PICASSO, Pablo (1881-1973)

PICASSO, Pablo (1881-1973)

Autograph letter signed « Picasso » to Max Pellequer
[Château de] Vauvenargues, 24th June 1959, 1 p. in-8° in blue thick pencil
Fine condition throughout

Affectionate and graphic letter from the master to his friend and collector Max Pellequer

« Mon cher Max,
Vous venez de partir ce matin et déjà je vous embête de nouveau (voir ma lettre des contributions que je reçois). Encore bien des amitiés de nous deux [an allusion to his partner Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961] pour vous deux. 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 him 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 they maintained allows us to take the measure of the ties that united them.
Picasso acquired a 14th-century castle in 1958 in Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. He held 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.