The two toy cars the boy was given by his father were transformed into a monkey sculpture even before he had a chance to play with them. Then again, papa was Picasso.
For Claude Picasso, such were the setbacks and glories of growing up with the artist, a theme explored in an exhibition in Barcelona curated by Paloma, his sole surviving child, and dedicated to Claude, her brother.
A version of Baboon and Young, the 1951 sculpture, is among a hundred paintings, drawings and objects on show at the Museu Picasso. Many are on loan from the family’s collections and have never before been seen by the public.
Picasso’s Baboon and Young sculpture
Françoise Gilot’s La Lección de Lectura, or The Reading Lesson
The exhibition offers a rare insight into Picasso as a father, his intimate family life and his relationship with two of his four children, Claude, who died in 2023, and his younger sister, Paloma, as well as their mother, Françoise Gilot, whose paintings are also on show.
“Claude and I grew up in an environment that was both ordinary and extraordinary,” Paloma, 76, said. “My father was never one to separate the ‘important’ from the ‘everyday’. To him, every moment was an opportunity for creativity.”
The exhibition, Growing Up Between Two Artists, which runs until October 26, demonstrates how Picasso immersed himself in his children’s world by making them toys, as well as sketches and paintings for them and of them.
The works on show vary from a primitive toy bus, made of painted wood with Evian water bottle tops for wheels, to terracotta doves and pencil and felt-tip pen drawings of musketeers.
One of Picasso’s musketeers
The latter was an obsession of Claude as a child. “[Picasso] cut out a lot of musketeers. They were on a piece of paper that had been folded several times that we would cut out to create a row of musketeers,” Claude once said. “They were Picasso’s musketeers, but not completely his because they were drawn on by the different children: Paloma … and me.”
The doves recall Picasso’s own childhood in Malaga when his father, José Ruiz, who was a drawing teacher, taught his young son the principles of art. Ruiz admired birds and specialised in painting them.
Picasso and Gilot teach Claude and Paloma drawing in 1953
EDWARD QUINN
“We wanted the exhibition to convey the sense of joy and freedom that permeated our days in Vallauris,” said Paloma, referring to a town in the southeast of France where they lived. Picasso’s love affair with Gilot lasted a decade from 1943, when he was 63 and she was 23.
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In 1952 Picasso made Four Shadow Silhouettes, using India ink wash on paper to capture the profiles of the four family members for a poster for a local ceramics exhibition. It echoes the impromptu theatrical performances that the family staged in private.
“Papa Picasso had this magical ability to transform the mundane into something poetic. He loved to play with costumes, hats and masks — he was a master of improvisation,” Paloma said.
One of the show’s highlights, an oil painting from 1948, shows Claude dressed in a traditional Polish costume, a gift his father brought back from Poland, where he attended a communist conference. Picasso always kept the portrait in his studio or in his homes.
“This large painting in an unusual format depicts him almost life-size, looking at us scornfully, holding a ball and wearing a beautiful embroidered jacket … [it] reminds us of Matryoshka dolls, the symbols of Russian folk art which Picasso was particularly fond of,” it says at the exhibition.
The show is a bittersweet tribute because it also refers to the couple’s 1953 separation, when Gilot left Picasso, who had numerous affairs and still had a legal wife. She took the children with her and the break-up prompted him to set out to destroy Gilot’s artistic career.
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The publication of Gilot’s highly successful 1964 memoir Life with Picasso, which included revelations about his abuse and misogyny, stung Picasso and led to him damaging his relationship with Claude and Paloma.
The exhibition includes an excerpt that states: “Paloma rarely bothered me. She was, as Pablo often pointed out, an ideal girl-child. ‘She’ll be a perfect woman,’ Pablo said. ‘Passive and submissive. That’s the way all girls should be. They ought to stay asleep just like that until they’re 21.’”
However, Paloma recalled him lovingly. “I remember him as being very affectionate, inspiring and fun,” she said. “We found him in his bathtub, where he lathered his face to draw funny things with his fingers. After the separation, we spent all our holidays with him.”