Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881, at number 15 of the Plaza de la Merced, and he was probably already thinking about his future with a soother in his mouth: he could dedicate himself to painting like his father, a teacher at the School of Fine Arts, or go to the army, like his uncle.
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Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881, at number 15 of the Plaza de la Merced, and he was probably already thinking about his future with a soother in his mouth: he could dedicate himself to painting like his father, a teacher at the School of Fine Arts, or go to the army, like his uncle.
And it is that his uncle Juan Picasso Gonzalez was well on his way to being a hero of the African War and to get promoted to General. He would also be an instructor of the Picasso Files, which did not report on the drawings of his nephew Pablo, but on the defeat of the Spanish Army at the Battle of Annual, back in 1921.
The fact is that Pablo decided, probably when he was still in his cot, to follow his father’s activity and make himself known under his mother’s surname. A lot of things were waiting for him: the Blue Period, the Rose Period, Paris and its avant-garde, cubism, scandalised critics, world fame and the world’s millionaires queuing to buy his works.
You can learn about all this at the Casa Natal Museum in the Plaza de la Merced, but if you want to see more works of the genius, you can go to San Agustin Street and enter the Picasso Museum. In there you can go eye to eye with more than two hundred Picasso creations and see how you feel after such experience.
And if it turns out that you can’t resist the temptation to have one of those pictures and you don’t see any cameras or guards around you, we warn you: you better plan the thing well if you don’t want to end up being investigated by the police, as it happened to Picasso himself in 1911.
What happened was that one day the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre. And two of the main suspects in the robbery were Pablo and his buddy Apollinaire, who had participated in some youthful mischiefs related to stolen pieces of art. The poet ended up spending a couple of nights in jail, but Picasso was only questioned and, scared to death, he denied knowing his friend.
The two of them were set free, because the whole thing, in fairness, didn’t have anything to do with them, but with another bizarre story which we wouldn’t have time to tell you now. But the most curious of all that is that the Louvre broke records of visitors, eager to see the gap that the Mona Lisa had left on the wall. Exactly as you heard!
