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He bestowed little love on his children after they passed the age of cherubic portraiture. Born over a span of 28 years, they were: Paulo, his only legitimate child, by Dancer Olga Koklova (he died in 1975); Maya, by Marie-Thérèse Walter; and Claude and Paloma, by Franchise Gilot. One of the few paramours or wives with any pretension to intellectuality, Gilot (now married to famed U.S. Scientist Dr. Jonas Salk) was co-author of a bitter book, Life with Picasso, in which she calls him a manipulator of human beings: "He loved only one thing—his painting. Not his women, not his children." Gilot broke with Picasso in 1953. Jacqueline Roque, the aspiring poet he married in 1961, was described by one acquaintance as "the only woman who ever was able to lead him around by the nose."
That nose was, for a while, ringed by the French Communist Party. He joined in 1944 and painted for it the famed Dove of Peace, which the Soviets happily substituted for the hammer and sickle as their symbol of peace on earth. No political sophisticate and certainly no ideologue, Picasso eventually distanced himself from the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As Salvador Dali quipped: "Picasso is a Spaniard —so am I. Picasso is a genius—so am I. Picasso is a Communist—nor am I."
After World War II, despite sporadic explosions of artistic energy, usually fired by some new love, the once gregarious Picasso gradually became more than ever a recluse. He sustained many old feuds and started new ones with fellow artists, critics and dealers, but welcomed the obsequities of a faithful coterie. In 1958 he purchased a medieval chateau near Aix-en-Provence called Vauvenargues. "I've bought Cézanne's view!" he said. He spent most of his final years, however, at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a hilltop villa at Mougins on the Riviera, named after a chapel that once stood on the site. He worked until dawn on the last day of his life, April 8, 1973.
To the end, as suggested in the following portfolio of intimate photos by David Douglas Duncan, Picasso remained Picasso: an indefatigable worker, a lover of mischief and pranks, quirky, increasingly aloof, mercurial, yet often remarkably generous and warm. In Viva Picasso, a book to be published by Viking next fall, Duncan describes how, in the course of preparing some Picasso canvases for photography, he took a swipe with a feather duster at a 1938 self-portrait—and smudged a part of the canvas. Writes Duncan: "I spent the whole morning dabbing with spit-moistened Kleenex trying to reduce the damage, to clean away the smudges." By lunchtime, the hour at which Picasso usually got out of bed, Duncan, his face gray-green, had to confess his crime. "What's happened?" asked the artist, thinking Duncan had crashed his beloved 300 SL Mercedes. After hearing that the photographer had in fact crashed a priceless work of art, Picasso turned and shouted to Jacqueline: "You have two starving men on your hands! What time do we eat?" He never spoke of the picture.
*He also may have chosen the name because of a 17th century Genoese painter named Matteo Picasso, though he always denied this.