The old village of Mougins in the Alpes-Maritimes, where Picasso spent his final years — Mougins, the hill village where Picasso lived from 1961 until his death in 1973 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Late Years — Mougins

1961–1973 — an old man painting like the building was on fire.

Notre-Dame-de-Vie

In 1961 Picasso married Jacqueline Roque and withdrew to Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a farmhouse above Mougins in the Alpes-Maritimes. The world came to him or didn’t come at all; Jacqueline managed the seclusion with formidable efficiency. The studio became the whole world.

The dialogue with the dead

The last decade’s great project was repainting the masters: dozens of variations on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1957, just before the move, but the spirit of the project), Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, Cranach’s Venus. Erotic, grotesque, virtuosic — an old lion wrestling the ancestors to prove he was still stronger. Critics who had filed him under “late Picasso, sad decline” were forced, painting by painting, to retract.

The pace

Hundreds of paintings, drawings, and prints a year, into his nineties. The work of 1970–72 — the musketeers, the couples, the self-portraits staring down death — has the urgency of a man who knew the clock and refused to negotiate with it.

8 April 1973

Picasso died at Mougins on 8 April 1973, aged 91, of a heart attack — reportedly after hosting friends for dinner the night before, still working, still planning. He was buried at the Château de Vauvenargues, beneath a sculpture garden of his own bronzes.

The old village of Mougins (CC BY-SA 3.0) — the hill town above which Picasso lived his final twelve years at Notre-Dame-de-Vie.

Source notes

Dates follow the standard biographical record. See Sources.