Pablo Picasso’s Storied Time on the Riviera

Over 30 years, Pablo Picasso cut a spectacular path through the Riviera. He was brilliant, cruel, and captivating. By the time he died in 1973 at his villa in Mougins, cinque miglia nell'entroterra da 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.

IL Cote 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.

Always restless, he passed through Menerbes, where he had bought a home for his former lover Dora Maar, and Golfe-Juan, where he bunked at a friend’s villa. He spent time in Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Vallauris, and Antibes, the latter two of which have dedicated Picasso museums.

Musee Picasso in Antibes

IL Musee Picasso in 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.

In her 1964 memoir Life with 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.

“Raffiche di pioggia soffiavano lungo i bastioni, e le statue emaciate sulla terrazza del castello Grimaldi grondavano di umidità”, scrive nelle prime righe di Il dispiacere in tre parti, “and there was a sound absent during the flat blue days of summer, the continual rustle below the ramparts of the small surf.”

Germain 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.

"Siamo della stessa famiglia", avrebbe detto Picasso a Richier in uno dei Salons de Mai di Parigi, dove il lavoro della scultrice fu esposto per la prima volta nel 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.

Villa di Picasso a Cannes: Villa California

Villa La Californie fu costruita a Cannes nel 1920. Pablo Picasso acquistò Villa La Californie nel 1955 e vi visse con la sua ultima moglie e musa ispiratrice.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.

Marina Picasso’s father was Picasso’s son by his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian-Ukrainian ballerina. He was humiliated by being forced to work as the artist’s chauffeur. Marina Picasso remembers being taken to the gates of the grand three-story house, La Californie, by her impoverished father, Paulo, to beg for handouts from an indifferent Picasso.

“It’s not a house where I have a lot of good memories,” she said. “I saw very little of my grandfather there. With hindsight, I understand that he may have been captivated by painting and nothing else was more important to him. Except when you’re a child, you don’t experience it like that.” Fifteen years of therapy helped Marina Picasso come to terms with the bitter memories. She vented her anger in a 2001 memoir, “Picasso, My Grandfather.”

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

Dopo Villa La Californie, Pablo Picasso e sua moglie Jacqueline acquistarono un'altra villa, questa volta a 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.

La lunga saga della proprietà con 15 camere da letto e della tenuta di tre ettari è iniziata molto prima che il pittore spagnolo la acquistasse, quando per decenni apparteneva alla famiglia anglo-irlandese di produttori di birra Guinness. Benjamin Seymour Guinness vide per la prima volta la spettacolare proprietà Mas de Notre Dame de Vie nel 1925.

Situato a Mougins – a 15 minuti di macchina nell’entroterra Cannes sulla Costa Azzurra – la proprietà era allora un “mas” (una fattoria tradizionale) ma Guinness, banchiere e filantropo discendente dal ramo bancario della famiglia Guinness, e la moglie artista Bridget la trasformarono in una lussuosa villa.

Il clima caldo tutto l'anno e la splendida luce dell'area circostante resero presto Mougins una destinazione desiderabile per artisti sia dilettanti che professionisti. Celebrità illustri erano frequenti visitatori, tra cui Winston Churchill, a cui piaceva dipingere sul terreno dell'ampia villa. Churchill era un buon amico di Benjamin e Bridget e divenne un visitatore abituale della loro casa a Mougins, trascorrendo molti giorni e notti d'estate seduto nel loro giardino a dipingere.

Un artista di tutt'altra categoria, Pablo Picasso, fu anche lui amico dei Guinness e, come Churchill, divenne un visitatore abituale della loro casa. Picasso fu così preso da Mas de Notre Dame de Vie che alla fine acquistò la casa da Loel, figlio di Benjamin e Bridget.

La proprietà risale al XVIII secolo e gode di un'ampia vista sul massiccio dell'Estérel e sulla baia di Cannes. È composto da varie abitazioni e durante l'ultima ristrutturazione è stato ampliato con una serie di sofisticate aggiunte come nuove vetrate, una pool house, piscina, ascensore, aria condizionata, spa, garage, casa per i custodi e vari altri annessi fino al finanziamento difficoltà e contrasti coniugali del titolare bloccarono l'opera rimasta incompiuta.

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.

Fu la figlia di Jacqueline da un precedente matrimonio, Catherine Hutin-Blay, ad ereditare la tenuta. Rimase abbandonato per quasi 30 anni e lei lo vendette nel 2007 all'imprenditore olandese per 12 milioni di euro. Si era innamorato della casa, aveva promesso 10 milioni di euro per un'ampia ristrutturazione e l'aveva ribattezzata “Caverna del Minotauro” in onore dell'ossessione di Picasso per la mitica bestia.

L'unico spazio originale del periodo Picasso è lo studio nella casa principale che il leggendario artista aveva creato aprendo diversi spazi e che porta ancora tracce di pittura ma nessuna delle sue opere.

Want more? Here’s a list of famous villas, the celebrities who owned them, and the crazy things that happened there.