Mountains of Málaga

The Ruiz Picasso family returned to Málaga on holidays in the summers of 1896 and 1897. Their stay in 1896 at the Llanes farm/oilpress that Picasso’s godparents, the Blasco Alarcón family, had on the outskirts of the city provided the young artist with the opportunity to carry out an exhaustive study of the region’s mountains, as demonstrated in this canvas, the most important from that period and for which Picasso conducted three preparatory studies: an oil painting and two panel paintings that are also preserved in the Museum. The loaded and thick brushstrokes he applies to the piece, together with the absence of lines―replaced by the combination of vividly coloured brushstrokes―and with intense luminosity, mark his first steps in distancing himself from academic doctrines, while also representing a serious attempt to assert his personality. It should be noted that by that time Picasso had already been impacted by the lighting and the chromatism present in the pleinairist works by the so-called “Colla del Safrà”, a group of young Catalan artists that included Isidre Nonell, Joaquim Mir, Ricard Canals, Ramon Pichot, Adrià Gual and Juli Vallmitjana. They dropped out of the School of Fine Arts exactly the same year that Picasso enrolled in it, fed up with the stagnation of the academic postulations they were being taught and determined to paint in the open air. Some of these young artists participated in the Exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries of 1896, where Picasso saw their work, seeing as he also presented his oil painting “Primera Comunión” [First Communion] there (MPB 110.001).