José Lebrero

Director of the Picasso Museum, Malaga

Photo: © Museo Picasso Málaga

"Picasso had wanted, during his life-time, to open a museum in Malaga to display some of his works in the town in which he was born in 1881. A project in the 1950s nearly saw the light of day, but eventually failed and it was not until 2003 when Christine, the wife of Paul (Picasso's eldest son) and her son Bernard (Picasso's grandson) with the Junta de Andalucía (Andalusian Government) set up a joint venture to allow their collection to be displayed that the museum opened," explains José Lebrero, who became director of the museum six years later.

The Malaga Picasso Museum is governed by the Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga. Legado Paul, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. It holds full legal rights and is the beneficiary title of the collection and the museum as well as being the owner of the beautiful 16th century Palacio de Buenavista, the institution’s headquarters, which belonged formerly to the Dukes of Granada.

Photo: Bleday Rosa © Museo Picasso Málaga

There are 233 works in the MPM collection; 43 further works by Pablo Picasso are on temporary loan. The collection covers Picasso’s revolutionary innovations, and includes examples of his wide range of styles, materials and techniques. It includes his earliest academic studies, his personal take on the classics, the overlapping perspectives of Cubism, his experiments in ceramics, his re-workings of the Old Masters and his late paintings in the 1970s.

"Almost everything in the museum has come directly from Picasso, so the chances are that you won't have seen it before. Furthermore, the works span almost his entire life from when he was 14 years old until he was 90", says Lebrero.

In 2014, a whopping 400,000 people visited the museum: "temporary exhibitions are very important to us: the objective is to relate Picasso to other great artists, or to make exhibitions thematic, from a historical or cultural point of view.”

Photo: © Museo Picasso Málaga

Lebrero's objective is to preserve the mission of the museum: "we need to promote Picasso with vigour, but we need to avoid the vulgarisation of his name and to maintain the quality associated with it. Also, I want the public to leave with a sense of satisfaction. It's important to make Picasso more understandable but we need to avoid overkilling by helping people to understand, but making sure that people must understand him for themselves."

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José Lebrero was artistic director of the Picasso Museum, Málaga, from 2009 to 2023.