Showcasing more than 200 of Pablo Picasso's works permanently housed at the recently opened Museo Picasso, Malaga, this comprehensive catalogue features many of the artist's most personal achievements. From his early works of 1917, through to those created before his death in 1973, it features the many media in which he worked, from sculpture, ceramic and prints to paintings and drawings. The works are those that Picasso gave to his family, or had in his possession, and which have been donated or permanently loaned from the private collections of the artist's daughter-in-law, Christine Ruiz-Picasso, and his grandson, Bernard, to the Museo Picasso, honouring Picasso's wish that his work would one day be returned to the city of his birth. Highly biographical, the catalogue features the women and children in his life: from the grave, traditional-style portraits of his sister, such as Little Girl and her Doll (1896-1897), and of his first wife, Olga, with their son, Paulo, in Mother and Child (1921-1922).
Through the Cubist and Cubist-Surrealist renderings of his later loves in Portrait of a Woman with a Green-Collar Dress (1938) and Woman with Arms Crossed Behind her Head (1939), it is possible to see how the shifts in his artistic style, from Classical to Cubism, Realism and Mannerism seem to mirror the significant changes in his life. The catalogue includes an informative essay by Francisco Calvo Serraller, examining the reasons for Picasso's abandonment of Spain, and the significance his return had to the Spanish School, who saw Picasso as the last modern link in the historic tradition whose greatest highlights were El Greco, Velazquez and Goya.