Maya Widmaier-Picasso

Born on 5 September 1935, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, she was named María de la Concepción after her father's sister Concepción, who had died in childhood. She came to be known as "Maya" due to her own pronunciation of "María" as a child. According to his biographer John Richardson, Picasso registered her birth to state that the father was unknown, due to the restrictions of French law that dictated that a married man was not allowed to register as the father of another woman's child. At her baptism in 1942, he declared that he was her godfather. Her mother Marie-Thérèse Walter had been in a relationship with Picasso since January 1927. By the summer of 1936, he had secretly moved on to a new relationship with the surrealist photographer Dora Maar. Gilot later commented that Maya was brought up believing "the fiction that her father worked a long way away". After the death of her father in 1973, Widmaier-Picasso and his other children sued to be recognised as his heirs. Widmaier-Picasso died of pulmonary complications on 20 December 2022, at the age of 87. == Portraits by Picasso ==

Widmaier-Picasso repeatedly posed for portraits painted by her father when she was between the ages of seven and 18. She is depicted as a toddler in a 1938 portrait titled First Snow. She recalled, "It was the day that I took my first steps… I was wearing little pink booties that my father kept his whole life." During the same period that he completed his monumental 1937 artwork Guernica, Picasso produced a number of portraits of his daughter, including Maya with Doll and Maya in a Sailor Suit, both painted in 1938. He is known to have created 14 portraits of her between 1938 and 1939. In 2017, the Gagosian Gallery presented in Paris the exhibition Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter, curated by Diana Widmaier Picasso. It was the first exhibition devoted to Picasso's portraits of his eldest daughter. ==References==