This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
As Spain marks the 50e anniversary of the death of the greatest painter of the XXe century, let’s discover this town in Galicia where Pablo became Picasso.
Like every summer, the north wind blows. It is a violent wind, which rages the sea and whips the coastal cliffs, but which ensures the sky of La Coruña (A Coruña in Galician) that pure blue that the waves copy. Located in the northwest of Spain, on the Atlantic coast, the city of 245,000 inhabitants spreads out on a peninsula between beaches and port worthy of Pinterest. For some, British pilgrims, it is the first stage of the Camino Inglès towards Santiago de Compostela. For others, it is a seaside destination that is still confidential.
“If there are no crowds on our beaches, it’s because we don’t come here to party, but to eat well, drink well and enjoy the beauty of the landscapes and cultural life”, notes Selina Otero, spokesperson for the A Coruña Tourist Board. For still others, especially art historians since little is known about the Corogne chapter of Picasso’s life, it is perhaps the most important of the cities associated with him.
For the record, Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881. In his birthplace, open to visitors, and in the museum that bears his name, tourists flock together, and three times rather than once in this year when Spain , through multiple exhibitions and activities, celebrates his illustrious son who died 50 years ago in Mougins, France.
The famous Andalusian also lived in Barcelona, where a museum is also dedicated to him. As for Madrid, she remembers the teenager who skipped his classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando to go and study paintings by Velázquez, Goya and El Greco at the Prado National Museum! But for art historian Antón Castro, one of the curators of the exhibition Picasso white in blue memory, which ends at the end of June at the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts in La Coruña, the case is heard: “If we don’t know the Galician Picasso, we don’t know Picasso!” »
Consciousness of a destiny
José Ruiz y Blasco, the father of the gifted child, took his family to A Coruña on October 13, 1891. He accepted a position as a drawing teacher at the School of Fine Arts in a new high school. Pablo Ruiz (he does not yet use his mother’s surname, Picasso) was then 9 years old. In this school, he will receive a fundamental classical training (hello, Le Faune!), but it is from the city itself that he will draw pictorial themes that will inhabit him all his life.
“La Coruña is the Picasso of portraits and self-portraits, it’s the Picasso of street people, beggars, the beach, the sea,” continues Mr. Castro. It is also in La Coruña that his conception of eroticism was born. In fact, it is by peering into the interstice of a shed on the sublime beach of Riazor that he discovers the female body.
In front of the Instituto Eusebio da Guarda, the imposing high school that once housed the Fine Arts, the guide Monicá Díaz recalls how badly the prodigy of the brush was however a student. So much so that at 13, he announced to his father that he would henceforth only devote himself to painting. Basta, the teaching of priests! “And his father accepted! Do you know many parents who would have done the same? she says.
We could put the question another way: do you know many teenagers who are so acutely aware of their creative potential? Because this is exceptional! At the age of 13, therefore, Pablo organized his first exhibition, head studies, at a furniture store on the rúa Real. “They are not badly drawn […] By continuing on this path, there is no doubt that it will have a bright future,” said Voice of Galicia, in February 1895! The following month, he did it again with, among others, The man in the capa portrait from which he will never depart.
The city of all inspirations
At the family home, a then brand new apartment located on the second floor of 14, rúa Payo Gomez, he painted that same year. The barefoot girl, the first of a long series of oils depicting a seated female figure. For Fernando Carballal, guide to the house-museum, two facsimiles of the artist’s notebooks are among the most precious objects presented there. “He always had a notebook and a pencil in his pocket and he drew everything he saw,” he says. In Coruña being the first city where he lived outside Málaga, everything attracted his attention. »
It is true that La Coruña has something to pique curiosity… Take the austere Romanesque churches so well preserved in its old town. The breathtaking rows of white dwellings, built for the wealthy merchants of the late 19th centurye century, all equipped with glazed galleries, which earned it the nickname of “city of glass”. The astonishing modernist bourgeois residences, with Art Nouveau accents, including the Casa Rey and many others around the Praza de Lugo. Pescadería, an old fishing district with narrow streets that come alive at night. The Tower of Hercules, the only lighthouse of Roman origin still in use in the world, which little Pablo called the tower of ” caramelo (candy), in view of the scratches created by the relief of its structure. Thus, apart from the Picasso Route offered by the Tourist Office, the city has plenty to dazzle!
To his biographers, Picasso confided: “La Coruña is the city where my senses were awakened. We can safely affirm that it is no less capable of enlivening ours.
To note : the Fundación María José Jove presents the exhibition Ruiz A Coruna 1894 – Picasso Paris 1922, a dialogue between works by Picasso from different periods and those of his contemporaries. By appointment, until December 23.
Carolyne Parent was the guest of the tourist offices of Spain and La Coruña.
This content was produced by the Special Publications team of the Duty, relating to marketing. The drafting of Duty did not take part.