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Work and Isolation. For time is of the essence; though Picasso is in good health (he eats sparingly in the big farmhouse kitchen at Mougins and rations himself to one glass of wine with meals), he hides. "If I received everyone who wanted to see me for just ten minutes, it would last every day till midnight," he says. Picasso's 41-year-old wife, Jacqueline Roque, is his shield: for the past ten years at Mougins she has borne the punishing weight of answering and filtering Picasso's mail, keeping his clippings up to date, dealing with the telephone, the cataloguing, the buying of food, supplies, canvas, paint and, on top of it all, calming the nerves of a high-strung and tetchy nonagenarian painter. They have produced no children. Jacqueline has a 22-year-old daughter from her previous marriage, who often visits them. But Picasso's isolation from his own offspring is nearly absolute. His first son, Paul, is now 50 and lives in Paris; his daughter by Marie-Thérèse Walter lives in Spain; and his two children by Françoise Gilot, Claude, 24, and Paloma, 22, were cut out of his life and virtually deprived of support from their millionaire father during one of his fits of rage over their mother's memoirs, Life With Picasso. Only work remains.
The energy with which Picasso can still attack his work is demoniac. He still, on occasion, paints until 2 or 3 a.m., and regularly puts in eight hours a day in the studio. "I painted three canvases this afternoon," Picasso once told his amanuensis, Hélène Parmelin. "What's necessary is to do them, to do them, to do them! The more you paint, the nearer you get to something. You must do as many as possible." This obsessed machismo resembles nothing so much as a displacement of sex into art: the furious production of Picasso's old age is an exact pictorial counterpart to the catalogue of seductions by Mozart's Don Giovanni, whose promiscuity was a shield against death:
In Italy, six hundred and forty, In Germany, two hundred thirty-one, A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one: But, but in Spain—One thousand and three!
Picasso is not only the most famous artist in history, he is also the richest. "Currency is worth less in Picasso's hands than a sheet of blank paper," remarked the English artist and critic Michael Ayrton, "and this condition promotes the problems with which the legendary Midas had to contend." Picasso can get anything by drawing for it. Shortly after World War II, he acquired one of his Midi villas, now relinquished, by exchanging it for a set of lithographs. His own collection of Picassos, several hundred oils (not counting his sculpture, much of which he has kept, his collection of work by other artists and the thousands of drawings that lie in bales throughout the rooms of Mougins, Vauvenargues and La Californie), is now worth anything from $50 million to $100 million. The value of his whole estate has been estimated at around $750 million. His income is immense. Between Jan. 5, 1969 and Feb. 2, 1970, he produced 167 oils and 45 drawings, which were shown in the Papal Palace at Avignon the following summer. Since (according to