Perhaps the biggest tourist attraction among Paris’s smaller museums is the Musée Picasso in the historic Hôtel Salé located in the Marais’ rue de Thorigny. The restless titan of twentieth-century modernism might seem out of place in the spacious seventeenth-century townhouse. Or perhaps not: Picasso, though a member of the Communist Party, enjoyed classically elegant surroundings, even spending his later years in a château in the South of France.

Picasso, superstitious and too busy to die, never made a will. Death did take him in 1973, however, and his survivors donated his artworks to the French state in lieu of paying high inheritance taxes on those items. This family donation of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and other creations was large enough for its own museum, hence the Musée Picasso opened in 1985. In 2021, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s daughter with Marie-Thérése Walter, donated nine other works: six paintings, two sculptures, and a sketchbook. The museum has created a new exhibition, “New Masterpieces. The Donation of Maya Ruiz-Picasso,” to place these newly donated works within Picasso’s oeuvre.1 Another exhibition, “Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter of Pablo,” displays the paintings and drawings Picasso made of his daughter during her early years as well as other ephemera from their relationship, such as paper cutouts, a children’s theater he made for her, and even her first passport (which bore her mother’s surname).2

Pablo Picasso, Don José Ruiz, le père de l’artiste, 1895, A Coruña, Spain, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Rachel Prat © Succession Picasso 2022.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition on Maya’s donation shows its earliest work first: a portrait of the artist’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco, painted by an adolescent Picasso in the year 1895. His father was a painter himself, and his painting Palamar (1878), which depicts pigeons, his favorite subject, hangs adjacent to his son’s portrait. Unable to earn a living from his art, Picasso’s father became a drawing teacher and a curator in a local museum. Upon discovering his son’s superior painting ability, José gave up painting and concentrated on encouraging the young Pablo. The exhibition has surrounded the donated portrait with other works of the precocious Picasso including L’homme à la casquette (1895), which shows much the same stark Spanish style and gray background that Picasso—more interested in line than color—favored at the time.

There is one newly donated work that is not by Picasso: a “Tiki” statue from the Marquesas Isles in Polynesia. The statue is grouped together with other works that show the strong influence of primitive art on Picasso and his Cubist period, such as a self-portrait, completed in 1906 and on display next to the tiki. Picasso, who possessed a somewhat elemental character, valued primitive art as much for incantatory as aesthetic reasons.

Maya Ruiz-Picasso’s donation also includes two paintings her father made in the years just after her birth:  L’enfant à la succete sous un chaise (The Child with a Pacifier under a Chair, 1938) and a portrait of Maya’s grandmother Emilie Marguerite Walter in 1939. The Child with a Pacifier under a Chair appears as a self-portrait of the artist as a child, though Picasso painted it at the age of fifty-eight. Some skeptics of Picasso’s genius have joked that their own children can paint like that, too. In a sense that was what Picasso had in mind in 1938. Picasso is often quoted as saying that “it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Throughout the 1930s, Picasso was painting figures with their eyes, ears, and noses out of place and with enormous, ill-formed hands. Also in that child-like style, his portrait of Emilie Marguerite Walter depicted her with a nose shaped like the number eight. Notwithstanding this artificial deformity, the woman’s sweet face and benevolence is apparent in surprisingly warm shades of gray, making her a comforting presence in a world that seems to have lost its hinges.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait d’Émilie Marguerite Walter (known as Mémé), 1939, Royan, France, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Rachel Prat © Succession Picasso 2022.

Picasso enjoyed turning utilitarian objects into works of art, such as the fertility goddess made from a tiny gas stove. New to the museum, the sculpture is placed next to a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Urinoir. Despite its small size, Picasso’s sculpture has the magical power he intended: the ability to redefine art.

Picasso’s humor was often apparent in his versions—as comical as they are reverent—of old masterpieces. Another part of Maya’s donation are El Bobo (1959), inspired by Jusepe de Ribera’s Le Pied-Bot (1642), and a notebook from the early Sixties, containing his notes for several paintings after Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). El Bobo shows a boy holding a carafe of wine in one hand and a frying pan with two eggs in the other, a crude depiction of his son Claude, then aged eleven. Though amusing, it lacks the poignant power and resonance of Ribera’s club-footed boy.

Pablo Picasso, Tête d’homme, 1971, Mougins, France, Musée Picasso. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Rachel Prat © Succession Picasso 2022.

The newest work donated to the museum is Tête d’homme (Head of a Man, 1971), completed two years before Picasso’s death and originally displayed in “Picasso 1970–1972,” an exhibition—held weeks after the artist’s death—of the last phase of his career. Even while reaching the end of his “strange, eventful history,” he was not “sans everything” despite some of the criticism the exhibition received at the time. Tête d’homme shows a dissipated youth with long, blonde hair typical of Seventies style. To accompany this painting in this last room, there are several other works from the posthumous exhibition. The most engaging is the sketch Le Jeune Peintre (1972), an artist full of hope and brandishing his brush as his sword. There is yet something wistfully melancholic about this painting: youth seen through the eyes of age.

“Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter of Pablo” reexamines Picasso’s work made in the years after he welcomed his first daughter. In her early years, Picasso often drew his daughter, just as he had her mother. His painting Première Neige, depicting Maya’s first glimpse of snow, appeared in 1938 based on a photograph the year before. Maya and her Doll (1938) gives his daughter the face of a grown young woman rather than a child. A pencil drawing of Maya made on February 13, 1951, makes the adolescent girl appear younger than Picasso’s paintings of her in infancy. He and his daughter remained close for many years, and Picasso even had her employed as an assistant on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s documentary, Le mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso, 1956). Their relationship ended in 1960 when Maya married, and Picasso, who must have been a jealous tyrant towards his daughter, never spoke to her again. Nevertheless, Maya has adopted his name and spent much of her life promoting her father’s achievement as witnessed by these two exhibitions.


  1.   “New Masterpieces. La Dation Maya Ruiz-Picasso” opened at the Musée Picasso, Paris, on April 16, 2022, and remains on view through December 31, 2022. 
  2.   “Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter of Pablo” opened at the Musée Picasso, Paris, on April 16, 2022, and remains on view through December 31, 2022. 

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