This 49-minute episode covers the period from the war years to Picasso's death.
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From 1937, Picasso maintained a Paris studio apartment at the Rue des Grands Augustins where he spent the war years — not being able to separate himself from his family circles and artworks — and depicted the war indirectly through vanitas still lifes and a series of paintings of flayed sheep heads. Forty years his junior, Francoise Gilot — an art fan and painter herself — now replaced the tormented Dora Maar in Picasso’s life. (He completed a "disturbing" series of portraits of Dora at this time.)
In the years after liberation, Picasso and Francoise spent more and more time on the Cote d’Azur where he filled the Château Grimaldi with his art (notably La Joie de Vivre, 1946) and ultimately bequeathed it all to the City of Antibes. Sea imagery, including a sexual urchin motif, figures prominently in the painting of this period. A new son (Claude, 1947) and daughter (Paloma, 1949) soon followed. Naturally the tall, slender Francoise appears in the works of this period, often in a floral motif.
In 1948, the family moved to a secluded house ("La Gauloise", or the "Welsh House") in Vallauris, near Cannes. Vallauris, long associated with a ceramics industry, had fallen on hard times and become kitschy—the "Sèvres of Schlock". Picasso restored its prestige by pursuing his own one man sculpture and art pottery industry at his studio — "La Fournas" — there. (Francoise appears frequently as a theme in the pottery.) The family adopted a self-consciously simple lifestyle and Picasso now became a Communist for his remaining years. In subsequent years, he advanced himself as an international "peace warrior" for Soviet propaganda and was once thwarted by the FBI in his attempt to include the United States in his travel itinerary.
Picasso so favored southern France partly because of the local bullfighting venues of Arles, Nîmes, and Fréjus. In his bullfight motif, both bull and fighter could represent himself while the picador’s horses were the women in his life. Two significant public works at Vallauris are presented: First, the bronze statue known as the Man with the Sheep ("which he regarded as perhaps his masterpiece", according to Richardson); second, two huge panels in a Romanesque chapel known as War and Peace (an artistic failure and a success, respectively, according to Richardson). The "overt piece of agitprop" called Massacre in Korea (1951) was his last effort at painting politically for the Communists.
Francoise walked out on him in 1953 and, among several girlfriends, he now selected Jacqueline Roque as her successor. He identified her with a figure in Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers and he gave her an orientalist cast in his works featuring her. Orientalism also featured in his immense new house at Cannes, the Villa de Californie ("La Californie"), of which he proved, for a change, very "house proud".
In his last major artistic phase, Picasso tried to "cannibalize" the works of his favorite "Old Masters’’, including Rembrandt, van Gogh and, most notably, Velázquez—he did 40 variations of Las Meninas. Picasso’s penultimate household was at Château of Vauvenargues (Richardson was among the first guests) which included a swath of the mountainside of Cézanne’s famous Montagne Sainte-Victoire.
In 1961, Picasso finally married Jacqueline and they made their last home at a house near (and also called) Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins where he died (1973) and she later committed suicide (1986). Many of his last works, done in his 80s, feature "Love and Death": the onset of his impotence, and La Celestina, the famous syphilis-ridden Spanish procuress. Both he and later Jacqueline were buried at Vauvenargues, where bitterness had descended on Picasso’s funeral: Jacqueline had banned his children from the premises.
