On the 8th April 40 years ago Pablo Picasso died of a heart attack at his chateau near Cannes on the French Riviera. His wife Jacqueline was entertaining friends for dinner and Picasso’s final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore.”
The year before, to mark his 90th birthday the Louvre Museum in Paris staged a Picasso retrospective. It was the first time the work of a living artist had been exhibited.
Born in Spain in 1881, Picasso exhibited his first paintings in Barcelona at the age of 12. During his life time he is said to have created approximately 20,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings. Arguably his best known painting was ‘Guernica’, inspired by his outrage at the destruction of a small Basque town during the Spanish civil war.
