Maya Ruiz-Picasso Walter, daughter of the painter Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérése Walter, died at the age of 87 “with her family,” according to a statement that gave no further details. “Rest in peace,” wrote the Minister for Culture and Sport, Miquel Iceta, on social networks.
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Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, Maya Ruiz Picasso was the second daughter of the Malaga painter and dedicated much of her professional career to promoting Picasso’s legacy. More than five years ago, the government granted him Spanish citizenship by letter of naturalization, just three days before the presentation of the exhibition Piety and Terror in Picasso: the road to Guernica, which is being held at the Reina Sofía Museum to commemorate the 80 the creation of this painting. “While Picasso was painting Guernica, this teenage girl, who obtained Spanish citizenship, was playing with her father’s brushes,” said then-minister Íñigo Méndez de Vigo.
She is currently the protagonist of a double exhibition at the Musée National in Paris on her relationship with her father and on the donations she made to the French state. At the end of September 2021, he donated eight unpublished works by the master. Including “Boy with a mannequin sitting under a chair”. A painting that is highly symbolic as it arguably depicts Maya as a child, hidden under the furniture, as a dark omen of world conflict, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, Picasso’s grandson, has explained on a number of occasions.
The death of Maya Ruiz Picasso comes at the gates of the beginning of the Picasso Year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death.
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