Mountains of Málaga

Mountains of Málaga is an oil on canvas that Pablo Picasso painted in 1896, during a summer spent at a country estate in Llanes, near Málaga, owned by the family of the artist's godparents, the Blasco Alarcón. The stay gave the young painter the chance to study the mountains of Málaga and their surroundings in detail. The summers of 1896 and 1897 mark a period in which landscape gained considerable weight in his output, and this canvas is the most important work of that phase.

The painting did not appear out of nothing. Several preparatory studies came before it, including another oil and two small panels, and the museum holds the preparatory study along with other landscapes of Málaga from the same years. According to Manuel Blasco Alarcón, whose book Picasso insólito is cited for this point, the site shown would correspond to the foothills of the so-called Cueva de la Negra in Llanes.

Technically, the most striking feature is the way the paint is applied. Picasso works with a thick, heavy brushstroke and largely abandons linear drawing, replacing it with patches of vivid colour and an intense luminosity. This approach marks a first break with the academic training he had received. The slanting brushstrokes and the careful use of ochre tones convey the dryness of the stretch of countryside, which seems almost tangible across the surface.

The work is held by the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, where it entered the collection in 1970 as a gift from the artist himself, and it is displayed in room 2 of the permanent collection. For anyone interested in the young Picasso's development, it is an early record of the search that would eventually lead him away from traditional painting.

Painter

Pablo Picasso

Date

1896

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

60 × 82 cm

Museum

Museu Picasso

Genre

landscape painting

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