Two high-profile museums are being unveiled within days of each other this week in Málaga. The southern Spanish port city is due to open the Centre Pompidou Málaga on 28 March, having inaugurated the State Russian Museum on Wednesday, 25 March, making the city the first to host foreign outposts of the Paris and St Petersburg institutions.
The mayor, Francisco de la Torre, wants to “make the city the most dynamic destination in Spain”. Since becoming Málaga’s mayor in 2000, he has made culture a key part of the regeneration of the city. Málaga boasts several art institutions, among them a museum in Picasso’s birthplace, the Casa Natal, the Museo Picasso Málaga, which opened in 2003, the Centre for Contemporary Art (CAC Málaga) and the Carmen Thyssen Museum, which opened in 2011. The city has invested €6.7m in preparing “El Cubo”, a converted space on the waterfront, to house the Pompidou’s collection, and another €580,000 to refurbish La Tabacalera, an old tobacco factory, for loans from the St Petersburg collection. The last week in March was the only available time to celebrate official state acts between two local elections, a spokeswoman for the city confirmed, insisting that both institutions would be ready in time.
De la Torre, who is up for re-election during May’s municipal elections, has been criticised for pushing the museums to open this month. “The mayor is running out of time and will pay anything for the inauguration photo,” a spokeswoman for the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) told the newspaper El País when the city announced that the budget for El Cubo had been increased. The mayor responded to his critics by insisting that there is “no project like it”. The Centre Pompidou Málaga will be the first to “pop up” outside France, as part of the outgoing Pompidou president Alain Seban’s ambitious plans to establish temporary venues far beyond Paris. For Seban, Málaga represents a “laboratory” to experiment in and “a window into a concept envisioned to develop globally”. It is unclear whether his successor will pursue the same policy as energetically as Seban.
The Spanish city and the Pompidou have agreed to a renewable five-year collaboration where temporary exhibitions could travel from Paris to Málaga in addition to the permanent collection. Around 100 works from the Pompidou’s 20th and 21st century collection will be installed in the 2,000 sq. m space for two years, while a smaller area will be used for temporary exhibitions. Portraiture and the influence of Picasso will be among the subjects explored in the permanent display, organised by the Pompidou’s deputy director Brigitte Leal. Highlights will include works by Giacometti, Magritte, Calder and Brancusi, and contemporary works by Sophie Calle, Bruce Nauman and Orlan. The city of Málaga has commissioned Daniel Buren to create a large-scale installation within El Cubo.
The Málaga outpost of the State Russian Museum opens with a year-long display, “Russian Art of the 15th-20th centuries”, featuring Medieval icons and works by Repin, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Chagall, Rodchenko and Malevich. The first temporary exhibition will be dedicated to the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and the avant-garde artists who collaborated with the Ballets Russes. The Pompidou in Málaga aims to generate €18.5m a year and attract around 250,000 visitors, says a report by the Auren consultancy. “The cultural mediation between art and the public will give impetus to the formation of the tourism sector”, De la Torre said in a press release, while also pointing out that the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology will open before the end of the year. The museums’ management is being centralised in a public agency led by José Maria Luna, which also manages Picasso’s Casa Natal. The city has approved an annual budget of almost €10m for all three institutions, and the public agency will oversee everything from museum security to marketing and education. The city of Málaga will pay the Paris institution €1m a year for the brand and the use of the collection, El País reported. The city, however, is not the sole backer of these projects. The mayor announced in February that he had secured nearly €3m for the Centre Pompidou Málaga from six private sponsors, including €1.25m from the savings bank Unicaja.