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"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.