An overseas exhibition includes never-before-seen works from the personal collection of Paloma Picasso, who helped organise the show.
Paloma Picasso, the youngest of Pablo Picasso’s four children, vividly remembers sitting on the floor of her father’s studio, drawing on paper as he worked at his easel.
“Because I was a
“I knew we were not supposed to touch anything,” she added. “He would always say, ‘You can touch with your eyes, but not with your hand.’”
Now Picasso has helped organise a show of her father’s work at Gagosian gallery, which opened Friday. Some of the pieces in the exhibition have been in her possession and have never been seen by the public.
“The idea was to do a show where it wouldn’t be chronological,” she said. “It would be more the different works talking to each other.”
The show, Picasso: Tête-à-tête, is an unusual role for Picasso, given that for the last 45 years she has focused on her jewellery collection for Tiffany & Co.
About two years ago she took over the stewardship of her father’s estate, after the death of her brother Claude Ruiz-Picasso (Ruiz was the name of Picasso’s paternal grandfather). The Picasso Administration manages copyright issues and licensing deals.
On a recent afternoon at 980 Madison Ave, New York – the show is Gagosian’s last in that building because it has been leased to other tenants – Picasso walked through the gallery as her father’s work was being installed.
Among the highlights she pointed out was Femme au Vase de Houx (Marie-Thérèse), an oil and charcoal on canvas from 1937, which she used to keep in New York and then in Switzerland, where she now lives.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.She also paused before Nu drappe, assis dans un fauteuil, a 1923 oil painting of Picasso’s first wife, Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, nude and sitting in an armchair, that at first looks like a simple line drawing but that Paloma Picasso said is actually very layered. “It’s a very touching, moving portrait,” she said. “You can see that it’s a real person who’s there.”
The exhibition includes six drawings, 24 sculptures and 38 paintings. They date from throughout the artist’s career, 1896 to 1972, and showcase Picasso’s expansive range. (She refers to her father as “Pablo”.)
“Some of them are really special, beautiful examples of various periods – from an incredible self-portrait to a later Marie-Thérèse,” said Larry Gagosian, referring to Picasso’s muse and mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, a French model. “It’s very exciting to show works by arguably the most famous artist that’s ever lived that haven’t been seen.”
Only a few pieces are for sale – prices are not publicly disclosed – and Picasso said she aimed to show the many attributes of her father through the artworks. “They can be both very soft and strong at the same time,” she said. “It’s all of the things that make Picasso who he is. I think we are really doing him justice here.”
Elegant and regal at 76, Picasso radiates deep affection and respect for her father, though she said she is well aware of the flaws that complicated his relationship to her mother, Françoise Gilot, a French painter 40 years his junior, who died in 2023.
“He was difficult at times, and I could see it with my own eyes,” she said. “Most people don’t behave well all the time. Why should we expect him to be perfect?”
Paloma and her brother Claude were the children of the couple; Gilot left the artist in 1953, and angered him with her 1964 memoir, Life With Picasso, in which she described his abuse, including an occasion when he held a lit cigarette against her cheek. Picasso severed contact with Claude and Paloma after the book’s publication and never contacted them again, which Paloma Picasso has described as painful.
“When my mother wrote the book, she wanted to make him less of a god and more of a man,” Picasso said in the gallery interview. “And it doesn’t make him less great where he’s great. He’s the greatest. But he can also have weaknesses. And that’s OK.
“Even though you can criticise him,” she continued, “that doesn’t make his work irrelevant.”
Despite her father’s reputation for mistreating women, Paloma Picasso has insisted that he was a man of his time and that some of the accusations are exaggerated. “My father didn’t only have relationships with very young girls,” she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia last year. “He was 40 years older than my mother, but she was not a girl at all. I don’t think he was a man who abused women or thought they were inferior to men.”
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.The presence of Picasso herself permeates the Gagosian exhibition – in a portrait of her holding a doll, which has her face; in the wooden dolls that her father made for her.
There are also black-and-white family photographs, including one of Paloma Picasso in a short black bob and flip-flops, perched on a stool next to her father and their dog.
“This is the dining room,” she said. “We would be having lunch and then – the minute lunch was finished – he would push everything and just start working right there.”
Because her mother was also an artist, “the painting and the living were completely intermixed,” Picasso added. “It was one world.”
Young Paloma was shy and didn’t always love having her father stopped on the street for autographs. But then she had something of an epiphany upon realising that she would want to meet the daughter of Charlie Chaplin. “I thought, ‘Well, if I want to meet Geraldine Chaplin,’” she said, “I should not be upset when people want to meet me because I’m the daughter of Picasso.’”
She was 24 when her father died in 1973, and felt in part responsible for preserving, protecting and promoting his legacy. “When you are the daughter of somebody that famous – and for such good reasons – you have this sense that you have to share with the rest of the world,” she said.
She and Claude entered a legal fight that in 1974 established them as legitimate heirs. And in 1989, after years of squabbling among all Picasso’s heirs including his widow, Jacqueline Roque, over the distribution of the thousands of artworks he left behind and commercial rights to his name, a French court appointed Claude as the estate’s administrator.
Claude sometimes clashed with his half-sibling Maya Ruiz-Picasso, the daughter of Walter, over how to run the administration. The estate’s proceeds are now divided among all of the artist’s descendants. (Maya died in 2022 at 87; Paloma and Claude’s other half-sibling, Paulo – Picasso’s son with Khokhlova – died at 54 in 1975.)
Picasso said her brother Claude, with whom she described herself as close, did “a fabulous job at the Picasso administration”.
As head of the administration herself now, Picasso said she is trying to incorporate her family members. “The nephews and nieces, they’ve all grown up. And they wanted for it to be more collegial,” she said. “I’m at the head of it, but I do report to them much more than Claude had to, and when I make a decision, I take their point of view in much more.”
Having established an independently successful career as a designer, Picasso said she feels ready to take on a greater role in the estate. “I made every effort for my work not to be connected to my father, which is why now I can do it,” she said. “I’ve proven to myself that I can exist on my own merits. I think I had to prove to myself that I could be worth something on my own.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Robin Pogrebin
Photographs by: Sam Hellmann
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
More on artists
Creative faces take their cultural perspectives global.
Power Art Couple Janet Lilo & Courtney Sina Meredith At Home In Avondale. Sitting down with artists Courtney Sina Meredith and Janet Lilo in their Avondale home and listening to their story is compelling and uplifting.
From Sāmoa To MoMA: Why Yuki Kihara Is The Most Prolific Pacific Artist In The World Right Now. Interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara has the art world’s attention. Her piercing, queer, indigenous perspective offers new ways of storytelling, reframing history and asking the tough questions when it comes to individual acceptance, community, legacies of colonialism, and the impact of human-caused climate change.
Why Is New Zealand A Tattooed Nation? Two Hands Tattoo Founder Stefan Sinclair Reflects On 20 Years Of Tattooing Kiwis. As the founder of Two Hands Tattoo, Stefan ‘Spider’ Sinclair has redefined New Zealanders’ relationship with tattoos.
How The Mother & Daughter Team Behind Arts Haven Ūkaipō Are Making It Work. Two minds are better than one as this creative power couple proves.
Shining a Light on the Pacific Sisters’ Artistic Legacy. Ginny Fisher spotlights the work of this pioneering art collective.
