Picasso’s granddaughter is rarely seated
Spotted, Tuesday, 54 floors up, at Canoe restaurant, inside the TD Bank Tower: a Picasso.
Not framed.
Pablo’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, was doing lunch with a lively bunch. Earlier, she had appeared on the floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange — in Valentino, no less — where the Toronto-based luxury brand that she co-founded, Mene (already a Vogue-endorsed disrupter in the jewelry realm) was going public.
“Ah, there it is,” she sighed blithely later that afternoon on a whirl through the Art Gallery of Ontario. We were on a hunt for a particular painting by her blue-ribbon ancestor, a giant of 20th century art, father of Cubism, as well as playboy of modern celebrity culture. I was looking at her looking at the visual puzzle that is Seated Woman (1926-27), which appears to depict not one woman, but three.
“A complex family dynamic,” reads part of the painting label, I noticed.
When I sought to ask about the “long shadow” that her grandfather casts on her life — all the more bewildering, perhaps, given that she was born in 1974, one year after he died — Widmaier Picasso stopped me right there. Widening with a warm, gregarious expression — her mien resembling something of a younger Meryl Streep — she replied, “No, not a shadow. I do not see it that way. Only light.”
“You can’t get yourself too trapped in Picasso World,” she conceded a little while later, while talking about her training as a Sorbonne-educated art historian, and the breadth of her own career.
Not to mention, the role she has fallen into as something of a spear holder for the next generation of Picassos — which is eminently obvious from her proclivity in the social pages. There was — bien sur — the party she threw in New York last year, held in honour of her friend Ryan Murphy, the uber-TV producer, which brought out a glittering swirl, including everyone from
Robert De Niro to Julianne Moore to Ansel Elgort.
There is her front-row cred during Paris Fashion Week, at the Dior show, as well as her cameo in a video that Jay Z filmed some years back, as part of a six-hour performance piece for the song known as — what else? — “Picasso Baby.” (“I’m the modern-day Pablo,” he rapped to her face in a scene of considerable irony.)
When talking to her, it becomes clear how robust her schedule is, and how much social mojo she wields. She mentioned recently visiting Malaga, Spain (where Pablo was born), hanging out in Sardinia over the summer with members of the Missoni clan, as well as a trip to the Centre Pompidou’s brand new gallery in Shanghai.
Turning to the subject of the jewelry concept that she was in Toronto to support, she conceded that she is asked almost every week to lend her name to something, and/or do a “capsule collection” for a brand. She almost always says no.
“I am very cautious about leveraging my legacy,” she says. But there was something about Mene, co-founded by Roy Sebag, CEO of Goldmoney Inc., that spoke to her love of history and her study of art markets: crafting pure 24-karat gold and platinum “investment jewelry” that is sold by gram weight, it woos customers to buy pieces, monitor their value over time and sell or exchange them at market prices.
The way in which the “price is transparent” and the manner in which it is “reinventing tradition … like in old Egypt, like in India,” is what excites Widmaier Picasso.
Inspecting her poise, and her warmth, I ask if she perhaps feels freer from the soap opera that afflicted her mother’s generation — considering that papa Pablo had four children by three different women (three out of wedlock), all of whom he documented in his work, and spill from an overall oeuvre that read like a diary of his life.
Widmaier Picasso, one of seven grandchildren — the descendant of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the painter’s greatest muse — answers plainly. “Of course.”
All the tumults spurred by love and obsession — not to mention the discombobulation created in the 1970s when Pablo, famously, did not leave a will — are a thing of the past. All the different strands of the family are in contact now.
Her aunt Paloma Picasso, the illustrious jet-setter in the 1970s and ’80s, “looks the same,” she enthuses. “Still iconic!”
Unlike the tremulous personal life that formed the path of her own mother, Maya, now 84, Widmaier Picasso grew up in a two-parent home with her siblings. First in Marseille and later in Paris. Her father was a one-time officer in the French navy. Her mother, preoccupied with the settling of Picasso’s estate, made her mark by organizing exhibitions of her own collection.
Finding her own way, young Diana studied a wide variety of subjects, including music and theatre, before eventually settling on a master’s degree in law and art history. Jobs fol- lowed in the Old Master drawings department at the Met in New York and at Sotheby’s in London. Having curated a number of exhibitions zeroing in on her grandfather — including one that just opened at the Villa Borghese in Rome — she has also spent more than a decade compiling the first complete scholarly inventory of Picasso’s 2,000 sculptures.
Having just moved back to France after living in New York City for a decade — “Anna Wintour told me I will only ever see you as a Parisian,” she says — she mentioned that a lot of her peers have done the same recently. The Macron effect.
“There is an energy,” she says. It is not the only life upheaval: 19 months ago, she welcomed Luna, a baby girl. The father, she alluded, is Swedish. The Picassos go on.
With any number of projects on the go, I am reminded what Didier Ottinger, a curator and friend in Paris, once said about her: “She could ride on the name in her passport, but she doesn’t. She’s a real art historian. She does the work.”
Asked what she thought of Genius, the recent miniseries in which Antonio Banderas played Pablo, Widmaier Picasso gave her A-Ok: “He was great.”
Does she ever dream about her larger-than-life grandfather? She sat on the question for a bit.
“If I do, I am not sure if I am dreaming.”