Picasso’s daughter and subject of a number of his portraits
MAYA WIDMAIERPICASSO, who has died aged 87, was the eldest daughter of Pablo Picasso, by his mistress Marie-thérèse Walter, and the subject of some of his most touching portraits.
Picasso was 46 and still married, unhappily, to Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by the beautiful, blonde Marie-thérèse after spotting her in 1927 outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Within a week they had become lovers, although at 17 she was under the age of consent. She became his muse for voluptuous portraits, and on September 5 1935 she gave birth to Maya.
Picasso’s tenderness for his daughter was reflected in canvases, sketches, poems and letters. While she was a small child, he kept a record of her development in sketchbooks, showing her asleep, sucking her thumb, dreaming, or roaring with laughter, and painted a series of affectionate cubist portraits of her.
When war was declared, in September 1939, Mariethérèse and Maya were on holiday in Royan, north of Bordeaux, and stayed there until the spring of 1941. At first Picasso concealed the fact that soon after Maya’s birth he had begun an affair with the exotic halfyugoslavian, half-french photographer Dora Maar. But Marie-thérèse soon found out, and as Picasso recalled: “Marie-thérèse turned to me and said: ‘Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?’ I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out for themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.”
He immortalised the moment in a painting, Birds In A Cage, in which a black dove (Dora) fights with a beautiful white dove (Marie-thérèse). The black dove won. Dora moved in with Picasso while Mariethérèse and Maya were installed in a nearby flat.
Maya was brought up believing “the fiction that her father worked a long way away”, as his subsequent lover Françoise Gilot explained. But he often visited her and her mother.
During the war years, Maya recalled that her father made her toys including paper theatres with characters and animals. Her daughter, Diana Widmaierpicasso, discovered a collection of sketchbooks full of playful scenes for Maya to colour in, along with exquisite origami sculptures of birds that he made for her from exhibition invitation cards.
More strangely, Maya recalled Picasso giving her his nail clippings, “because he was very frightened that people would... take them and cast some kind of spell. He gave them to my mother or me because he knew we loved him and we weren’t going to cast a spell on him.”
Maya continued to pose for Picasso from time to time until she was 18. Later on, however, father and daughter drifted apart and towards the end of his life she never tried to visit him, fearing she might be turned away.
In 1960 she married Pierre Widmaier, a naval captain, and had two sons and a daughter, for whom she worked to create a happy, normal family life.
After Picasso’s death in 1973 his survivors became embroiled in a seven-year legal battle over inheritance which was eventually settled after the French government passed a law allowing illegitimate children to inherit, as a result of which Maya got one-tenth of her father’s estate.
By this time she had lost her mother, too: in 1977 Marie-thérèse hanged herself in the garage of her house in southern France, having spent most of her life hoping that Picasso would come back to her.
Maya Widmaier-picasso dedicated much of her life to preserving her father’s legacy and guarding the personal mementos he gave her. After the death of her half-brother Paulo in 1975 she established herself as the main authority and authenticator of his work. Last year the Picasso Museum in Paris mounted an exhibition of works by the artist gifted to the museum by Maya.
Her husband and children survive her.