Timpul de poveste a lui Pablo Picasso pe Riviera

Peste 30 de ani, Pablo Picasso a croit un drum spectaculos prin Riviera. Era genial, crud și captivant. Când a murit în 1973, la vila sa din Mougins, cinci mile în interior de 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.

The Coasta de 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.

Mereu neliniștit, a trecut prin Menerbes, de unde cumpărase o casă pentru fosta lui iubită Dora Maar, și Golfe-Juan, unde s-a cazat la vila unui prieten. A petrecut timp în Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Vallauris și Antibes, dintre care ultimele două au muzee dedicate lui Picasso.

Muzeul Picasso din Antibes

The Muzeul Picasso din 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.

În memoria ei din 1964 Viața cu 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.

„Rafale de ploaie au suflat de-a lungul meterezelor, iar statuile slăbite de pe terasa Chateau-ului Grimaldi au picurat de umezeală”, scrie el în rândurile de început ale Supărare în trei părți, “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.

„Suntem din aceeași familie”, i-a spus Picasso lui Richier la unul dintre Saloanele de Mai din Paris, unde lucrarea sculpturii a fost prezentată pentru prima dată în 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.

Vila lui Picasso din Cannes: Vila California

Vila La Californie a fost construită la Cannes în 1920. Pablo Picasso a cumpărat Villa La Californie în 1955 și a locuit acolo cu ultima sa soție și muză,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.

Tatăl Marinei Picasso a fost fiul lui Picasso de către prima sa soție, Olga Khokhlova, o balerină ruso-ucraineană. A fost umilit fiind forțat să lucreze ca șofer al artistului. Marina Picasso își amintește că a fost dusă la porțile marii case cu trei etaje, La Californie, de către tatăl ei sărăcit, Paulo, pentru a implora mâna unui Picasso indiferent.

„Nu este o casă în care am multe amintiri bune”, a spus ea. „L-am văzut foarte puțin pe bunicul meu acolo. Cu privirea retrospectivă, înțeleg că s-ar putea să fi fost captivat de pictură și nimic altceva nu era mai important pentru el. Cu excepția cazului în care ești copil, nu trăiești așa.” Cincisprezece ani de terapie au ajutat-o pe Marina Picasso să se împace cu amintirile amare. Și-a exprimat furia într-un memoriu din 2001, „Picasso, bunicul meu”.

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

După Villa La Californie, Pablo Picasso și soția sa Jacqueline au cumpărat o altă vilă, de data aceasta în 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.

Situat in Mougins – o călătorie de 15 minute cu mașina în interiorul 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.

Clima caldă pe tot parcursul anului și lumina superbă a zonei înconjurătoare au făcut din Mougins o destinație de dorit atât pentru artiști amatori, cât și profesioniști. Vedete ilustre erau vizitatori frecventi, printre care Winston Churchill, căruia îi plăcea să picteze pe terenul vilei întinse. Churchill a fost un bun prieten cu Benjamin și Bridget și a devenit un vizitator obișnuit la casa lor din Mougins, petrecând multe zile și noapte de vară stând în pictura din grădină.

Un artist de altă categorie, Pablo Picasso, a fost, de asemenea, un prieten al familiei Guinness și, la fel ca Churchill, a devenit un vizitator obișnuit la casa lor. Atât de luat a fost Picasso de către Mas de Notre Dame de Vie, încât a cumpărat în cele din urmă casa de la Loel, fiul lui Benjamin și Bridget.

Proprietatea datează din secolul al XVIII-lea și are vedere extinsă la masivul Estérel și la Golful Cannes. Este compus din diverse locuințe și în timpul celei mai recente remodelări a fost mărită cu o serie de completări sofisticate, cum ar fi ferestre noi din sticlă, o casă de piscină, piscină, lift, aer condiționat, spa, garaje, casă pentru îngrijitori și diverse alte anexe până la finanțare. dificultățile și conflictele conjugale ale proprietarului au oprit lucrarea rămasă neterminată.

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.

Singurul spațiu original din perioada Picasso este atelierul din casa principală pe care legendarul artist o crease prin deschiderea mai multor spații și care încă mai poartă urme de vopsea dar nici una dintre lucrările sale.

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