Pablo Picasso: his daughter confides in their relationship for the 50th anniversary of his death

Paloma Picasso, the last of Pablo Picasso’s four children, born of his union out of wedlock with Françoise Gilot, described Friday on France Inter the “heavy but full of love” legacy of her father, whose 50th anniversary is commemorated on Saturday. death.

Asked about the legacy of the monument to world painting, a cause of “suffering” for many of its descendants, “I would say it’s heavy but there was a lot of love behind it,” replied the wife of 73-year-old businesswoman.

The one who has built an image of fashion icon with red lips and smoky eyes, creator of perfumes, dresses and fashion accessories, called her relationship with her father, for whom she posed, “absolutely magical and wonderful” during her childhood.

“A very quiet little girl”, she was “allowed” to stay in the workshop of the master, an inveterate smoker of Gitane, who made her “little characters to color” with the empty packets. In 1963, as a teenager, his mother’s book, Living with Picasso, appeared, where Françoise Gilot described the painter as a “tyrannical, superstitious and selfish being”.

Best-seller in the United States, it will be rejected in France, where intellectuals sign a petition against its publication in French. “Lots of people I’ve known stop saying hello to me. It teaches you what life is like very, very young. I’m not allowed to go see my dad anymore,” which is “very painful,” she recalled.

It was “not a book against Picasso, it humanized Picasso. It was a positive thing for me because making him like an inescapable god was a way to dehumanize him and make him less interesting,” she added.

At this time, Paloma Picasso was “evicted”, along with her older brother Claude, from the life of their 83-year-old father, and his last companion, Jacqueline Roque, “furious”, according to her.

As French law initially did not authorize the recognition of births outside of marriage, the children of Françoise Gilot and their half-sister Maya (daughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter) only belatedly, thanks to a legislative change. , the name of their father, who remained married to Olga Khokhlova until 1955, after the birth of Paloma and Claude.

Françoise Gilot, 101 years old and baptized by Picasso “the woman who says no”, is the only one of her companions to have left him to pursue her own career as a painter in the United States.