An unlikely candidate for city of culture 2016, Malaga is celebrating its links with Picasso and with an Irish painter, writes Aidan Dunne
On the face of it the decision of the City of Malaga to honour Irish painter George Campbell by naming a major junction in his honour is a surprising one. It is true that Campbell, who died in 1979, had forged close links with the city. Over a period of many years, he and his wife Madge spent a great deal of time based in Pedregaleto, a former fishing village that had been absorbed by the eastward spread of the city, and he was enamoured of Spanish culture. He loved the traditions, the music, the lifestyle and the people. All were significant influences in his painting. Still, two other factors contributed significantly to the commemoration.
One is the role of the erstwhile director of the Cervantes Institute in Dublin, Antonio Sierra. Sierra, who spent 30 years in Ireland, became an integral part of the Irish cultural scene. Three years ago he retired to Malaga, and he has been a tireless advocate of the plan to honour Campbell. He is currently working to establish an Irish Cultural Association of Malaga. Apart from Sierra's advocacy, the gesture can be seen against the background of a huge cultural overhaul of the city.
Local politicians and administrators, as well as people employed in the cultural sector there, sport lapel pins that read "Malaga 2016": the city is one of five in contention to be European capital of culture in the year 2016. Their campaign is already well under way and they take the challenge very seriously. Winning the contest, they feel, offers them a chance to highlight the cultural gains Malaga has made and to consolidate its newly emergent identity.
The city, which occupies a relatively restricted corridor between mountains and sea, is the capital of the Costa del Sol. Millions of visitors, including many thousands of Irish visitors, arrive at its airport each year and fan out along the coast.
But the vast majority head west, to a string of popular tourist destinations, never venturing into Malaga itself. Not that long ago, Malaga did not have a great reputation. Its fabric was neglected, the unemployment rate was high, and it wasn't a nice, or a particularly safe place to be. Nor is this the view of jaundiced outsiders. Local people are surprisingly candid in detailing its shortcomings in the past.
Things have changed considerably over the last 10 years. The town centre has been transformed through an ambitious programme of regeneration, with pedestrianised shopping streets and a revitalised coastal park. There are plans for a number of new seafront hotels and, as with other coastal cities, the docklands are in the process of redevelopment. But there is also a profound realisation that prosperity comes at the cost of cultural identity. To this end, the city is trying not only to preserve and enhance its historical character, but to develop its cultural profile. As one local politician put it: "We want to make Malaga an important cultural destination." Emphasising its links with "Jorge" Campbell is one small but significant aspect of that process.
In the context of modern art, Malaga's main claim to fame is as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso, and the opening of the Museo Picasso Malaga in 2003 was an enormous achievement. Following prolonged negotiations with the artist's daughter-in-law and grandson, Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the museum boasts a formidable collection of works encompassing every phase of his prolific career. Together with various loans, this means that there is a constantly rotating series of exhibitions on view. Wisely, however, the museum also incorporates two storeys of very substantial temporary exhibition galleries. At the moment (until June 11th) these are occupied by The Picassos from Antibes, drawn from the Musée Picasso in Antibes, which is currently closed for refurbishment.
The Malaga Museum is beautifully done. The temporary exhibition spaces are tactfully integrated into a substantially revamped 16th-century building, the Buenavista Palace, which houses the permanent collection. Preparatory work on the site revealed significant remnants of Malaga's Phoenician beginnings, and these are preserved and open to visitors in the basement of the palace. It's a short stroll to the Picasso Foundation in the apartment building where the artist was born and spent his first years, in the Plaza de la Merced.
A more recent and equally ambitious initiative is the establishment of a contemporary art museum, CAC Malaga (Centre de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga), in a central location. As is often the case, the museum occupies a revamped premises, the former wholesale fish market designed in 1938 by Luis Gutierrez Soto. A remarkable, wedge-shaped structure, it is beautiful modernist building, surprisingly well adapted to the display of contemporary art. One of the notable features of the architecture is that, because you enter at the apex of the wedge, the building seems to continually expand before you as you make your way through the exhibition spaces.
While it is a municipal institution, the museum already boasts a substantial permanent collection. Apart from such leading Spanish artists as Juan Munoz, Miquel Barcelo and Juan Usle, there is an impressive international line-up, including Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, Edward Ruscha, Louise Bourgeois and Thomas Ruff. The title piece in the current temporary exhibition, Anish Kapoor's My Red Homeland, is a huge kinetic installation and provides some idea of the museum's level of ambition.
While the city's remaining cultural features are for the most part predictable - an impressive cathedral, a bullring, a municipal museum - some are exceptional. The linked Moorish strongholds of the Gibralfaro castle and the Alcazaba (adjacent to a Roman amphitheatre in the process of refurbishment), if not quite in the same league as the Moorish architecture in Cordoba and Granada, are significant. Malaga, with its bougainvillaea and palm trees, its aromatic orange blossom, has a luxuriant, tropical feel to it. And in its botanic gardens, La Concepcion, a few kilometres north, it has a wonderful resource. Privately developed in the 19th century, the gardens boast a stunning collection of tropical and sub-tropical trees and were acquired by the city in 1990. They amount to an exceptional cultural asset.
Malaga is not unique among contemporary European cities in linking a programme of urban regeneration to cultural development and, ultimately, cultural tourism. But it is pursuing this dual path with exceptional focus and ambition. Its investment in culture is, in a sense, a gamble. Yet it's a necessary gamble, particularly if it is to move beyond the culturally impoverished, lowest-common-denominator model that has defined the tourist industry on the Costa del Sol for decades.