Picasso Museum and Cathederal visit Malaga

Mar 1

It's friday again, so that means housekeeping day and that means, get out of the way!  Plus today we had to turn in our car (an issue of insurance coverage) and re-rent for the last 20 days of our stay here.  So off to Malaga we went.  While there, we chose to visit the Picasso Museum and the cathedral.

Malaga is the birthplace of Picasso, but he only lived there until he was about 8 years of age, when his family moved to A Coruna, Galaica,  in the north of Spain.  He lived in Spain until he was 18 years of age, then moved to France to study and live.  The reason he never came back to live permanently was down to politics.  In 1939 General Franco emerged victorious in the Spanish Civil War and Picasso swore never to set foot in Spain while the fascist dictator ruled the country.  Sadly for Picasso, and Spain, Franco ruled until his death in 1975.  Picasso had died 2 years earlier in 2973, at age 91.   

One of his most powerful pictures is Guernica.   The painting was created in response to the bombing April 26, 1937, of  Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain, the general area where he spent his younger years.  The bombing was done by Nazi Germany and Italian warplanes at the request of Franco and his Spanish Nationalists.  Many women and children were killed that day.  We saw this painting in Madrid a couple of years ago.  

Today we would be seeing about 200 works by Picasso that spanned a period from about 14 years of age to his death at 91, in all manner of mediums from paintings, to ceramics, to metalwork, to sculptures, etc.  He was very prolific.

His early work was quite "normal", naturalistic, but as time went on it got stranger and stranger.  It was interesting to see how he portrayed his first wife Olga through the years.  She started out being portrayed very normally as a lovely young woman, but as time went on he portrayed her as more grotesque and angry looking, at one point he was calling her "the castrator".  The painter's rapid and often dramatic changes of style are frequently attributed to the presence of a new love interest, the waning of an old one, or both.  Picasso's infamously once remarked that women are "goddesses or doormats".   

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any pictures inside the museum, so I have nothing to show you.

After, we finished at the Museum, we wandered over to the nearby Cathedral of Malaga, Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación - Our Lady of Incarnation.  The building is one of the best examples of Spanish religious art.  It is located on the remains of an early mosque. The foundations were laid around 1530 and work ended in the 17th century.  Because of the long time frame of the building process, there are aspects of Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance  styles included in the design.  The church remains unfinished to this day.

It is a much less ornate church than many we have been in.  Inside the church are 2 massive pipe organs with more than 4000 pipes dating from the 18th century.  They are still in use and frequently played in concerts.  There are 14 chapels included within the church along with the main altar.

A photo montage of today's sites:

https://youtu.be/kc69tynexZ8