Picasso is Dead in France at 91
Special to The New York Times
Mougins, France, April 8 — Pablo Picasso, the titan of 20th- century art, died this morning at his hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie here. He was 91 years old.
The death of the Spanish-born artist was attributed to pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs, by Dr. Jean-Claude Rance, a local physician who was summoned to the 35-room mansion by the family. Dr. Rance said that Picasso had been ill for several weeks.
With him when he dies was his second wife, the 47-year-old Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961. In the last few years, Picasso rarely left his 17-acre estate, which was surrounded by barbed wire. He had been in exile from his native land since 1939, when Generalissimo Francisco Franco defeated the Republican Government of Spain in the three-year Civil War.
About 10 days ago, Picasso was helping to assemble 201 of his paintings for exhibition at the Avignon Arts Festival, which will open in that city May 23 at the Palais des Papes. According to Paul Puaux, the festival director who had visited the artist at his home on the Riviera above Cannes, these canvases covered the artist’s output from October, 1970 to the close of 1972.
“There was something completely different, something less tortured in certain paintings,” Mr. Puaux said today in Paris. He added:
“You feel there is a change, a new period. There is much less eroticism and much more softness. His wife told me that he was working much more slowly, more deliberately now, searching and dogging into each canvas.”
The main subject of the 201 works, Mr. Puaux said, “is man, as always – children, a number of mothers with child- but also musical instruments, trumpets and flutes, birds and one very, very beautiful landscape, which is rather unusual for Picasso.”
The dominant color of the canvases is bistre, a warm, brownish black, Mr. Puaux said.
Major Show in 1970
Three years ago, in 1970, 165 of Picasso’s paintings and 45 drawings were shown in the Palais des Papes. They constituted Picasso’s production from January, 1969, through January 1970. The pictures were mostly of vibrant men and women, often in close embrace. There were also dozens of goateed, lusty figures, which the artist’s friends called “the musketeers.”
In 1971, on the occasion of Picasso’s 90th birthday, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has the world’s largest public collection of his works, put on a special exhibition. At the same time, the French Government displayed some Picassos in the grand gallery of the Louvre, the first time the museum had ever exhibited the work by a living artist.
As for Picasso, he ignored his birthday, shutting himself up in his villa, even refusing to receive a delegation from the French Communist party, of which he was a member. The group included his old friend, Louis Aragon, the poet.
Why He Was a Communist
The artist had a succinct reply to those who asked him why he was a Communist. “When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and very aware of how poor people had to live,” he told a journalist in 1947, adding:
“I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists.”
Sometimes, however, Picasso was an embarrassment to his party. A portrait he did of Stalin on the Soviet leader’s death in 1953 caused a furor in the party leadership. Earlier, the Soviet Government had locked its collection of Picasso’s early works in the basement of Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum.
Publicly, Picasso displayed amusement at the Soviet Union’s banishment of his paintings. Everybody had a right to react to his work as it affected them, he said.
Although the artist passionately detested Franco, he admired his fellow countrymen. One expression of his feelings came in the spring of 1970, when he decided to give 800 to 900 of his early works to Barcelona. These were said to be the best of his output up to 1917.
Earlier, in 1963, Picasso’s close friend, the late Jaime Sabartes, had donated his Picasso collection of some 400 works to the city of Barcelona, and the Palacio Aguilar was then renamed the Picasso Museum. However, the Franco regime covertly opposed the museum, and the artist’s name, was not on the door.
A Paris friend credited Picasso’s gift to Barcelona to his sense of irony. “He liked putting an important Picasso collection right in the middle of Barcelona when there was unrest in Spain and Franco was on his way out,” the friend explained.
Picasso’s works fetched enormous prices at auction, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. By sales through his dealers, the artist himself became wealthy, although the precise size of his state was not known.
In addition to his wife, Picasso leaves four children, a son, Paulo, born to his late first wife, the dancer Olga Khoklova; a daughter, Mrs. Pierre Widmaier, born to his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, and a son, Claude, and daughter, Paloma, both the children of Francoise Gilot, another mistress, now the wife of the biologist Dr. Jonas Salk.
Funeral plans were incomplete last night.