Picasso spent the summer of 1946 working in the Château Grimaldi, and when he left he donated the work he had made there to the city. The result is one of the best Picasso collections in France — not a greatest-hits survey but a coherent body of work from a single productive moment. The castle itself, part medieval tower and part Renaissance loggia, sits right on the rampart walls above the sea. Place Mariejol, Antibes. Closed Mondays.
Musée Picasso
Picasso's 1946 summer output in a seaside castle
A story
In the summer of 1946, Picasso was given use of the Château Grimaldi as a studio. He worked there furiously for a few months and left behind 23 paintings, 44 drawings, 32 lithographs, and 11 oils on paper — the entire output of that stay. When he donated them to the city, the castle became one of the few museums anywhere to hold a focused body of work from a single intense period of an artist's life.