Young Picasso - Exhibition on Screen

In the autumn of 1907,

a young Spanish artist showed his Parisian friends a new painting.

So horrified were they that he rolled it up and hid it away for a decade.

Indeed, it wouldn't be properly shown until 1937.

And yet it's a painting that changed the course of art history.

The artist was Pablo Picasso.

Picasso was, like so many artists at the beginning of the century

an interesting mixture of many influences.

There was a Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, who said

that a man's homeland is his childhood.

Picasso's childhood is Málaga

and his core is Málaga.

This never left him.

He never forgot the light of the Mediterranean.

He remembered the bulls that he visited with his parents and his uncles

here in Málaga.

Flamenco was part of him.

Picasso is Málagueño but he is also from Barcelona,

from La Coruña,

and he is also, eventually,

an artist that is formed in Paris

but his homeland, his childhood, is Málaga.

The Málaga in which Picasso was born

was a Málaga of class struggle,

a Málaga divided between the upper bourgeoisie

and the working class.

It's a year in which Málaga's industry is still strong

but is falling behind

in comparison with other industrial areas.

Especially the north of Spain and Barcelona.

But Picasso's city was also the home

of the Golden Age of Málagueña painting.

In the city there are great painters

sculptors, engravers

but all local.

Picasso, from childhood, absorbed that environment.

One of the most important aspects of

Picasso's very nature

was the capacity he had for attention

fixation and, above all, retention.

Although Picasso studied in depth

the most important traditions of art

German, Italian, French

there was something in his work that takes us directly to the south

to this hybrid south, a south in which different cultures

have historically lived together.

The Jew, the Arab, the Christian.

I believe this is key to understanding the work of Picasso

because it has the elements

the forms, these cultural elements

that, distinct from their place of origin, comprised the south of Spain.

Here, in Málaga,

Picasso enjoyed bullfights

he admired doves and pigeons.

This brought him closer to Andalucía.

To his roots.

To his origins.

This is the house where Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born

on October 25th, 1881.

This house had been inhabited before the wedding of Picasso's father

by the father and his two sisters

but after the wedding of José Ruiz Blasco

with María Picasso López

the couple came to live here.

And this is where Picasso was born.

The family had a great influence on Picasso.

The character of Doña María

the profession of Don José

were key influences in his life and in his work.

Picasso grew up in a small bourgeois family in Málaga

where thanks to his father's profession and his father's friends

he came into direct contact with painting

with drawing, with colour.

Here he makes his first drawings, his first paintings.

The childhood of Pablo Picasso was an exciting one

because it was linked to art

since his father was an art teacher.

On the other hand his childhood was full of visual stimuli.

Málaga was a small city.

He lived where there was a lot of life on the streets

and that probably affected his way of understanding the world.

Málaga and the presence of his father

were the key points of his influences.

I would say that when his father was asking him to draw a pigeon

or to go to a corrida with him,

he was building his son with very strong Spanish roots.

We cannot neglect the fact

that Don José is very important for Pablo as an inspiration.

He realised that Pablo was more than talented

and that this needed to be supported.

In 1891, a few days before his tenth birthday,

Pablo arrived in a very different part of Spain,

La Coruña on the northern Atlantic coast.

Pablo's father, José, had secured a teaching role.

And it was here that he really taught his young son how to paint with oils.

"In La Coruña, my father did not go out

unless it was to go to the art school.

On his return, he painted.

But nothing more.

The rest of the time, he looked out the window at the falling rain

and then, in the end, he abandoned painting for good.

Instead he gave me his colours and his brushes

and he never painted again.

It frightened my parents that their child

dared exhibit his work.

Some friends chose a place,

an umbrella shop at Calle Real number 54,

more a junk shop selling everything from headscarves to suits.

In spite of my cheap prices the sales were poor.

I wouldn't have sold a thing

were it not for the generosity of my father's friends..."

Picasso arrived in La Coruña on October 14th, 1891 from Málaga.

He made the trip by boat with his whole family.

They would stay in La Coruña for three and a half years.

It was a very important period for the young Picasso

because it was where he started his academic training

and where he also began

to make his first pictures with a completely free spirit.

That first year Picasso was enrolled at secondary school

and the school of fine arts

which was in the same building as the secondary school.

Picasso had as his teacher his own father

José Ruiz Blasco, who had taken that position

and Picasso combined these studies between 1892 and 1894

but then in 1894 his father

decided that his son end his normal studies

to stop studying mathematics and grammar

and to devote himself solely to the study of art.

At the beginning of 1895

Pablo starts to study the natural figure

and it was Picasso's father who paid the models

to pose for Picasso and his classmates.

It was here that Picasso made considerable advances

because over two or three months he made many portraits.

These portraits were important not just from an artistic point of view

but from a psychological one

because Picasso exhibited these works

in the shop windows of the Calle Mayor

which was common for artists at that time.

Picasso received some very complimentary reviews.

Some even compared him to Giotto and Raphael.

These paintings, rather than being considered works of genius

should be seen as the works

of a 13-year-old boy already showing promise.

My grandfather realised that the artistic scene was in Barcelona.

Of course, he was very young: 13, 14 years old.

And there is a part of luck in his life

because when his father was appointed in La Coruña,

was offered to make a switch with someone in Barcelona,

it was just luck

because Pablo was going to be part of the artistic scene of Spain

and from Barcelona everything was possible.

When one looks at Picasso's work

one always sees the desire to rebel

of not wanting to do what others told him to do as an artist.

This is evident from the beginning

when, as a child he did things that adults usually do

and later, as an adult

he did things that children do.

We are talking about an artist

who can be described as a great rebel

against the artistic academy

against conventions

against stereotypes

against the authority of others.

Very shortly after arriving in Barcelona

Picasso was enrolled in the Llotja art school.

The training was very old-fashioned.

The young students did not like it

because the academy was basically repetition and copying.

Picasso was very reluctant

to follow this training.

But there is the great paradox

that the academic training that Picasso received

in La Coruña, in Barcelona and later in Madrid

was decisive for his training as an artist.

Picasso is an artist who throughout his life

will want to break the rules

and transgress from all the teaching

he had received in his training.

Despite this he is an artist who has

a very solid, very sound base.

A base that allowed him later to develop

in a more profound way as an artist.

The Picasso who arrived in Barcelona

at just 13 years of age

was no more than a student of fine arts.

He was not yet the genius he was to become.

Nor did he pass through Barcelona

as a great artist recognised by all the world.

The Picasso that was in Barcelona was an artist still evolving.

Very eclectic in the sense that he fed on

different influences that came from outside

but he had not yet defined his own style.

But in the meantime, he was being influenced

from all directions.

I think that the Barcelona period was important for two reasons.

The first, something more academic.

On the other side you have the people of Barcelona

and those exotic subjects like prostitutes or local people.