Le temps passé de Pablo Picasso sur la Riviera

En 30 ans, Pablo Picasso s'est frayé un chemin spectaculaire à travers la Riviera. Il était brillant, cruel et captivant. Au moment où il mourut en 1973 dans sa villa de Mougins, à cinq milles à l'intérieur des terres 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.

La Côte d'Azur, 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.

Toujours agité, il passe par Ménerbes, où il avait acheté une maison pour son ancienne amante Dora Maar, et Golfe-Juan, où il couche dans la villa d'un ami. Il a passé du temps à Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Vallauris, et Antibes, dont les deux derniers ont des musées dédiés à Picasso.

Musée Picasso à Antibes

La Musée Picasso à 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.

Dans ses mémoires de 1964 La vie avec 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.

"Des rafales de pluie soufflaient le long des remparts, et les statues émaciées sur la terrasse du Château Grimaldi dégoulinaient d'humidité", écrit-il dans les premières lignes de Chagrin en trois parties, “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.

"Nous sommes de la même famille", aurait dit Picasso à Richier à l'un des Salons de Mai à Paris, où l'œuvre de la sculptrice a été montrée pour la première fois 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 à Cannes : Villa California

La Villa La Californie a été construite à Cannes en 1920. Pablo Picasso a acheté la Villa La Californie en 1955 et y a vécu avec sa dernière épouse et muse,Jacqueline Roqué 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.

Le père de Marina Picasso était le fils de Picasso par sa première femme, Olga Khokhlova, une ballerine russo-ukrainienne. Il a été humilié d'être contraint de travailler comme chauffeur de l'artiste. Marina Picasso se souvient avoir été emmenée aux portes de la grande maison à trois étages, La Californie, par son père appauvri, Paulo, pour mendier des aumônes à un Picasso indifférent.

"Ce n'est pas une maison où j'ai beaucoup de bons souvenirs", a-t-elle déclaré. « J'y ai très peu vu mon grand-père. Avec le recul, je comprends qu'il était peut-être captivé par la peinture et que rien d'autre n'était plus important pour lui. Sauf quand tu es enfant, tu ne le vis pas comme ça. Quinze ans de thérapie ont aidé Marina Picasso à accepter les souvenirs amers. Elle a exprimé sa colère dans un mémoire de 2001, "Picasso, mon grand-père".

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

Après la Villa La Californie, Pablo Picasso et sa femme Jacqueline achètent une autre villa, cette fois à 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.

Situé dans Mougins – un trajet en voiture de 15 minutes à l'intérieur des terres 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.

Le climat chaud toute l'année et la magnifique lumière des environs ont rapidement fait de Mougins une destination prisée des artistes amateurs et professionnels. Des célébrités illustres étaient des visiteurs fréquents, parmi lesquels Winston Churchill, qui aimait peindre sur le terrain de la villa tentaculaire. Churchill était un bon ami de Benjamin et Bridget et est devenu un visiteur régulier de leur maison de Mougins, passant de nombreux étés jour et nuit assis dans leur jardin à peindre.

Un artiste d'une tout autre catégorie, Pablo Picasso, était également un ami des Guinness et, comme Churchill, est devenu un visiteur régulier de leur maison. Picasso a été tellement séduit par le Mas de Notre Dame de Vie qu'il a finalement acheté la maison au fils de Benjamin et Bridget, Loel.

La propriété date du 18ème siècle et bénéficie d'une vue dégagée sur le massif de l'Estérel et la Baie de Cannes. Il est composé de divers logements et lors de la rénovation la plus récente a été agrandi avec un certain nombre d'ajouts sophistiqués tels que de nouvelles baies vitrées, un pool house, une piscine, un ascenseur, la climatisation, un spa, des garages, une maison de gardiens et diverses autres annexes jusqu'au financement les difficultés et les conflits conjugaux du propriétaire ont stoppé les travaux restés inachevés.

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.

Le seul espace original de la période Picasso est l'atelier de la maison principale que l'artiste légendaire avait créé en ouvrant plusieurs espaces et qui porte encore des traces de peinture mais aucune de ses œuvres.

Vouloir plus? Voici un liste des villas célèbres, les célébrités qui les possédaient et les choses folles qui s'y sont passées.