Picasso Widow, 59, Takes Own Life

Jacqueline Picasso, the widow of Pablo Picasso, committed suicide today at her chateau on the French Riviera, the same place where the giant of modern art died in 1973. She was 59.

Police said she was found with a bullet in her head, fired from an automatic pistol that was found lying by her side.

The chateau, Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, a village overlooking Cannes, is a virtual museum filled with some of Picasso’s greatest paintings.

Friends said she had been ill and suffering from depression in recent months.

One friend was quoted as saying the painter’s widow had said on Monday that she “preferred to end it (her life) in order to not stay like that.”

She was Jacqueline Rocque when Picasso married her in 1961. He was 79 years old and she was 35.

The elegant beauty was a Paris-born divorcee and former dance teacher when she met Picasso, becoming his model and companion.

She once said she never formally posed for the artist during their two decades of marriage. “Pablo painted my portrait only because I was passing by,” she said. “And I passed by hundreds of times in 20 years.”

The painter’s first wife, ballet dancer Olga Kokhlova, died in 1955. But the couple, married in 1918, had been separated for more than 20 years at the time of her death. They had one son. By liaisons with Marie-Therese Walter and Francoise Gilot, the artist had three other children.

One of six heirs of the painter, Jacqueline received a quarter of Picasso’s estate--about $60 million after taxes--in 1977 after years of legal wrangling over the fortune.

She will be buried alongside her husband at the Chateau de Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence in southern France.