Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, in his French villa. He was almost 92 years old, a rich man, an internationally celebrated artist, a father, and a grandfather. Most of the research concerning Picasso focused on his earlier years when he was a bold and provocative young artist. In this article, we will examine Pablo Picasso’s final years, the stories of his heirs, and his artistic legacy.
How and When Did Pablo Picasso Die?
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, in France at the age of 91. The official cause of death of the great artist was a heart attack caused by his old age. His death was immediately reported by almost every news outlet globally, as he had been one of the greatest contemporary art masters for many decades already. Just a year and a half before his death, museums worldwide celebrated his 90th birthday, showcasing both his old classics and newer art. The explicit nature of some of the new paintings still managed to cause several scandals among the public, so the artist was true to his reputation until his last days.
Picasso spent the final nineteen years of his life with Jacqueline Roque, his second wife and caretaker. The couple had a substantial age gap of 46 years, with Picasso’s son Paulo being older than the artist’s new love. They met while Jacqueline was working at a ceramics workshop near Picasso’s villa. For half a year, Picasso brought her flowers daily and left her drawings in chalk.
In 1954, the couple started living together. According to some friends of the family, Jacqueline was submissive to the point of masochism and followed every whim of the aging artist. However, Picasso’s children remembered the situation slightly differently. They insisted that Roque basically isolated Picasso from the rest of the world and prevented him from seeing his family members. Even after his death, she did not concede, banning Picasso’s children and grandchildren from attending his funeral. One of the artist’s grandsons was so traumatized by this fact he committed suicide on the same day.
Picasso’s Final Works: Self-Portrait Facing Death and Other Works
Picasso’s final years were marked by the incessant urge to create more art. Nonetheless, he noticed that the old age was merciless to him, as he gradually lost his eyesight and hearing. He could not help but notice he was losing the sharpness of his mind as his compositions became more grotesque and color schemes less balanced. In an attempt to revive his creative spirit, he painted incessantly, creating more than 400 of Jacqueline Roque.
Self-portraits were incredibly important artistic forms for Picasso during his entire life. They transformed along with his artistic language, followed by his obsessions and intrusive thoughts. They ranged from highly realistic images to faces of African masks or almost abstract collections of lines and planes. Picasso never tried to make himself look better than he actually was in his paintings. Rather, he often emphasized the heavy facial features and a certain animalistic or brute look.
In 1972, he painted one of his last self-portraits, in which he finally admitted that death was underway. In bright chalk, he painted an image of an old, weary man with a skull-like face, messy stubble, and eyes looking empty and blank. This was a striking contrast to other self-portraits by the artist, which always focused on his intense, piercing gaze. Some art historians see the late Picasso’s simplified lines and distorted faces as a certain kind of homage to the works of another artist he admired, his fellow Spaniard Francisco Goya. Goya’s so-called Black Paintings were a collection of terrifying images painted in an almost Expressionist loose manner that reflected the artist’s poor mental and physical state.
A particular obsession of Picasso’s later years was the Old Master paintings. He always valued his predecessors, yet his interest became even more intense in the final decades. Perhaps this was Picasso’s version of conservatism that often rises in people of an old age.
In the late 1960s, Picasso focused on engravings. At the same time, he studied the works of Rembrandt van Rijn, who was famous not only for his paintings but for prints of fantastic quality. To better study his works, Picasso even projected high-quality slides of them onto his studio’s walls. Picasso’s Ecce Homo was both an homage and a twist on Rembrandt’s etching with the same name. The original image by Rembrandt represented a scene when Pontius Pilates introduced Jesus, already crowned with thorns and tortured, to the crowd moments before his execution. Picasso’s version was different, and it essentially told his own story, turning the scene into a theatrical stage surrounded by spectators. Perhaps this was the artist’s vision of the end of his life that would inevitably attract attention and lead to re-evaluation of himself and his work.
Picasso’s Heirs
Picasso left a substantial legacy to his heirs, with tens of thousands of paintings, sculptures, prints, and other works. He also had a personal art collection, which included works by his friends like Henri Matisse and a selection of African and Polynesian art. Picasso had four children from three women, who divided his artworks and property between them.
Paulo Picasso was the first son of the artist born to Ukrainian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. Initially enthusiastic about becoming a father, Picasso grew to despise the boy as he grew up due to the differences in political views. Unwilling to share his property with Olga, he refused to grant her divorce. As she was unable to perform after a series of surgeries, she and her children lived in poverty for two decades. Paulo suffered from alcoholism and outlived his father only by two years.
Paulo’s daughter remembers her grandfather well, yet she never had any gentle feelings towards him. She published a book, Picasso, My Grandfather, in which she expressed her disdain for him as a man and a father. Moreover, Marina partially blamed her grandfather for the death of her brother, who drank bleach on the day of Picasso’s funeral. Marina inherited one-fifth of the Picasso estate but sold it entirely, spending the funds to build and support an orphanage in Vietnam.
Maya Picasso was the daughter of Marie-Therese Walter. Legally, Picasso did not recognize her as his daughter, signing the paperwork as her godfather. For the first ten years of her life, Picasso was a caring father but gradually separated from her. She worked as a personal assistant to Josephina Baker, a costume designer, and even an assistant to her own father during his work with film.
Claude Picasso and Paloma Picasso were the youngest of children, and their mother was Françoise Gilot, a painter and memoirist. Claude Picasso grew up to be a photographer and film director and the founder of the foundation dedicated to his father’s life. Paloma Picasso became a famous jewelry designer and perfume creator known for her collaborations with Yves Saint Laurent and her signature red lipstick. Today, Picasso’s remaining heirs run the Picasso Administration Foundation, which protects the artist’s legacy and manages authenticity checks.
The Legacy of Pablo Picasso
Over the years, Picasso became one of the most polarizing figures in art history. To some, he is the personification of toxic masculinity, chauvinism, and narcissism. To others, he is the transformative, larger-than-life figure who forged modern and contemporary art. In this case, both things can be true at once. Pablo Picasso’s difficult personality flaws of character could not possibly outweigh his impact on the artistic scene.
His overwhelming scope of artistic interests and lasting presence in the art world seemed to be almost too intense and massive for one artist to handle. Picasso’s inventions forged the path for the development of abstract art and alternative forms of rendering spaces. His experiments with collage and assemblage widened the range of artistic techniques and materials.
Picasso’s incessant curiosity and desire to experiment created a popular image of a genius artist, both in terms of class, gender, and behavior and in terms of the overwhelming impulse to work and desire to learn. Picasso’s work and life ethics certainly caused pain to those around him, yet they forged an artist who outlived generations of other artists, and even half a century after his death, does not cease to amaze and shock. Even today, contemporary artists often reference his work, even if they reinterpret it in their own ways, sometimes even challenging Picasso’s perspective.
