The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I learnt to paint like Picasso in Malaga...
... and that’s no bad thing! Sarah Rodrigues picks up her brushes in the artist’s home town
‘TMy window looked directly onto the Iglesia de Santiago, where Picasso was baptised
hat side looks quite good,” said my art teacher, Alicia, glancing from my sketch pad to the lighthouse and port of Malaga. “But the lines on that side are a little bit scary.”
I wasn’t about to be discouraged. Not only was Alicia – the local art teacher at the helm of my Malaga drawing tour (ohmygoodguide.com) – delightful, knowledgable and supportive, but I was also enjoying the meditative act of drawing, rather than snapping a hurried photo on my phone. Besides, Picasso himself, born and raised until the age of 10 in this coastal Andalucian city, was lambasted by early critics. In one 1922 review, the female form depicted by him in Woman was described as “ungainly” and “positively misshapen”.
Not, mind you, that I am comparing myself with Picasso. Apples and trees are all very well, but the artistic ability with which my father is blessed definitely did not come to me. A few years ago, I signed up for drawing lessons at the V&A, blithely assuming that everyone would be in the same talentless boat as me. The “reveal”, as we sat in a circle and turned our sketch pads around, was only slightly less mortifying than the initial introduction session, during which it transpired that the other participants were not all, as I was, spurred on by an impending midlife crisis, but individuals who, you know, had studied at St Martins but just hadn’t had “the time to pick up a pencil for a while”.
Just my luck that the other student present for this port-side lesson had a degree in fine arts. I made sure that Alicia was positioned between us as I squinted towards the horizon with my pencil measured against La Farola – the lighthouse, which, completed in 1817, is the only landmark that would have been present in Picasso’s time – to gain a sense of perspective. A murmuration of birds swooped and soared, backlit by morning sun; knowing that Picasso’s father, a breeder and painter of pigeons, was a key influence in the artist’s life, I couldn’t help but clumsily V-shape them onto my own rendering of that pale blue January sky.
In this sunny corner of Spain, oranges cluster on branches, sometimes falling plumply to the ground in a splatter of pulp and pith. Due to their bitterness, plucking one as an itinerant snack isn’t recommended, but if you have a yen to drink Aperol spritzes in your hotel room, I can confirm that they are worth lunging out of a window for.
My window at the newly opened Palacio Solecio, a restored 18thcentury palace, looked directly onto the Iglesia de Santiago, which, as well as being Malaga’s oldest church, is the one in which Picasso was baptised in 1881, and in which his parents had wed less than a year previously. Built upon the ruins of a mosque, it’s often noted for its Mudejar tower; for me, it was the gaping maw of the dragon’s head at the edge of the church’s gutter that was irresistible – and, as much as the winter sun was a genuine treat, some part of me wished for a downpour that would spew rainwater from that jagged mouth onto the cobbled lane below.
Picasso inevitably looms large in Malaga. An elegant bronze statue of him, crafted by Francisco Lopez Hernandez, in Plaza de la Merced, where the artist would have played in his childhood, is situated just opposite the apartment in which he was born. Other more rudimentary impressions of Picasso hover outside restaurants, brandishing menu boards. Souvenir
shops are stuffed with merchandise emblazoned with copies of his work. A tapas bar and restaurant bear his name.
On a Sunday morning walk with Mahy, a guide from Tours by Locals (toursbylocals.com), we visited the birthplace – now the Museo Casa Natal Picasso Malaga – on the corner of the plaza, where you can see toys the young Pablo played with, as well as family photographs and some examples of his early work. The nearby Museo Picasso Malaga was once a Moorish palace and has retained its central pillared courtyard and decorative wooden ceilings; an exhibition exploring the influence that old masters such as El Greco and Giovanni Battista Caracciolo had on Picasso’s work is running there until June 26. Although it generally holds a relatively small selection of Picasso’s works, the ones on display provide a fascinating insight into the mind and machismo of a man whose love life was, well, complicated, to put it mildly.
Although Picasso spent around the same amount of his lifetime in Barcelona as he did in Malaga, it is in the former’s museum that the majority of his works are housed. Opinions vary on how the artist felt about his home town: biographer and friend John Richardson describes a “lifelong resentment of his birthplace – resentment of the backwardness, listlessness and air of defeat that characterised the beautiful southern province where he spent the first 10 years of his life”. Others claim that, despite the fact that he only visited the city a handful more times after his family’s departure in 1891 before leaving forever in January 1901, Malaga was always in his soul.
Certainly, the city was a lifelong inspiration and influence. Early trips with his father to La Malagueta, the bullring located a short walk from the port, are reflected over and over again in his works. We weren’t able to view its graceful 19th-century curves from within, as it only opens from April to September, but a lazy lunch on the terrace of the Malaga Palacio hotel afforded us a tantalising glimpse over its rim, as well as sweeping views of the city. The shacks below the Alcazaba, a sprawling 11th-century fortified palace adjacent to a wellpreserved Roman amphitheatre, were one of young Pablo’s favourite haunts: here, he learnt basic flamenco and developed a love of cante jondo. This form of music and dance had an impact on many of his paintings.
The shacks are no longer there, but, once we had shaken off the soporific effects of a lengthy and sangria-soaked lunch at El Pimpi (elpimpi.com) – partowned by another of Malaga’s favourite sons, Antonio Banderas – we made our way to Tablao Flamenco Alegria (flamencomalaga.com) for an intimate flamenco performance. For just over an hour, a virtuoso guitarist, cantante and three dancers poured their very souls into a performance that was so personal and intense, it stung to watch it. I had previously suspected that talk of the “passion” and “intensity” of flamenco was just so much blah-blah: based on this spectacle, it’s not.
I’m not horrified exactly by the fruits of my art class, but, suffice to say, I won’t be making a similar foray into flamenco anytime soon. Even so, Malaga is replete with inspiration: architecturally, in its cathedral – lovingly dubbed La Manquita, the onearmed lady, due to its missing tower – and the skeletal undulations snaking over the Palmeral de las Sorpresas, the waterside promenade; in its 30-plus museums, and, more contemporarily, in the Maus street-art collective (mausmalaga.com), which enlivens the hip Soho neighbourhood, as well as the streets around Calle Pedro Molina, where some of Picasso’s works, including his Guernica, are reproduced.
And then there is the food. Fish were a recurring motif in Picasso’s work; the sparklingly fresh seafood at the Mercado Central de Atarazanas had been enticing enough, but back at the Palacio Solecio’s Balausta restaurant, presided over by Michelin-starred chef Jose Carlos Garcia – and looked after by the truly fabulous Ignacio – we feasted on grilled sardines and anchovies, along with cod loin in a reworked version of a fisherman’s stew, plus sea bass with Malaga clam velouté, black garlic and pak choi – all accompanied by local wines. If I could choose to magically have a skill, drawing and flamenco might certainly be up there – but the ability to capture a taste, a sensation, a moment, would top them both.
This experience would, no question, be one I’d bottle.