Art: Pablo Picasso’s Last Days and Final Journey

DEATH holds no fear for me,” Picasso recently told a friend. “It has a kind of beauty. What I am afraid of is falling ill and not being able to work. That’s lost time.” Right up to the end, Picasso lost no time.

The day before he died had been a day like many others at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, his hilltop villa at Mougins on the French Riviera. Late in the afternoon the artist had taken a walk in the little park that surrounds his sprawling stone house overlooking the reddish foothills of the Maritime Alps. He liked now and then to gather flowers and vegetables in the garden, often taking them inside to draw. “That day I showed him the anemones and pansies, which he particularly liked,” recalls Jacques Barra, Picasso’s gardener.

Later that evening Picasso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. Picasso was in high spirits. “Drink to me; drink to my health,” he urged, pouring wine into the glass of his Cannes lawyer and friend, Armand Antebi. “You know I can’t drink any more.” At 11:30 he rose from the table and announced: “And now I must go back to work.” In recent weeks, he had been working especially hard, preparing for a big show of his latest paintings at the Popes’ Palace in Avignon in May. On this night, before he went to bed, he painted until 3 a.m.

On Sunday morning Picasso awoke at 11:30, his usual hour, but this time he could not rise from his bed. His wife Jacqueline rushed in and then called for help. At 11:40, before a doctor could get there, Pablo Picasso was dead. Dr. Georges Ranee, who arrived shortly afterward, attributed his death to a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs.

At daybreak on Tuesday, as an unseasonable snowfall blanketed the south of France, a small cortege left Mougins and carried Picasso’s body to his 14th century chateau at Vauvenargues in the bleak Provencal countryside. Accompanying the body were Picasso’s widow; her daughter by her first marriage, Catherine Hutin; and Paulo, 52, Picasso’s son by his first marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova. After the 1 10-mile journey, the mahogany casket, without ceremony, was placed in the chateau chapel to await the building of a mausoleum.

But the shroud of estrangement from three of his grown children that had clouded Picasso’s last years also marred his death. For reasons never entirely clear, Maya, Picasso’s daughter by his longtime mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Claude and Paloma, his children by Françoise Gilot, had been prevented from seeing their father in recent years. Last week the same sad situation prevailed. Indeed, this time police were on hand to turn away Marie-Therese and other old friends who came to pay their respects.

Later that day, Maya, Claude and Paloma drove to Vauvenargues and placed a large wreath of vivid flowers in the cemetery overlooking the chateau. “That was as close to our fa ther as we could get,” Maya said. “It’s sad. The whole situation is very delicate.” The next day, Paulo’s son Pablo, 24, of nearby Golfe-Juan, was reported in serious condition after drinking a bottle of chloric acid. According to his mother (who has long been separated from Paulo), Pablo had been despondent about being kept from seeing his grandfather. Others said he had also been depressed about financial troubles.

The choice of Vauvenargues as the burial site both delighted and surprised the village’s 300 residents, since Picasso had rarely visited there in recent years. “We chose it partly because my father loved the Provencal light,” explained Paulo. “Besides, the majestic surroundings were more worthy of him than Mougins, where he had sordid arguments with the village council. If ever a Picasso museum is created,” he added, “Vauvenargues would be a fine place.”

Picasso had been enchanted with the austere medieval château when he acquired it in 1958. It included 2,500 acres on the north slope of Mont Sainte Victoire, and, as he told a friend at the time: “I have just bought myself Cézanne’s view.” He liked the vast rooms, since he was always running out of space for his paintings and sculptures. But he soon changed his mind. Few friends dropped by as they did on the Riviera, and it was too far from the sea to enable him to take an occasional swim. Finally, in 1961, Picasso decided to move to Notre-Dame-de-Vie and the balmier climate of the Riviera back country. There he kept up his prodigious pace, filling one room after another with paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures—and building on to the house when necessary.

In the morning, he sometimes sketched in bed, and he delighted in going through the mail to see what outrageous request or oddity someone might have sent him. Like a good Spaniard, he lunched around 2 o’clock, then occasionally went for a walk in the garden with Jacqueline and their two Afghan hounds. After a siesta, there was tea, and when he was not expecting friends, Picasso read or worked until 2 or 3 in the morning. “Work is what commands my schedule,” he told a friend. “Daylight is perfect to contact friends —which is always a must with an artist —and go out. In our modern times, we can obtain excellent light at night —which we could never do with the yellowish shades of old lamps—and I also have silence.”

“Picasso always lived,” said a friend, “for now—right now,” which may explain why he left no will. That surprising fact probably guarantees legal battles concerning his enormous estate for years to come. To be sure, he had already disposed of some of his paintings while he was alive. In 1970 Picasso, who never lost his affection for his native Spain through his long years of self-imposed exile against the Franco regime, donated some 1,000 works from his early years to a new Picasso Museum set up by his late secretary, Jaime Sabartés, in a palatial mansion in Barcelona. Picasso also decreed that his famed mural Guernica, which has been on temporary loan to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art since World War II, be returned to Spain when civil liberties have been restored. Last week, as Spain mourned him as its own, his countrymen expressed regret that Picasso had not ensured that more of his major works would one day be seen in his homeland.

In Paris, Picasso’s lawyer announced that his widow and his son Paulo would respect a wish expressed by Picasso and donate the artist’s valuable personal collection of great painters to the Louvre. Picasso jokingly referred to the collection, which includes 800 to 1,000 works by Corot, Courbet, Cézanne, Braque, Matisse and others, as “bric-a-brac,” but Prime Minister Pierre Messmer quickly accepted the priceless gift on behalf of France.

As for Picasso’s Picassos, no one knows exactly how many there are, and cataloguing them may take years. The estimates of the number of his works squirreled away in his villas range from 12,000 to 25,000. That ought to be enough to enrich museums in both Spain and France—and the rest of the world as well.