PICASSO, Pablo (1881-1973)

PICASSO, Pablo (1881-1973)

Autograph letter signed « Picasso » to Max Pellequer
[Château de] Vauvenargues, « 13.[0]5.[19]59 », 1 p. in-4°

Picasso writes to his friend and advisor Max Pellequer about a financial project

« Mon cher Max. Je vous envoie le chèque pour le percepteur du 6^e A^t  (70.000) [probably for his apartment at 7, rue des Grands Augustins in the 6th arrondissement] dans cette lettre. Je vous écrirai bientôt pour notre et votre projet de banque ici et à Cannes. [Jaime] Sabartés est parti et est déjà à Paris. Il vous verra dès que vous serez rentré.
Milles amitiés de nous deux pour vous deux.
Je vous embrasse.
Picasso »

A banker and shrewd art lover, Max Pellequer amassed a considerable collection of modernist works in the 1920s. In 1920, he married Francine Level, niece of the merchant and businessman André Level. It was through the latter that he met Picasso in 1914. This meeting marked the genesis of an unbreakable friendship between the two men. Pellequer became one of the artist’s closest friends, but also his banker and financial advisor. For more than 30 years, he acquired an incredible collection of paintings and sculptures from Picasso. The epistolary relationship that they maintained all these years allows us to take the measure of the ties that united the two men.
Still with the precious help of his friend Max, Picasso acquired a 14th-century castle in 1958, in Vauvenargues, near Aix en Provence, at the foot of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. He occupied it intermittently between 1959 and 1962. On this subject, he told Danier-Henry Kahnweiler: “I bought Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire. Which one? The real thing.” It was in the park of this same property that the painter was buried in a noxious atmosphere, on April 10, 1973.

Jaime Sabartés (1881-1968), mentioned here, was a Spanish poet who was for a long time Picasso’s private secretary, whose biography he published: Picasso: Toreros, in 1961.