Pablo Picassos berättelsetid på rivieran

Under 30 år klippte Pablo Picasso en spektakulär väg genom Rivieran. Han var lysande, grym och fängslande. När han dog 1973 i sin villa i Mougins, fem mil inåt landet från 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.

De 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.

Alltid rastlös passerade han genom Menerbes, där han hade köpt ett hem till sin tidigare älskare Dora Maar, och Golfe-Juan, där han sov i en väns villa. Han tillbringade tid i Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Vallauris och Antibes, varav de två sistnämnda har dedikerade Picasso-museer.

Picassomuseet i Antibes

De Picassomuseet i 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.

I hennes memoarer från 1964 Livet med 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.

"Regnvindar blåste längs vallarna, och de utmärglade statyerna på terrassen till Chateau Grimaldi droppade av vått", skriver han i inledningen av Chagrin i tre delar, “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.

"Vi kommer från samma familj", berättade Picasso för Richier på en av Salons de Mai i Paris, där skulptörens verk visades för första gången 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.

Picassos villa i Cannes: Villa California

Villa La Californie byggdes i Cannes 1920. Pablo Picasso köpte Villa La Californie 1955 och bodde där med sin sista fru och 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.

Marina Picassos far var Picassos son med hans första fru, Olga Khokhlova, en rysk-ukrainsk ballerina. Han förnedrades av att han tvingades arbeta som konstnärens chaufför. Marina Picasso minns att hon togs till portarna till det storslagna trevåningshuset La Californie av sin fattiga far, Paulo, för att tigga om utdelningar från en likgiltig Picasso.

"Det är inte ett hus där jag har många bra minnen," sa hon. ”Jag såg väldigt lite av min farfar där. Med facit i hand förstår jag att han kan ha blivit hänförd av måleriet och inget annat var viktigare för honom. Förutom när man är barn upplever man det inte så.” Femton års terapi hjälpte Marina Picasso att komma till rätta med de bittra minnena. Hon gav ut sin ilska i en memoarbok från 2001, "Picasso, min farfar."

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

Efter Villa La Californie köpte Pablo Picasso och hans fru Jacqueline ytterligare en villa, denna gång in 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.

Belägen i Mougins – en 15-minuters bilresa inåt landet av 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.

Det varma året runt klimatet och det underbara ljuset i det omgivande området gjorde snart Mougins till en eftertraktad destination för artister både amatörer och professionella. Berömda kändisar var frekventa besökare, bland dem Winston Churchill, som gillade att måla på tomten till den vidsträckta villan. Churchill var en god vän med Benjamin och Bridget och blev en regelbunden besökare i deras Mougins hem, och tillbringade många sommardagar och kvällar med att måla i sin trädgård.

En konstnär av en helt annan kategori, Pablo Picasso, var också en vän med Guinnesses och blev, liksom Churchill, en regelbunden besökare i deras hem. Så tagen var Picasso av Mas de Notre Dame de Vie att han så småningom köpte huset av Benjamin och Bridgets son Loel.

Fastigheten är från 1700-talet och har vidsträckt utsikt över Estérel-massivet och Cannesbukten. Den består av olika bostäder och under den senaste ombyggnaden utvidgades med ett antal sofistikerade tillägg som nya glasfönster, ett poolhus, pool, hiss, luftkonditionering, spa, garage, hus för vaktmästare och diverse andra annex tills finansiellt svårigheter och äktenskapliga konflikter av ägaren stoppade arbetet som lämnades oavslutat.

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.

Det enda ursprungliga utrymmet från Picasso-tiden är ateljén i huvudhuset som den legendariske konstnären hade skapat genom att öppna flera utrymmen och som fortfarande bär spår av färg men inget av hans verk.

Vill ha mer? Här är en lista över kända villor, kändisarna som ägde dem och de galna sakerna som hände där.