Picasso died in Antibes on April 8, 1973. The museum, which is dedicated to the great master of the 20th century, exhibits works from recent years there.
Fifty years to the day after the death of the painter, on April 8, 1973, the Picasso museum in Antibes (Alpes-Maritimes) launched Saturday the commemorations of the anniversary of his disappearance with the opening of an exhibition devoted to the very last years of his life.
Mounted with the help of the Picasso National Museum in Paris, the Antibes exhibition “Picasso 1969-1972” presents until July 2 37 canvases and four works on paper executed by the artist during those years in Mougins, not far from Antibes, where he lived since 1961 and where he breathed his last.
Create until the end
Bust of a man with a hat, Flute player and naked woman, Torero… On loan from the Picasso museums in Paris and Malaga, private galleries and the artist’s family, these large-format works bear witness to a period when, far from “twilight announced by his detractors, Picasso summed up his whole life as an artist and as a man in a creative proliferation,” notes in the catalog the curator of the exhibition, Jean-Louis Andral, who subtitled the exhibition “the end of the beginning”.
“When Picasso exhibited for the last time in Avignon in 1970 and then in 1973, some of the critics found that he had lost his means and that it was the beginning of the end. I wanted to reverse the formula to say that on the contrary, it was a moment which opened up new horizons for painting, which seduced painters like (Jean-Michel) Basquiat”, Jean-Louis Andral, also director of the Picasso museum in Antibes, told AFP.
Citing the book Travel in Picasso of Hélène Parmelin, he notes this confidence of the Spanish artist explaining in 1973 that “perhaps he had never been ‘also a painter’ than in the last canvases”. He never stopped creating until his last work session on November 12, 1972, a few weeks before his death at the age of 91.
Many exhibitions on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary
Housed in the Château Grimaldi, facing the sea, the Picasso Museum in Antibes permanently presents 23 paintings and 44 drawings by Picasso left on deposit by the artist in 1946 after a two-month stay during which he was able to use part of the museum as a workshop.
The collection has been enriched over the years and donations, in particular ceramics made in the post-war years in the neighboring town of Vallauris.
From Antibes to Malaga, the painter’s birthplace, via Paris, the fiftieth anniversary of his death promises many highlights to rediscover his work and in particular the opportunity to question, at the time of #MeToo, his relationship to women with, in particular, an exhibition Picasso and feminism at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in June.