Paloma Picasso, the youngest of Pablo Picasso’s four children, vividly remembers sitting on the floor of her father’s studio, drawing on paper as he worked at his easel.
“Because I was a very quiet little girl, I was able to stay with him,” she said in a recent interview. “He would let me stay next to him while he was painting because I could spend hours without uttering a word.
“I knew we were not supposed to touch anything,” she added. “He would always say, ‘You can touch with your eyes, but not with your hand.’”
Now Ms. Picasso has helped organize a show of her father’s work at Gagosian gallery, which opened on April 18. Some of the pieces in the exhibition have been in her possession and have never been seen by the public.
“The idea was to do a show where it wouldn’t be chronological,” she said. “It would be more the different works talking to each other.”
The show, “Picasso: Tête-à-tête,” is an unusual role for Ms. Picasso, given that for the last 45 years she has focused on her jewelry collection for Tiffany & Company.
About two years ago she took over the stewardship of her father’s estate, after the death of her brother Claude Ruiz-Picasso (Ruiz was the name of Picasso’s paternal grandfather). The Picasso Administration manages copyright issues and licensing deals. .
On a recent afternoon at 980 Madison Avenue — the show is Gagosian’s last in that building because it has been leased to other tenants — Ms. Picasso walked through the gallery as her father’s work was being installed.
Among the highlights she pointed out was “Femme au Vase de Houx (Marie-Thérèse),” an oil and charcoal on canvas from 1937, which she used to keep in New York and then in Switzerland, where she now lives.
She also paused before “Nu drappe, assis dans un fauteuil,” a 1923 oil painting of Picasso’s first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, nude and sitting in an armchair, that at first looks like a simple line drawing but that Ms. Picasso said is actually very layered. “It’s a very touching, moving portrait,” she said. “You can see that it’s a real person who’s there.”
The exhibition includes six drawings, 24 sculptures and 38 paintings. They date from throughout the artist’s career, 1896 to 1972, and showcase Picasso’s expansive range. (She refers to her father as “Pablo.”)
“Some of them are really special, beautiful examples of various periods — from an incredible self-portrait to a later Marie-Thérèse,” said Larry Gagosian, referring to Picasso’s muse and mistress. “It’s very exciting to show works by arguably the most famous artist that’s ever lived that haven’t been seen.”
Only a few pieces are for sale — prices are not publicly disclosed — and Ms. Picasso said she aimed to show the many attributes of her father through the artworks. “They can be both very soft and strong at the same time,” she said. “It’s all of the things that make Picasso who he is. I think we are really doing him justice here.”
Elegant and regal at 76, Ms. Picasso radiates deep affection and respect for her father, though she said she is well aware of the flaws that complicated his relationship to her mother, Françoise Gilot, a French painter 40 years his junior, who died in 2023.
“He was difficult at times, and I could see it with my own eyes,” she said. “Most people don’t behave well all the time. Why should we expect him to be perfect?”
Ms. Picasso and her brother Claude were the children of the couple; Gilot left the artist in 1953, and angered him with her 1964 memoir, “Life With Picasso,” in which she described his abuse, including an occasion when he held a lit cigarette against her cheek. Pablo Picasso severed contact with both Claude and Paloma after the book’s publication, and never contacted them again, which Ms. Picasso has described as painful.
“When my mother wrote the book, she wanted to make him less of a god and more of a man,” Ms. Picasso said in the gallery interview. “And it doesn’t make him less great where he’s great. He’s the greatest. But he can also have weaknesses. And that’s OK.
“Even though you can criticize him,” she continued, “that doesn’t make his work irrelevant.”
Despite her father’s reputation for mistreating women, Ms. Picasso has insisted that he was a man of his time and that some of the accusations are exaggerated. “My father didn’t only have relationships with very young girls,” she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia last year. “He was 40 years older than my mother, but she was not a girl at all. I don’t think he was a man who abused women or thought they were inferior to men.”
The presence of Ms. Picasso herself permeates the Gagosian exhibition — in a portrait of her holding a doll, which has her face; in the wooden dolls that her father made for her.
There are also black-and-white family photographs, including one of Ms. Picasso in a short black bob and flip-flops, perched on a stool next to her father and their dog.
“This is the dining room,” she said. “We would be having lunch and then — the minute lunch was finished — he would push everything and just start working right there.”
Because her mother was also an artist, “the painting and the living were completely intermixed,” Ms. Picasso added. “It was one world.”
Young Paloma was shy and didn’t always love having her father stopped on the street for autographs. But then she had something of an epiphany upon realizing that she would want to meet the daughter of Charlie Chaplin. “I thought, ‘Well, if I want to meet Geraldine Chaplin,” she said, “I should not be upset when people want to meet me because I’m the daughter of Picasso.’”
She was 24 when her father died in 1973, and felt in part responsible for preserving, protecting and promoting his legacy. “When you are the daughter of somebody that famous — and for such good reasons — you have this sense that you have to share with the rest of the world,” she said.
She and Claude entered a legal fight that in 1974 established them as legitimate heirs. And in 1989, after years of squabbling among all Picasso’s heirs including his widow, Jacqueline Roque, over the distribution of the thousands of artworks he left behind and commercial rights to his name, a French court appointed Claude as the estate’s administrator.
Claude sometimes clashed with his half sibling Maya Ruiz-Picasso, the daughter of the French model Marie-Thérèse Walter, over how to run the administration. The estate’s proceeds are now divided among all of Pablo’s descendants. (Maya died in 2022 at 87; Paloma and Claude’s other half sibling, Paulo — Picasso’s son with the dancer Olga Khokhlova — died at 54 in 1975.)
Ms. Picasso said her brother Claude, with whom she described herself as close, did “a fabulous job at the Picasso administration.”
As head of the administration herself now, Ms. Picasso said she is trying to incorporate her family members. “The nephews and nieces, they’ve all grown up. And they wanted for it to be more collegial,” she said. “I’m at the head of it, but I do report to them much more than Claude had to, and when I make a decision, I take their point of view in much more.”
Having established an independently successful career as a designer, Ms. Picasso said she feels ready to take on a greater role in the estate. “I made every effort for my work not to be connected to my father, which is why now I can do it,” she said. “I’ve proven to myself that I can exist on my own merits. I think I had to prove to myself that I could be worth something on my own.”
Picasso: Tête-à-tête
Through July 3, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-744-2313, gagosian.com.
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for nearly 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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