A few years ago Diana Widmaier-Picasso started to lock herself away in an
eyrie above the Place Vendôme in Paris - only steps from the Ritz - to try
to compile a complete catalogue of the sculptures of Pablo Picasso, her
grandfather. She started work in 2003 and the first volume should appear
next year; there's a lot to get through. And along the way she developed a
fascination - what was Picasso doing on the day she was born?
For someone with her scholarship and knowledge of the man, working that out
should have been easy. “I was looking at the drawings,” she says, “because
he did so many, and dated them so precisely, in 1971 but I was surprised I
could never find the date.” She had all but given up and then she uncovered
a ceramic, a head of a woman. And who does she think she is? “I don't know,”
she says. “But she looks strangely like Marie-Thérèse.”
Diana is the daughter of Maya, Picasso's child by Marie-Thérèse Walter, the
woman for whom he left his first wife, the Russian dancer Olga Koklova, and
with whom he had an affair in 1927-35. It's a period in Picasso's work that
is famous for its fruitful, sunny eroticism, and his portrayals of
Marie-Thérèse are distinctive for their warm curves - hence Diana's
suspicions about that ceramic. But she can never be sure - she was born just
two years before Picasso died and she never met him; neither did her two
elder brothers. In fact, hardly anyone saw him in those years because he was
living in increasing seclusion near Mougins, in the South of France, with
his last wife, Jacqueline Roque.
“In some families,” she says, “the last wife doesn't want her husband to be
too involved in social life - even Picasso's friends had difficulty seeing
him. My mother didn't want to insist.”
But Diana is being diplomatic. Maya saw little of her father: she lived with
the artist's Spanish family in Barcelona when she was studying but “when she
got married, and was 25 or 26, she set up her own family”. (Maya married
Pierre Widmaier, whose trade was merchant shipping.) And Picasso effectively
shut out his other children, Claude and Paloma, after their mother,
Françoise Gilot, published a tell-all biography of their relationship. And
then Roque capped it all by ensuring that many of the family were barred
from his funeral. There has been good fortune but also terrible sorrow for
Picasso's descendants.
But all the family have had more time of late to discover what Picasso was
doing behind the walls at Mougins. Those last years have always been
associated with his interest in Old Masters; it is said that he used a slide
projector to throw huge images of them across the walls of his studio. And
last year the Grand Palais in Paris assembled a survey of those pictures, a
version of which is coming to the National Gallery this month, entitled
Picasso: Challenging the Past. In fact the show challenges the notion that
it was only in those last years that the artist became preoccupied with the
past. The exhibition ranges from Self-Portrait with a Wig - which he
produced in 1897, when he was 16, styling himself as an 18th-century
nobleman - to pictures such as the Cubist-styled Nu Couché, which he
produced four years before his death, and which echoes a long tradition of
reclining nudes. What the show reveals is an artist less consumed with
reworking the world than reworking art history. “What I admire so much is
how stubborn he is,” Diana says. “He's obsessed with the image. He worked
and reworked, copied and deconstructed, transformed and made it his own.”
For her, the show is particularly enthralling: she's the first of the family
to have seriously immersed herself in art history. Moreover, for many years
she specialised in Master Drawings at Sotheby's, and was an intern at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York. She moved back to New York last year, where
she is closer to her boyfriend, the fashion photographer Gilles Bensimon.
Meeting her at the Met, I found Diana to have a remarkable resemblance to
the hard, almost sculptural features of her grandfather.
Recently Diana has been doing her own research into Picasso's relationship
with her grandmother. She no doubt wants to rehabilitate her, as
Marie-Thérèse has suffered at the hands of biographers. “They have a
tendency to copy one another,” she says, “and the first one who didn't like
her was Roland Penrose [one of the artist's earliest biographers], who
introduced Picasso to Dora Maar [his next mistress].”
If Diana is to do this, though, she'll have to explain why, in 1977,
Marie-Thérèse killed herself. The woman was certainly damaged by Picasso's
passing, yet according to Diana, “they wrote to each other for a long time
but, to my knowledge, they didn't see each other after 1955”. So explaining
the suicide is difficult: “Having got to know her through the letters,” she
adds, “I would say that she was a very emotional person, very emotionally
disturbed. She was a much more complex person than the portraits suggest.”
The fact is that each time Picasso loved and left, there was ugliness in his
wake. Olga Koklova would pursue him for many years, quite unhinged, after he
left her for Marie-Thérèse. Jacqueline Roque shot herself in 1986. Paolo,
Picasso's son by Olga, drank heavily; and among Paolo's children Pablito
committed suicide and Marina offloaded her angst in a memoir. (The latter
caused such acrimony that it drove Olivier to write a biography. As ever,
though, his sister is cautious. “I don't really know Marina; I'd like to
know her. Everyone in the family feels differently about Picasso, and
perhaps her father ... I can't judge. She might not write the same book
today.”)
I asked her whether she thought that Picasso's stature, and his behaviour, had
damaged the family. “It's difficult,” she says. “It's almost like Picasso
and Old Masters. It's a spiritual relationship you have, you have to
transform it and bring it somewhere else. I think each of us in the family
have been trying to do that, it might take more time for some than others.”
She believes that the new show will enable the public to see the Masters with
more clarity. “People tend to see Old Masters as things they have to revere
- they don't feel a connection. But looking at them through Picasso's eyes I
think people can see why these older pictures, in their time, were so
revolutionary.”
Picasso first saw Velázquez's Las Meninas on a trip to Madrid with his father
when he was 15, but it was not so sacred to him that he couldn't subject its
motifs to mutation, as he did in Infanta Margarita, from 1957. For some,
works such as this are typical of all that is hasty and thoughtless in
Picasso's late work. But the show also includes softer, earlier work, such
as Nude with Joined Hands, from 1906, a picture that may not draw on a
specific source but is happy to be part of the long tradition of the nude.
Although the National's exhibition goes some way to overturning the idea that
Picasso looked to Masters only in his old age, Diana still subscribes to the
theory that he changed style when he changed woman. “I wrote a book about
Picasso's art and eroticism, so I strongly believe that there was a real
link between his life and his art - he was the first one to say it. His life
was important: his emotions, his friendship, his loves, his passions - and
he was definitely a man of passion. But also the homage, the tribute he's
paying to Raphael, or Poussin, that's important. I was touched to find a
book on Poussin that my mother inherited from her father. He has outlined
the words ‘Picasso, painter of the woman'.”
Those looking for that Picasso will find no shortage of images in the new
show. There are two pictures of Marie-Thérèse, Sleeping Nude with Blonde
Hair, and Nude in a Red Armchair, both from 1932. The only disappointment is
that it doesn't include La Rêve, from 1932, the picture that hit the news in
2006 when the casino magnate Steve Wynn attempted to sell it for a record
$139 million. Unfortunately, Wynn put his elbow through it and the deal was
off.
Finally, I moved on to happier thoughts, and to her own life. Wasn't Diana
dating a much older man? And hasn't Marina married an older man? Is there a
pattern? “It's about the same age difference, in fact!” she says. “Of
course, I think about it, but I also think like my grandfather - you have to
live in the moment. There's no past, there's no future. I think people are
always questioning about love affairs, they always wonder what's behind
them. But you can never really enter the intimacy of two people. Anyway, if
there's one thing that Picasso has taught us all - not just the family -
it's to live with freedom.”
Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747
2885), Feb 25-June 7; Diana Widmaier-Picasso gives a talk about Picasso and
Cranach at the National Gallery on May 13
