El tiempo histórico de Pablo Picasso en la Riviera

A lo largo de 30 años, Pablo Picasso abrió un camino espectacular por la Riviera. Era brillante, cruel y cautivador. Cuando murió en 1973 en su villa de Mougins, cinco millas tierra adentro desde cannes, Picasso had lived in the French Riviera and Provence for nearly three decades after relocating semi-permanently from Paris, where he moved from his native Spain in 1904.

Él Costa Azul, with its mimosa blossoms, olive groves and sun-drenched hills, was closer geographically and perhaps spiritually to his mother country, from which he had been in exile after his stance against the fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Picasso fell under the southern spell of Provence and the French Riviera on his first visit to Avignon in 1912 (his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907, refers to a street with the same name in Barcelona), and he visited frequently during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1945, already in his sixties, with Paris liberated but hardly recovered from the war, he began to voyage there more regularly.

Siempre inquieto, pasó por Menerbes, donde había comprado una casa para su ex amante Dora Maar, y por Golfe-Juan, donde se alojó en la villa de un amigo. Pasó un tiempo en Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Vallauris y Antibes, los dos últimos tienen museos dedicados a Picasso.

Musée Picasso en Antibes

Él Musée Picasso en Antibes sits ablaze in white-hot sunlight on the edge of the Mediterranean, housed in a 17th-century chateau with ramparts that plunge right into the rocks below. The time he spent there in the autumn of 1946 represents a tiny but pivotal sliver in the artist’s life. As is frequently the case with Picasso, it was buoyed by energy from a new muse and love, the painter Françoise Gilot, whom he had met three years earlier in occupied Paris.

En sus memorias de 1964 la vida con picasso, Gilot writes of her first visit to what was then known as Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes: “You’re going to swear here that you love me forever,” she recalls him saying, and she duly obeyed, though Gilot would leave him in 1953. But her presence in Antibes was vital to the sense of regeneration as a man and as an artist that Picasso felt during his stay. While there, she learned she was pregnant, and her son, Claude, was born the following May.

The chateau was at the time a struggling museum of Napoleon-era collectibles, and Picasso had coincidentally tried to buy the building two decades earlier. In 1946, with plenty of empty space to fill, the curator agreed to let Picasso use the second floor as his atelier.

Still as prolific as he had been in his youth, Picasso began painting with astonishing vigor and excitement, on any of the scarce materials available in postwar Antibes: plywood, fiber cement panels, boat paint and Ripolin, which was cheap, and ready-mixed.

When he left the chateau in late November (when its name was officially changed to the Musee Picasso), he donated 23 paintings and 44 drawings from his stay there and later, an extraordinary collection of unique ceramics he made in nearby Vallauris, in which Franoise’ s curvaceous body is often transformed into pots that evoke an ancient heritage.

The museum, filled with the work Picasso made there and soon after, represents an almost perfect time capsule. The Antibes period shows a palpable sense of renewal, marked by a profound visual response to the light, atmosphere and rituals of the Mediterranean setting (sea urchins, fish, fisherman); it’s also bursting with ardor for Françoise, the woman with whom he would share the next years.

It is most masterfully embodied in Joie de Vivre (1946), the largest painting in the collection. “This conveys Picasso’s joy after World War II at being on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the company of Françoise Gilot,” says Marilyn McCully, leading Picasso specialist who has most recently written about his visits to the Cote d’Azur in the 1920s and 1930s. “The mixture of her presence –the dancing nymph in the center– and creatures drawn from mythology who dance around her in the composition clearly demonstrates how Picasso brought personal and ancient associations together in his work.”

Outside on the Museum’s terrace, the lapis watery backdrop makes an ideal setting for the sculptures of Germaine Richier, which evoke both the antiquity associated with the Mediterranean region and the modern that Picasso so boldly represents indoors. Given his unfortunate reputation with women, chronicled so forcefully by Gilot herself, it’s a bit of karmic irony to have these bronzes here, standing tall above the water like sentries. Even more delicious to have them immortalized by Graham Greene, who lived in Antibes for 25 years — the confluence of art, literature and history that is a matter of course on the Cote d’Azur.

“Ráfagas de lluvia soplaron a lo largo de las murallas, y las estatuas demacradas en la terraza del Chateau Grimaldi estaban empapadas”, escribe en las primeras líneas de Tristeza en tres partes, “and there was a sound absent during the flat blue days of summer, the continual rustle below the ramparts of the small surf.”

Germaine Richier, born in 1902, came of age in the arts at a time when they were affected, scarred and molded by the devastation of two world wars. She was also of a generation where the artistic talents of women such as Camille Claudel were largely ignored and sculpture still presented itself mostly in figures that were heroic, macho renderings of the permanence of man.

“Somos de la misma familia”, habría dicho Picasso a Richier en uno de los Salons de Mai de París, donde se mostró por primera vez la obra de la escultora en 1947.

The two artists met again in Antibes, at the museum which did not yet bear his name, but in which Picasso’s work in Antibes had been shown to the public since 1947. Richier responded enthusiastically when she was offered to exhibit her sculptures in the summer of 1959 – one of the factors undoubtedly was that the Arles-born artist was happy to be welcomed by the Malaga-born painter.

She died in 1959 while setting up an exhibition at the Musee Picasso; the pieces here are both the largest in scale and biggest grouping of her work. They embody a time where a heroic self-perception of man (and woman) has been marred and questioned by the horrible deeds perpetrated in World War II. They portray Mankind as a reduced vulnerable hybrid shell-here, in front of a deep blue Mediterranean background.

Nothing is more French: existential questioning, violent history, against a beautiful cultivated setting, on the ramparts of a onetime fortress, outside of a former atelier where love, life and creation took hold.

La Villa de Picasso en Cannes: Villa California

Villa La Californie se construyó en Cannes en 1920. Pablo Picasso compró Villa La Californie en 1955 y vivió allí con su última esposa y musa,Jacqueline Roque until 1961, when they abandoned it because another building was built that blocked his sea view. It was here that the Spanish artist created his masterpiece ‘The Bay of Cannes’.

His granddaughter, Marina Picasso, inherited the house at age 22. Since Ms Picasso inherited the villa, she has renovated it in 1987, renaming it the ‘Pavillon de Flore’. It has since acted as a museum and gallery open to the public. In 2015 she put the house up for sale, stating to the press that it came with less than fond memories of an “indifferent” grandfather.

El padre de Marina Picasso era el hijo de Picasso con su primera esposa, Olga Khokhlova, una bailarina ruso-ucraniana. Fue humillado al ser obligado a trabajar como chofer del artista. Marina Picasso recuerda que su empobrecido padre, Paulo, la llevó a las puertas de la gran casa de tres pisos, La Californie, para pedir limosna a un Picasso indiferente.

“No es una casa en la que tenga muchos buenos recuerdos”, dijo. “Vi muy poco a mi abuelo allí. En retrospectiva, entiendo que pudo haber sido cautivado por la pintura y nada más era más importante para él. Excepto cuando eres un niño, no lo experimentas así”. Quince años de terapia ayudaron a Marina Picasso a aceptar los amargos recuerdos. Expresó su ira en un libro de memorias de 2001, "Picasso, mi abuelo".

The sale “will be a way for me to turn the page on a rather painful story,” she told the newspaper Nice-Matin. She has reportedly received an offer of nearly £110 million for the villa, along with an extensive collection of his works.

Picasso’s Villa in Mougins: Notre-Dame-de-Vie

Después de Villa La Californie, Pablo Picasso y su esposa Jacqueline compraron otra villa, esta vez en Mougins, where Picasso lived for 12 years, until his death in 1973 at age 91. During that time, the painter, more closed in on himself, worked tirelessly, turning the house of Notre-Dame-de-Vie into a gigantic artistic workshop.

The long saga of the 15-bedroom property and three-hectare estate started long before the Spanish painter bought it, when for decades it belonged to the Anglo-Irish Guinness brewing family. Benjamin Seymour Guinness first spotted the spectacular Mas de Notre Dame de Vie property in the 1925.

Situado en Mougins – un viaje en automóvil de 15 minutos hacia el interior de cannes on the French Riviera – the property was then a “mas” (a traditional farmhouse) but Guinness, a banker and philanthropist descended from the banking arm of the Guinness family, and his artist wife Bridget converted it into a luxurious villa.

El clima cálido durante todo el año y la hermosa luz de los alrededores pronto convirtieron a Mougins en un destino deseable para artistas tanto aficionados como profesionales. Ilustres celebridades eran visitantes frecuentes, entre ellos Winston Churchill, a quien le gustaba pintar en los terrenos de la extensa villa. Churchill era un buen amigo de Benjamin y Bridget y se convirtió en un visitante habitual de su casa Mougins, pasando muchos días y noches de verano sentado en su jardín pintando.

Un artista de una categoría completamente diferente, Pablo Picasso, también era amigo de los Guinness y, como Churchill, se convirtió en un visitante habitual de su casa. Picasso quedó tan prendado de Mas de Notre Dame de Vie que finalmente compró la casa al hijo de Benjamin y Bridget, Loel.

La propiedad data del siglo XVIII y tiene amplias vistas sobre el macizo de Estérel y la Bahía de Cannes. Se compone de varias viviendas y durante la remodelación más reciente se amplió con una serie de adiciones sofisticadas, como nuevas ventanas de vidrio, una casa de la piscina, piscina, ascensor, aire acondicionado, spa, garajes, casa para los cuidadores y varios otros anexos hasta financiera Dificultades y conflictos maritales de la propietaria frenaron la obra que quedó inconclusa.

After the master’s death at this villa in 1973, his widow Jacqueline Roque withheld inheritance and feuded with Picasso’s children. A spiteful woman, Roque also barred the grandchildren that were a result of Picasso’s first marriage, Marina Picasso and her brother Pablito, from the artist’s funeral. Pablito Picasso committed suicide a few days later. Jacqueline lived in the villa until 1986, when she also committed suicide (by shooting herself) there.

It was Jacqueline’s daughter from a previous marriage, Catherine Hutin-Blay, who inherited the estate. It stayed abandoned for almost 30 years, and she sold it in 2007 to the Dutch entrepreneur for €12 million. He had fallen in love with the house, pledged €10 million worth of extensive remodeling and renamed it “Cavern of the Minotaur” in honor of Picasso’s obsession with the mythical beast.

El único espacio original de la época picassiana es el estudio de la casa principal que el mítico artista había creado abriendo varios espacios y en el que aún quedan restos de pintura pero ninguna de sus obras.

¿Quieren más? Aquí está un lista de villas famosas, las celebridades que los poseían y las locuras que sucedieron allí.