At the end of September 2021, she had sold eight unpublished works by the master, through a donation, to the Parisian museum dedicated to her father.
Maya Ruiz-Picasso, eldest daughter of the Spanish master and subject of several of his paintings, died Tuesday at the age of 87, lawyer Richard Malka told AFP, citing a statement from the family. “Maya Ruiz-Picasso passed away peacefully this morning surrounded by her family, at the age of 87“, Indicates the press release, without giving further explanations.
Born on September 5, 1935, María de la Concepción, nicknamed Maya, is the first daughter of Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, met in 1927. The arrival of this child will change the life of the artist, who died in 1973 , and had four children. She is currently the subject of a double exhibition at the Picasso National Museum in Paris, on her relationship to her father as well as on the dation and the donations she made to the French State.
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Maya with doll (1938), Maya with doll and horse (1938), Maya in sailor costume (1938), Maya at the boat (1938) or Apron Maya (1938) are thus some of the unstructured portraits, all in color, of little Maya currently presented in Paris.
“He’s the only person in the world that I know who didn’t talk about Pablo Picasso but about dad. (…) I think that testifies to this exceptional relationship that she had had with him”, reacted to AFP his son, Olivier Widmaier Picasso.
In September 2021, Maya Ruiz Picasso had donated to the State, six paintings, a sketchbook, a statue and an ethnographic work, now on display at the Picasso National Museum in Paris. This tax system makes it possible to donate works of art and national treasures, by way of payment of inheritance tax or wealth tax. It plays an essential role for modern art, whose very high values make it difficult for a public museum to buy. André Malraux had imagined this liberality by thinking in large part of the fate of the colossal work of Picasso, who left 50,000 works after his death in 1973, when the country had, before the war, only three of his works in its public collections.
Thanks to the law on donations, passed in 1972, the Picasso National Museum could be launched. The heirs donated 203 paintings, 158 sculptures, 88 ceramics and more than 3000 drawings to the state. “The ministry had come to ‘choose’ the works in succession, endeavoring to build a coherent museum complex”, recalls Olivier Widmaier Picasso. This was not the case in 2021, the nine works donated by Maya having been chosen this time by the heiress herself. Fiscal secrecy requires, we do not know how much represented the effort made by the State, in the name of heritage. But at the time of the donation, Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy, summarized for Le Figaro: “The benefit of this donation, the principle of which was desired by Malraux, is twofold and reciprocal.”
Among the works transferred in 2021, Child with a pacifier sitting under a chair. A symbolic painting since it probably represents Maya as a child, hidden under the furniture, as a dark omen of the world conflict to come, explained Olivier Widmaier Picasso, present at the press conference alongside his sister Diana at the time of the donation. Maya Ruiz-Picasso was the mother of three children.
“After the death of her father, she always had the sense of a mission, that these works should return to the State, for all. That was the dation,” entrusted his son Olivier on Tuesday.
France and Spain will celebrate in 2023 the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso through several exhibitions on both sides of the Pyrenees.