Word: picassos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Picasso still owns the Château de Boisgeloup near Gisors, which he bought in 1931; a sumptuous Belie Epoque villa at Cannes, La Californie (which he quit in pique when a real estate developer put apartment blocks on the land below the garden, ruining the view); and the enormous castle of Vauvenargues on the north flank of the hill that Cézanne often painted, Mont St.-Victoire. But Mougins has become his cloister. "He doesn't travel any more. He hardly even goes into Cannes
Work and Isolation. For time is of the essence; though Picasso is in good health (he eats sparingly in the big farmhouse kitchen at Mougins and rations himself to one glass of wine with meals), he hides. "If I received everyone who wanted to see me for just ten minutes, it would last every day till midnight," he says. Picasso's 41-year-old wife, Jacqueline Roque, is his shield: for the past ten years at Mougins she has borne the punishing weight of answering and filtering Picasso's mail, keeping his clippings up to date, dealing with...
...energy with which Picasso can still attack his work is demoniac. He still, on occasion, paints until 2 or 3 a.m., and regularly puts in eight hours a day in the studio. "I painted three canvases this afternoon," Picasso once told his amanuensis, Hélène Parmelin. "What's necessary is to do them, to do them, to do them! The more you paint, the nearer you get to something. You must do as many as possible." This obsessed machismo resembles nothing so much as a displacement of sex into art: the furious production of Picasso...
...Picasso is not only the most famous artist in history, he is also the richest. "Currency is worth less in Picasso's hands than a sheet of blank paper," remarked the English artist and critic Michael Ayrton, "and this condition promotes the problems with which the legendary Midas had to contend." Picasso can get anything by drawing for it. Shortly after World War II, he acquired one of his Midi villas, now relinquished, by exchanging it for a set of lithographs. His own collection of Picassos, several hundred oils (not counting his sculpture, much of which he has kept...
...Marlborough Gallery) the current price for a recent Picasso oil ranges between $50,000 and $150,000, and for a drawing up to $25,000, the gross market value of that one year's work may be put at around $15 million...