FATHER AND DAUGHTER
Born Maria de la Concepcion Widmaier Picasso in Boulogne in France. She was named after her father’s sister, Concepcion, who had died in childhood, when her father was just fourteen.
As a little girl she could not pronounce her own name, saying it as ‘Maya’. Subsequently, this is what she was always known as.
Her father was the famed artist, Pablo Picasso. Her mother was model Marie-Therese Walter. The couple had met as Pablo was leaving a Paris Metro station in 1927.
However, Pablo was married to ballet dancer, Olga Khoklova, and had a five-year old son called Paulo.
When Maya was born, she became Pablo’s eldest daughter, albeit illegitimate.
Picasso registered Maya’s birth as ‘Father unknown’, because in French law it was illegal for a married man to be registered as parent of another woman’s child.
Pablo moved Marie-Therese into an apartment directly opposite his house in Paris. He kept each family secret from the other one.
Pablo and Marie -Therese’s relationship lasted nine years, but in 1936 he left her, and his wife Olga, for an affair with photographer Dora Marr.
Maya and her mother moved to a house at Tremlay-sur-Mauldre, where Pablo would come and visit his daughter most weekends.
Her started a series of paintings of Maya, running parallel to the creation of his greatest work, Guernica.
One of these was called ‘First Snow’. Maya recalled, “It was the day I took my first steps…I was wearing little pink booties that my father kept his whole life.”
Between 1938 and 1939, Picasso painted fourteen portraits of his daughter, including ‘Maya with Doll’ and ‘Maya in a Sailor Suit’.
Maya was not fond of Dora Marr. She and her mother met Dora by accident. “One day, we turned up at his studio and she was standing there next to Guernica. I started crying and said to my father, ‘I don’t want to see the dribbly lady. (Dora had a habit of licking her lips a lot). I never saw her again.”
In 1941, Marie-Therese and Maya moved back to Paris, which was occupied by the Nazis.
Picasso used to come to their flat and he tried to teach Maya how to draw. To do this, he created a series of study books to help her – but she struggled to master the skill.
At the end of the war, Picasso moved to the south of France to live with Francois Gilot, and Marie-Therese told him that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Maya was, “Brought up believing the fiction that her father worked a long way away.”
Despite this, Marie-Therese always held a torch for Picasso, describing him as, “Merveilleusement terrible (Wonderfully awful).”
She would travel south, without her mother, to visit her father.
It was on one of these visits that Pablo Picasso told Maya that she had a half-brother, Paulo. “One day, Papa said to me, ‘This is your brother”, as he handed her a photograph. She was aged ten.
When Maya was eighteen, she moved to Spain to study at the Lycee Francais in Madrid, before moving to Barcelona, where she worked with her cousin, a neurologist in a hospital, designing orthopaedic corsets.
Maya came back to Paris aged twenty, where she was employed by a feminist magazine, before becoming the Personal Assistant to dancer and singer, Josephine Baker.
Maya adored Ms. Baker. “She was not only an extraordinary dancer and actress, but also an activist – a woman who supported civil rights.”
Throughout this period, Maya constantly helped her father. They had a very close relationship. Both were involved in the movie, ‘Le Mystere Picasso’, filmed in Nice.
Maya was described as having a larger-than-life character, with a good sense of humour. “I liked to tell people that my father was a house painter.”
In 1960, Maya married French naval officer, Pierre Widmaier. They had three children; Olivier, Richard and Diana (who would become an art historian).
Pablo Picasso died in 1973, aged ninety-one. He left no will. During his artistic career, Picasso created two thousand paintings, seven thousand drawings and thirty thousand prints.
Maya and all of Picasso’s other children, sued the estate to be named heirs. There was a court case and it was agreed to divide the estate amongst five heirs, four of whom (including Maya) were his offspring.
At this point, Maya began to use the surname ‘Ruiz Picasso’ in tribute to her paternal grandfather, painter Jose Ruiz y Blasco, who died in 1913.
Her older half-brother, Paulo, died in 1975, aged just fifty-four.
Over the years, Maya became to be seen as the leading authority on Picasso’s work. She was often called in to authenticate his work and was used on a regular basis by auction house such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Maya also donated many of her father’s works to art galleries around the world. This led to her being awarded the Knight of the Legion d’Honneur in 2007, for her contribution to the art world.
Her daughter, Diana, said, “I think all the expertise she developed was a way for her to continue living with her Dad.”
She had a very fractious relationship with her youngest half-brother, Claude (whose mother was Francois Gilot). He wanted to be the person who authenticated his father’s work, not her.
If Maya said a work was genuine, Claude said it was fake. If she stated it was not by Pablo Pcasso, he claimed it was.
Unbeknown to her, Claude and the other surviving heirs, set up ‘Picasso Administration’, claiming to be the only authoritative body. Maya was not invited. “I only found out when a friend told me. I nearly died!”
Maya said to her half-siblings, “I’m not dead you know.”
However, despite Claude’s efforts, the art world continued to consider Maya as the real expert on Picasso.
In 2015, she opened the ‘Maya Picasso Foundation for Arts Education’ buying the Hotel de Savole on the Rue des Grandes Augustins in Paris for its home. It was where Pablo Picasso had his studio when in the French capital city.
This led to Maya becoming a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.
However, there was immediate controversy. She sold Picasso’s ‘Bust of a Woman’ (1931) to two separate buyers at the same time – the Qatari Royal Family and art dealer Larry Gagosian.
The case went to court – and Gagosian won. It was at this point that her brother Claude tried to prove that Maya was mentally incapacitated.
In 2017, the Gagosian Gallery in Paris, held an exhibition entitled ‘Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter’. It showed all the portraits the artist had made of Maya, the first time they had been exhibited together. It was curated by her daughter, Diana.
Two years later, the exhibition went to New York. Maya wrote the catalogue for this, which was later published as her memoirs, entitled ‘Father and Daughter.
The one picture Maya really wanted was the one she could not have. In 1932, Picasso painted a portrait of her mother, Marie-Therese. It was called ‘Le Reve (The Dream). It had been sold to American art collector, Victor Ganz.
Diana said, “My mother loved Le Reve so much – not only, I think, because it represented her mother, Marie-Therese, in all her beauty and happiest days with Pablo, but also because it is an iconic picture of love.”
Maya kept upping her offers for the painting, but Ganz always refused to sell. Jokingly, Maya even offered to divorce her husband and marry Ganz, in order to live with the painting.
Maya stopped authenticating her father’s paintings, as her eyesight began to fail.
In one of her last interviews, Maya was asked for an impression of her father. “He served as an example of a person who was passionate about what he was doing, guided by the desire and need to always create.”
Maya died of pulmonary problems. She is survived by her husband, Pierre, and her three children.
Shortly after Maya’s death, her half-brother Claude also died.
At Maya’s insistence, many of her father’s paintings have been gifted to the nation (in lieu of death duties). Her son, Olivier said, “She was very attached to the idea that her inheritance should go to a museum…so I always thought I had a little brother called the ‘French public collection.”
RIP = Reve Inspired Picasso
