2023-08-28 16:06:47
Kultur Claude Picasso ✝
The lord of Pablo Picasso’s legacy
As of: 4:06 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
Claude Picasso with his father Pablo
What: AFP/JEAN MEUNIER
Not only was he the son of one of the most important artists of the 20th century, he also had the responsibility of keeping his memory alive. A task with which he not only made friends. An obituary.
Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, being the son of a world-famous father and a proud, confident mother remains his secret. Claude Ruiz-Picasso never talked much about his childhood years in the Olympus of painters in southern France.
When the aged Picasso and his late love Françoise Gilot separated in 1953, Claude was just six years old. And the painter reacted to the beautiful but unsparing life report that Gilot published in retrospect (“Vivre avec Picasso”) by blocking contact. Even at the funeral service after Picasso’s death in 1973, no one from the Gilot family was allowed to be present – not least because of the widow Jacqueline Roque, who was betrayed and neglected countless times.
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Claude also went his way without a protective home. He hired himself out as a photographer, worked for Richard Avedon in New York and otherwise took care of his father’s gigantic work.
In 1975, a French law appointed him executor of the extended family. And he dedicated himself to this great task with all his energy. With the “Picasso Administration” in Paris, the binding control and switching center for all disputed attribution and authentication issues was established. Whereby competition was to be feared only from the eldest Picasso daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso, who upheld the memory of her mother, the early Picasso love Marie-Thérèse Walter, quite independently by preparing her own expert opinions and reports for decades.
Claude Picasso in front of his father’s painting “Femme dans un fauteuil” from 1927
What: AFP/SEBASTIEN BOZON
However, Claude was not particularly happy in the service of his father. He was never in agreement with the unspectacular policy of the Musée Picasso in Paris, which was committed to science. And the fact that he sold the global brand “Picasso” to the car manufacturer Citroën in 1999 earned him criticism from all ranks.
Even sister Paloma, who is two years younger and who has now taken over the “administration”, is said not to have been happy with the deal. Claude has now died at the age of 76 – just a few months after the death of his mother Françoise Gilot, who continued to live a self-determined life as an artist after her Picasso affair.
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