Pablo Picasso / Signed Autograph Letter / Pellequer / Sabartés / Paris / Project

  

Autographed letter signed "Picasso" to Max Pellequer [Château de] Vauvenargues, "13th [19]59", 1 p. Picasso writes to his friend and advisor Max Pellequer about a financial project. I am sending you the check for the tax collector on the 6th. Probably for his apartment at 7, rue des Grands Augustins in the 6th arrondissement in this letter.

I will write to you soon about our and your bank project here and in Cannes. [Jaime] Sabartés has left and is already in Paris. He will see you as soon as you return. A thousand greetings from both of us to both of you."

A savvy banker and art lover, Max Pellequer began assembling a significant collection of modernist works in the 1920s.

He married Francine Level in 1920, niece of the merchant and businessman André Level. It was through the latter that he met Picasso in 1914.

This encounter marked the beginning of an unbreakable friendship between the two men. Pellequer became one of the artist's closest confidants, as well as his banker and financial advisor. Over more than 30 years, he acquired an incredible collection of paintings and sculptures from Picasso. The epistolary relationship they maintained over all those years allows us to understand the depth of the bond between the two men.

Always with the valuable help of his friend Max, Picasso acquired a 14th-century castle in 1958, in Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire. He occupied it intermittently between 1959 and 1962. On this subject, he told Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: "I bought Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire.

" It is on the grounds of this same property that the painter was buried in a somber atmosphere on April 10, 1973. Max Pellequer Collection Then private collection.