A photographer by profession, she has dedicated most of her life to studying and conserving her father’s legacy. Pablo Picasso adored her, so much so that she dedicated a series of works to her
dead Maya Ruiz-Picassothe eldest daughter of the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), custodian of his father’s legacy and subjects of many of his post-Cubist masterpieces. He was 87 years old. A family spokesman announced it today.
Mara de la Concepcin Picasso had always lived in Paris. She was known to all as Maya. She was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, on September 5, 1935, from the painter’s relationship with the French model and muse Marie-Thrse Walter, with whom he had been romantically linked since 1927.
A photographer by profession, she has dedicated most of her life to the study and conservation of 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 Chochlova. She then had two younger half-brothers, Claude (born in 1947) and Paloma (born in 1949), born of her 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 artist’s life, who never built walls between the private sphere and his own creative universe, so much so that he made it the subject of several masterpieces and dedicated a series of paintings to it: Maya the stern (1938), Maya the stern and on a horse (1938), Maya in a sailor suit (1938), Maya on a boat (1938) or Maya on an apron (1938).
In 1960 Maya married Pierre Widmaier, a soldier in the navy, with whom she had three children: Olivier, Richard and Diana. Diana Widmaier Picasso an art historian specializing in the work of her grandfather Pablo, whose 2017 exhibition she curated for the Gagosian Gallery in Paris, Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter, featuring Picasso’s portraits of her eldest daughter.
In 2021 Diana Picasso had curated for the Picasso Museum in Paris with a small unpublished treasure of works by her great grandfather, conceived as pure entertainment for her daughter Maya.
In October 2021 Maya Picasso appeared in public for the last time in a room of 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 painting, since it represents Maya as a child, hidden under the furniture, as a dark omen of the imminent world war, explained Olivier Widmaier Picasso.
December 20, 2022 (change December 20, 2022 | 19:38)
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