Malaga Art, History and Silliness

We met up in Malaga with Steve and Sally who had flown in from their home in Kent, UK. They met up with us in July 2016 in Budapest at the end of another long cycling trip that began on the North Sea in Germany. Fun to celebrate with friends again. Here we were in 2016 in Budapest.

And here we are in 2024 in Malaga. We are all still standing!

We rendezvoused with Steve and Sally to tour the Museum of Malaga, a combined fine arts and archeological museum, opened in 2016 in its present location and the biggest museum in Andalucía. It’s a beautiful Neoclassical building, originally the port Customs House. Construction began in 1791, it was sacked in 1810 during the occupation of Malaga by French forces during the Peninsular War and was finally completed in 1829. The various floors are around a big inner courtyard. The Picasso Museum that we had toured during our previous stay in Malaga had temporarily closed its Picasso exhibit for a reason I forget, but Steve and Sally were able to see a different collection of his work in this museum - though smaller it was equally interesting I thought. There was one room of his work donated by a longtime friend and personal secretary of Picasso.

This small painting, called La Coruña, done when Picasso was just 14, demonstrates how he had already mastered tradition painting techniques.

And then he went off in many different directions.

The other really interesting exhibit in the Museum of Malaga was called “Selective Memory: Art after the Spanish Civil War”. It explained that “The aftermath of the national conflict made it impossible for the artistic avant-garde to flourish in Spain, the borders were closed to European innovations…educational institutions and the local art market focused on the nostalgia of 19thC. painting and the perfection of its signature genres: bourgeois portraits, landscapes and scenes of folk customs and traditions.” But the avant-garde movement began to subversively emerge with surrealism, fantastic figurative painting that featured deformed figures in oppressive settings and expressionism. That’s Fred Astaire on the left.

The archeology exhibits also referenced the oppression of the Spanish Civil War and how ideology influenced archeology in that Franco was determined to establish the Spanish Aryan/Christian heritage in order to strengthen political ties with Germany. Research into Spain’s Visogothic past (a Germanic people) became a matter of state and there was a hasty excavation of the Visigoth Necropolis and the distribution of artifacts to various museums to exhibit prior to Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler’s visit to Spain. The long history of Islamic occupation was strategically dismissed.

There were some fascinating archeological finds, many of which eventually came to the museum from a private collection of the Marquis and Marchioness of Casa-Loring.

And a bust of José Freüller y Alcalá-Galiano, Marquis of La Paniego. There’s that name again though I think a different guy..

After all the art and archeology, we repaired for libations to another historical site, the 50 year old, Bodega Bar el Pimpi, visited by Picasso and other famous folks. In the heart of the old town across from the Roman Amphitheatre, it’s a touristy place but fun with many interconnected spaces dripping with vines and flowering plants, wine and sherry barrels, old flamenco posters and a bull’s head.

We rounded out the day on the roof terrace of Steve and Sally’s hotel, enjoying the night-time views over the city and the Med and Sally and I getting silly after watching the incessant posing for photos of one young beautiful thing. Old people having fun!