Before his name became synonymous with the modernist revolution, before “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and the reinvention of the language of painting, there was a child who grew up in the light of Andalusia. Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga on 25 October 1881, in the Plaza de la Merced. The first ten years of his life were spent in a Mediterranean city where nature and his innate curiosity laid the foundations for what was to become a radical innovation in art – Cubism. Thus, Málaga remains on the world’s cultural map as one of the sources of Picasso’s imagination.

His first art teacher was none other than his father, José Ruiz Blasco, a painter, drawing teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Málaga and curator of the municipal museum. He gave his son his first lessons in drawing and painting and passed on to him, amongst other things, a fascination with pigeons, as well as with the world of bullfighting and Spanish traditions. His early works, including “View of the Port of Málaga” (1888), capture something of the city’s intimate landscape: the sea, the harbour, the open spaces and that honey-coloured light so characteristic of the south.

Leaving Málaga did not mean a permanent break with the city. Picasso’s family moved to La Coruña in 1891, when he was just ten years old. He was to return to the city on several summer visits — in 1895, 1896, 1897 and 1899 — and during his final stay, between late 1900 and early 1901, his close friend Carlos Casagemas was by his side. The Casa Natal Museum in Málaga details these sporadic returns as invisible yet recognisable traces in his themes and sensibility: bulls, doves, water, the Mediterranean and the Spanish traditions specific to the region.

Viewed today through the lens of his childhood spent in southern Spain, Picasso’s story takes on a distinctive nuance. Málaga should not be seen as a direct cause of his artistic revolution, but rather as a formative landscape, the place where his eye was shaped before his artistic maturity began to deconstruct reality. Perhaps this is one of Andalusia’s greatest attractions for the contemporary collector. The very same coastal region that today brings together art, architecture, design and a cosmopolitan lifestyle was, for Picasso, the first untamed territory of his gaze.