I moved back here a month ago and somehow I’m still not done unpacking. I keep finding books that I shoved into random boxes in an effort to evenly distribute the weight of all my belongings. In the past I’ve been known to shove 70 pounds of books into one or two boxes that no one can actually move, so this time I tried to be more efficient.

Yesterday, in a box that is still currently sitting in my parents’ garage, I found Francoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso – the last book I purchased from my favorite little bookstore in Chicago. Francoise was one of Picasso’s many muses and an artist herself, and this is a book I’ve been meaning to read ever since I first saw it in the gift shop at the Picasso museum in Malaga, Spain two Januarys ago. Still tucked inside the front cover of that book is a postcard I purchased from that museum — one that I meant to send but must have forgotten about.

Malaga’s Picasso museum is one of my favorites and I still often think about it, although I’ve never written about it here. Anyone who’s been reading my blog for a while (or knows me in real life) is aware that art is one of my passions, and it’s one of those things that I won’t stop talking about if you even so much as bring it up for a second. We all have that with something, and I think we all realize that it can be annoying. I’ve tried not to do too many art museum posts here on the blog because I know it isn’t everyone’s thing, and I know that there’s only so much you can say about art museums in a blog post without becoming repetitive.

It’s easy to be brief about the one in Malaga because there was really only one thing I loved about it: the rooms are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. The themes are based off Picasso’s philosophies throughout his life, each one depicted by a single quote on the wall as you enter each room. Most of the quotes are brief excerpts from things he wrote — essays or notes — but a few of them come from interviews. As a result, each room contains paintings, drawings, or sculptures from any given era of Picasso’s career — and his career was long – so the artwork in one room can span anywhere from twenty to seventy years.

I have several of these quotes written down on my museum gift shop receipt and the little brochure they give you at the entrance. I am such a Picasso fangirl that it’s almost embarrassing. I’ll probably write a whole blog post about him at some point in the near future, so brace yourselves for that. In the meantime, here are a few of the quotes I loved so much that I stood in the middle of an impatient, irritated crowd as I wrote them on the back of a receipt and blocked everyone else’s view for a whole five minutes:

“A good painting — any painting! — ought to bristle with razor blades.”

“Jacqueline Seated”

“When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”

“They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”

“Academic training in beauty is a sham. [...] Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.”

The reason that I remember this museum so often and so fondly is simply because of the way it was arranged. It’s a strange sort of time warp to think of any given thing in your life progressing in a non-chronological way — to think of the things you’ve written or painted, the major events you remember the most, and the particular choices you’ve made as things that have all pertained to certain themes rather than as things that have happened one after the other, in this year or that month. It’s fascinating to me that a man who lived for 91 years and created art for most of them could have a painting that he produced when he was 25 correlate almost perfectly with a sculpture he created when he was 75.

I will be turning 25 this June, and I wonder if the things I’ll be writing when I’m 75 (using whatever futuristic galactic contraption has replaced the computer by then) will still relate to the things I’m writing now. I wonder which themes will carry over, or which quotes I’ll still want to write on the walls.

In the meantime, I should probably stop looking up Picasso quotes to put on Pinterest and actually finish unpacking the boxes that are still sitting in my parents’ garage.

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