Picasso heirs donate works to pay tax bill
HER father Pablo was the genius behind an estimated 13,500 paintings and 100,000 prints and engravings.
So it’s perhaps understandable that Maya Ruiz-Picasso decided to help pay off an inheritance tax bill by donating nine of his artworks to France.
At a ceremony in Paris yesterday the 86year-old handed over six Picasso paintings, two sculptures and a sketchbook. One, the child with a lollipop sitting under a chair, is said to represent her as a girl.
the oldest work is dated to 1895 – a traditional portrait of Picasso’s father, Jose Ruiz y Blasco, who was also a painter.
the most recent is Head of a Man, a portrait from summer 1971, two years before the artist’s death at the age of 91.
Bruno Le Maire, France’s economic minister, said at the ceremony: ‘It is an honour for our country to welcome these new artworks by Picasso. they will enrich and deepen our cultural heritage.’
According to a law established in 1968, individuals are allowed to pay taxes in France in kind with ‘recognised cultural goods of high artistic or historical value’.
In a statement the French Ministry of Culture
said the donation constituted a ‘precious and incomparable’ addition to the National Picasso Museum.
the pieces will be presented to the French public at the gallery in April.
Born in 1935, Maya Ruiz-Picasso is the daughter of Picasso and his lover and muse, the French model Marie-therese Walter.
In 2017 she featured in a Paris exhibition Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter, curated by her own daughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso.
While the value of the collection was not specified, the artworks could run into tens of millions of pounds.
two similar paintings of Maya, which were valued at around £36million, were stolen in Paris in 2007. they were recovered safely six months later by French police.
In 2015 a painting by Picasso became the world’s most expensive painting to sell at auction. Les Femmes d’Alger (the Women of Algiers) set a then record price of around £131million at Christie’s in New York.
It was reportedly bought by Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al thani, a former prime minister of Qatar. It was the last of 15 in a series started in 1954.
the nine donated works were heirlooms for Picasso’s children and include a statue in a Polynesian style of a type he kept as totems in his workshop.
In June, a Picasso painting was found under a bush nine years after it was stolen in a daring heist from Greece’s national gallery.
the art-loving builder who carried out the raid finally admitted the crime to police and told them where he hid Head of a Woman – having fled with it on public transport.