto”, [one Sunday he sleeps holding on to the keel of the open port-hole]; or referring to fishing smacks, those boats designed for shallow water fishing along the coast of Malaga; “echa sobre el cuerpo tendido en el sol una red y tira el copo de la pesca milagrosa…” [throw a net over the mass of water stretched out in the sun and pull in the miraculous catch]; “marina donde estas bienestar de olor de sardinas que en la playa bailan la danza del fuego en la parrilla”; [in a seascape where you are comfortable with the smell of sardines on the beach dancing the fire dance on the grill]; “medias banderillas de fuego y de castigo de los largos espetones de sardinas quemando delante del negro de la arena de las candelas”; [like half banderillas of fire and punishment the long spits of sardines being scorched over the black sand of the hearth]; “se fueron a pasear todas juntas a la playa. Los primos les compraron boquerones y chanquetes y se las llevaron detrás de los tablones a tomar el fresco que a aquella hora boca de lobo o más luz al interior de pimientos morrones verdes como la noche”; [all the girls went for a walk together along the Beach. Their cousins bought them fried anchovies and goby and took them behind the notice boards for a stroll in the open which at that time was cold and dark or more light in the interior of peppers as green as the night], phrases relating to dried jasmine flowers: “espejo derretido entre los palos de los jasmines”, [mirror melting between the jasmine stalks]; “la corona de jasmines”, [the crown of jasmines]; “biznaga puesta en el moño del tejado de cal”; [dried jasmine placed in the chignon of the lime roof] or about the sweets he ate as a child : “ caramelo de tarde de domingo encerrado en el cuarto sin toros”, [Sunday afternoon sweet locked in my room without bulls]. And perhaps the most emotionally charged of all his writings: ”Yo he nacido de un padre blanco y de un pequeño vaso de agua de vida andaluza yo he nacido de una madre hija de una hija de quince años nacida en Malaga en los Percheles el hermoso toro que me engendra la frente coronada de jasmines” [From a white father and a small glass of water containing Andalusian life was I born. I was born from a mother who was the daughter of a fifteen year-old girl born in Malaga in the district of Percheles, that beautiful bull that engendered my forehead crowned with jasmines] (3rd May 1936).

Other memories of his early childhood

The Plaza de la Merced, where Pablo played as a child, was a space reserved for the citizens’ recreation and amusement, and looked much the same as it does today. In his article entitled La oración de la tarde(The evening prayer) (1887), Juan José Relosillas describes its liveliness and picturesque quality: either walking or resting we find old men, nursemaids, soldiers, priests, the odd patriot rapt in fervour before the monument to Torrijos, boys and girls playing, door to door salesmen; they nibbled grapes or quinces, picked at aniseed, hazel nuts, chick peas and hackberries, listening to the sounds of the cornet and the drum from the neighbouring barracks and the chimes from the parish church of La Merced. Again, Palau affirms that the artist gave a vivid account of a peculiar episode that took place in the square: it involved a very young boy and girl who climbed down from the balcony of one of the Casas de Campos, walked all the way along the wide cornice of the building and even sat down in a small seat, until their parents could recover them, in an atmosphere of great general excitement. Another of Picasso’s most distant memories was that of the “snow man”, who in summer sold small portions of snow after announcing his merchandise through the streets to the sound of a bugle or trumpet.

Near the Plaza de la Merced was the “petit-bourgeois” district of the Victoria (the “suck and throw” district where Picasso’s mother lived when she was single), and calle Mundo Nuevo, on the slope of mount Gibralfaro. This was a poor area, with caves inhabited by gypsies and populated by low class folk. According to Richardson, Picasso’s love of pure flamenco music began there, where he would also learn to smoke and dance a little flamenco.

Around the summer of 1885 is perhaps when we can date an anecdote told by Manolo Blasco, Picasso’s cousin. Presented with a photograph of the old baths of la Estrella (a wooden structure erected above the sea, with large dried grass mats hanging down to protect the privacy of the women who used to bathe there in their petticoats), Picasso said that he remembered going there “and while a friend was speaking to my mother a wave came and lifted up her petticoat and I was very small I looked up and saw only hairs […] and this is why until I was much older I believed that women were like goats, with hair from the waist downwards”. Indeed, a text written in 1935 recalls this incident: “ the hut which in the baths taken sees its dried grass mats raised and from which evil intentions are learnt”.

Testimonies given by those closely related to Picasso confirm that he would tell a great number of stories about his childhood in Malaga: about an uncle of his who was utterly devoted to the dovecote he kept on the roof of his house and which collapsed, nearly killing him; about a driver who drove the tram in time to the rhythm – fast or slow – of the coplas (popular ballads) he sang; about the sparrow he carried tucked away in his shirt front during a walk along the Alameda and which managed to escape because of his cousins’ impatience to get a look at it; about a woman whom he used to call “Doña Besame Aqui” (Madame Kiss Me Here) because of the movement imposed on her walking step by a severe limp she suffered…The scholar Roland Penrose wrote “ He described to me in detail the astonishing baroque interior of the Church of the Victoria”.

The schools

Picasso did not like going to school. The first place he went to was a “Miga” (derived from the word “Amiga”), a kind of nursery school set up in a private house, of which he hardly remembers anything. It was probably in calle Agustín, near the place where his father worked as municipal curator. He had to leave it because it was so dark and damp that it threatened his health. Around 1888 he started his primary education at San Rafael School, situated at nº 20 calle Comedias, where he would be taken by a “mannish and moustachioed “ servant girl. This was the big lay school in the city, modern, light, and well ventilated and, moreover, run by a friend of the family. But Picasso stuck stubbornly to his unwillingness – whether real or exaggerated – to attend school; in the classroom he did not pay attention, he drew, he moved about restlessly. Sometimes he would take with personal objects belonging to his father (a walking stick, a paint brush, and even, rumour has it, the odd dove) to ensure that they would come and get him. According to Genevieve Laporte, Picasso told her that he had studied with the Jesuits, but that they had expelled him for having cut off the curls of a girl who sat in front of him. In fact, this was just one of those stories that Picasso himself took great pleasure in inventing.

His father, José, as we have seen, was more concerned about teaching him drawing technique; his mother, a good reader, may well have been the one who introduced him to books. As a n adult, Picasso often resorted to poetry and poets; however, he was not very fond of writing until, from 1935 onwards, he decided to play creatively with language, unconstrained by obligations and rules, making use of his expressive qualities.

The move to La Corunna

The professional situation of José in the School of Fine Arts was not particularly promising given that the post of assistant was not officially recognised and there were few possibilities of being promoted because of the tough competition raised by other teachers; added to this was the modest nature of the salaries and the frequent delays in being paid. Ruiz Blasco supplemented his earnings by working as curator of the Municipal Museum, a post he had held since 1879, but which was highly unstable, to the extent that on various occasions he had to work for free.

In 1884, 1887 and 1890, he applied for a post that had become vacant at the School of Fine Arts in La Corunna. We can assume that the insistence on going to that city was due to the hope of counting on the protection of doctor Ramon Perez Costales, ex-minister of the 1st Republic and patron of the arts, whom he must have met through his brother, doctor Salvador Ruiz. In any case, he was admitted to compete for the post along with four other candidates, and on the 4th April 1891 his appointment was officially published as full member of the Professorship of Decorative and Figure Drawing in the Galician town.

Before leaving Malaga, Picasso had to pass his entrance exam into Secondary Education. The exam was held on the 25th June 1891 at the High School in calle Gaona, and consisted only of a short dictation and a division operation. Picasso, “boasting” of his difficulty with numbers, told Sabartès that the teacher practically told him the answer to it. On the 20th September he was enrolled in the two subjects of the first course (Latin and Spanish Language and Geography) and on the 6th October he paid the requisite academic fees and the enrolment was transferred. There is no certainty that he attended classes but he may have done so for a few days, as from 1st October, when the course began.

Around the middle of October (probably the 20th) the family set off by sea; with the help of Salvador Ruiz, the doctor at the Maritime Health Institute, they were able to get a cheap passage. They had to disembark in Vigo, before the scheduled arrival time because of bad weather conditions, on the 25th; Picasso was join the course at the Institute on the 26th or 27th October. They would never see Malaga again, or their family relations until the summer of 1895.

This section is based on the Rafael inglada's book Picasso antes del azul (1881-1901), II. Infancia en Málaga (1881-1891). Málaga: Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 2003. We must to quote too:

BLASCO ALARCÓN, Manuel. Picasso insólito. Madrid: Banco de Bilbao, 1981.

BRASSAÏ. Conversaciones con Picasso. Madrid: Turner/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002.

CABANNE, Pierre. El siglo de Picasso, I (1881-1937). El siglo del cubismo. Las metamorfosis. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1982.

D. OLANO, Antonio. Picasso íntimo. Madrid: Dagur, 1971.

_____ . “Picasso, hacia los noventa años”. Madrid: Arriba, suplemento del domingo, nº 40, 14 de marzo de 1971.

GALLARDO, Francisco. “Picasso, niño de Málaga”. En Málaga. Boletín de Información Muncipal, nº 13, cuarto trimestre 1971, pp. 13-24.

HUELIN Y RUIZ-BLASCO, Ricardo. Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Prólogo de Enrique Lafuente Ferrari. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1975.

INGLADA, Rafael. Diccionario Málaga-Picasso, Picasso-Málaga. Prólogo de Maya Ruiz Picasso. Málaga: Arguval, 2005.

_____ . La llave de su ojo malagueño. Antología de textos (1935-1959). Málaga: el autor, 2002. Reeditado en Picasso antes del azul (1881-1901), II. Infancia en Málaga (1881-1891). Málaga: Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 2003, p. 331-350.

_____ . Picasso antes del azul (1881-1901), I : documentos familiares inéditos. Málaga: Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 1995.

LAPORTE, Geneviève. El amor secreto de Picasso. Barcelona: Euros, 1974.

LEÓN, Rafael. “Discusión en torno a Picasso”. En Málaga. Boletín de Información Muncipal, nº 15, segundo trimestre 1972, p. 14-23, y nº 19, segundo trimestre 1973, [pp. 28-37].

_____ . “Las dos casas de Picasso”. En Picasso y Málaga. Edición del Centenario del nacimiento de Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1981, pp. 51-61.

_____. “Papeles sobre Picasso”. En Málaga. Boletín de Información Muncipal, nº 14, primer trimestre 1972, p. 5-9, y nº 19, segundo trimestre 1973, [pp. 15-22].

OTERO, Roberto. Lejos de España: encuentros y conversaciones con Picasso. Barcelona: Dopesa, 1975.

PALAU I FABRE, Josep. Picasso vivo 1881-1907. Barcelona: Polígrafa, 1980.

_____. Querido Picasso. Barcelona: Destino, 1997.

PAZOS BERNAL, Mª de los Ángeles. “En el umbral de Picasso: José Ruiz Blasco”. En Picasso y Málaga. Edición del Centenario del nacimiento de Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1981, pp. 5-35.

PENROSE, Roland. Picasso. Madrid: Cid, 1966.

_____ . Picasso: su vida y su obra. Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1981.

RICHARDSON, John. Picasso: una biografía. Volumen I, 1881-1906. Con la colaboración de Marilyn Mc Cully. Madrid: Alianza, 1995.

RUIZ-PICASSO, Christine. “Una colección particular”. En Picasso. Primera mirada: colección Christine Ruiz-Picasso. Dirección y comisariado, Carmen Giménez. Sevilla: Junta de Andalucía, 1994.

RUSSELL, Frank D. El Guernica de Picasso. El laberinto de la narrativa y de la imaginación visual. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1981.

SABARTÉS, Jaime. Picasso. Documents iconographiques. Genève: Pierre Cailler, 1954.

______ . Picasso: retratos y recuerdos. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1953.

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