A photographer by trade, she has devoted most of her life to studying and preserving her father’s legacy. Pablo Picasso admired her so much that he dedicated a number of works to her
Maya Ruiz-Picasso died, eldest daughter of the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), custodian of her father’s legacy and the subject of many of his post-Cubist masterpieces. He was 87 years old. A family spokesman announced this today.
Mara de la Concepcin Picasso had always lived in Paris. She was known to all as Maya. She was born on September 5, 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris from the painter’s relationship with the French model and muse Marie-Thrse Walter, with whom he had been friends since 1927.
A photographer by trade, she has devoted most of her life to studying and preserving her father’s legacy, curating publications and exhibitions. Maya was the second of Pablo’s four children. The eldest was his half-brother Paulo (1921-1975), born of the artist’s marriage to the dancer Olga Khokhlova. He then had two younger half-brothers, Claude (born 1947) and Paloma (born 1949), born of his father’s relationship with the French painter Françoise Gilot.
Picasso adored his eldest daughter: the arrival of this little girl was a revolution in the life of the artist, who never erected walls between his privacy and his own creative universe, so much so that he made her the subject of several masterpieces and dedicated a series of paintings to her to her: Maya la poupe (1938), Maya la poupe et au cheval (1938), Maya au costume de marin (1938), Maya au bateau (1938) or Maya au tablier (1938).
In 1960, Maya married Pierre Widmaier, a marine, with whom she had three children: Olivier, Richard and Diana. Diana Widmaier Picasso is an art historian specializing in the work of her grandfather Pablo, whose 2017 exhibition Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter she curated for the Gagosian Gallery in Paris and featured Picasso’s portraits of his eldest daughter.
In 2021, Diana curated Picasso for the Picasso Museum in Paris with a small unpublished treasure trove of her great-grandfather’s work, conceived purely as entertainment for her daughter Maya.
In October 2021, Maya Picasso made her final public appearance in a room at the Picasso Museum in Paris, surrounded by her son Olivier and daughter Diana, to donate six paintings, a sketchbook, a statue and an ethnographic work. Only one painting was shown for the occasion, Enfant la sucette assis sous une chaise, a symbolic image because it depicts Maya as a child, hidden under the furniture, as a dark omen of the impending world war, explained Olivier Widmaier Picasso.
December 20, 2022 (change December 20, 2022 | 19:38)
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