ISTU 2009 - Aix en Provence

For the first time, 35 years after the painter death, the château de Vauvenargues where Pablo Picasso is buried is to be open to the public.

The Château de Vauvenargues was the last home chosen by the painter before he finally moved to Mougins.

The 17th century castle was bought by the artist in 1958 to escape Cannes and the tourists constantly trying to see the artist at work. Admiring the Sainte Victoire mountain, favorite subject of Cezanne’s paintings, he would have said to his agent  “I have just bought myself Cézanne’s mountains”.

Picasso and his wife Jacqueline lived in here between 1959 and 1965. The most significant rooms in the life of Pablo and Jacqueline Picasso will be open to the public: the dining room, the bedroom, the bathroom where Picasso painted the figure of a faun straight onto the wall above the bathtub, and the studio where he created some of his masterpieces.

On top of their tomb is a bronze statue, la femme au vase, the original of which, made in 1933, was displayed at the entry of the Spanish pavilion at the international exhibition in Paris in 1937, where one of the Spanish painter’s most famous paintings, ‘Guernica’, was unveiled.