More than 100 years after he left and 30 years after he died, Pablo Picasso has finally achieved his dream of having a museum dedicated to his work in his home city of Malaga, southern Spain.
Opened by King Juan Carlos, a collection of more than 200 of his works went on display at the new museum yesterday as relatives who donated most of them said they were realising one of the artists’ unfulfilled wishes.
Picasso, whose famous Guernica was painted in support of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, vowed he would never return to Spain as long as dictator General Francisco Franco lived.
The hatred was mutual and Franco, an admirer of Dali, showed no desire to have Picasso raised to the status of national hero.
Picasso, who had spent most of his life in France, eventually died in 1973, two years before Franco.
But Picasso always said he would like to see his works displayed in the city where he was born. ”I would send two lorries, full of pictures,” he once said.
In the end it took a convoy of several lorries and a large police escort to deliver the pictures and objects that had been stored in Madrid bank vaults over the past two years.
The paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and engravings were donated by Picasso’s daughter-in-law Christine Ruiz-Picasso, and the artist’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Ruiz-Picasso explained yesterday that the artist’s son, her late husband Paul, had travelled to Malaga as far back the mid-1950s to try to set up a museum but that Franco authorities had blocked the plan.
”Picasso knew what was happening here,” she said. ”He suffered a lot because the dictatorship prevented his work returning.”
The new museum’s collection spans the artist’s life and includes highly valued works such as Olga Kokhlova with Mantilla (1917), Jacqueline Sitting (1954) and Man, Woman and Child, which Picasso finished a year before he died.
Several of he works have never been seen in public before, including Olga Seated (1923) and Geometrical Still Life with Music Score (1921).
The newspaper El Pais said the works, though not as valuable as those held at Picasso collections in Paris, Barcelona, New York or Antibes, had been valued by Sothebys at £120m.
Malaga hopes the museum will attract half a million visitors every year and give a much-needed cultural boost to the tourist attractions on offer in the Costa del Sol.
The Malaga Picasso museum, which will also have an initial temporary exhibition of 43 pieces, is located in the specially refurbished 16th-century Buenavista Palace, a few hundred yards from the house where the artist was born in 1881. – Guardian Unlimited Â