“Pablo Picasso was a great artist, but he was not always an angel.” His grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, needn’t explain further — everyone knows he’s referring to the Spanish artist’s turbulent relationships with the many women he’s been passionate about.
Bernard bears a striking physical resemblance to his grandfather, though perhaps without the flamboyance of the pioneering artist. He is one of several heirs of the 20th century artist who co-founded the Cubist movement, but also experimented with different styles, techniques and mediums. Forty-five years after his death, Picasso’s influence over the art world is as undiminished as his popularity and dominance over the art market. The market is currently abuzz with news of the auction début of Le Matador , a 1970 self-portrait of Picasso as a bullfighter, in a Sotheby’s London sale later this month. It will be accompanied at the auction by a 1937 portrait of one of his muses and lovers, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Furthering the legacy
While the painter largely lived in France — a leftist in exile because of the Franco regime — his heart remained in Spain. “I had the good fortune to spend time with him in Cote d’Azur and Cannes. I remember my mother telling me a story about when he used to go to a bullfight on the beach. If he heard people speaking in Spanish, he would immediately run to talk to them. He would cry that he could not go back to his home country,” Bernard recalls.
Fifty eight-year-old Bernard was 17 when he became one of Picasso’s principal heirs, and he acknowledges that this “has provided me everything, material things, that people may wish for”. It’s been an enviable situation, freeing him of the burden of making a living. He published some poetry in the early part of his life, but says that while it helps him connect with artists, he no longer has the free time to focus on it. His work is Picasso’s legacy: “I would not call it my profession, it’s what I do with my life”.
This has been true, in some ways, for others in the larger family, too. Picasso’s step-daughter, Catherine Hutin-Blay, recently acquired a convent in Aix-en-Provence in France which, by 2021, she hopes to convert into a museum that will house the 2,000 works of the artist that she inherited from her mother, Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife.
Copyrights and controversies
For Bernard, the realisation of the responsibility that came with the inheritance arrived slowly. The biggest issue, he says, was to “acknowledge where I was born, and to try and open my eyes to see what I was looking at. I was surrounded by art all the time. But my experience was not sufficient to know what I was looking at. That took me a long time, to build not only a perception (of who Picasso was and what his art was about), but also the joy of seeing the beauty and intelligence on canvas.”
Bernard was in Delhi a few days ago to deliver the keynote address at a conference marking the Delhi Art Gallery’s 25th anniversary. Presenting his work — from setting up Museo Picasso in Malaga, Picasso’s birthplace, to the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, which holds his personal archive of his grandfather’s works — he was careful to credit the other family members involved, his mother Christine in the first instance, and his wife Almine, an art gallerist, in the second.
This is possibly an instinct borne out of the complications in these last 40-odd years, of asserting ownership over many of Picasso’s works, while also sharing the copyright with other family members. Especially considering the fact that he gained his inheritance after an ugly, protracted court battle, and that these past years have seen the family as a collective, under the Picasso Administration, engaged in copyright battles, authenticating works as well as selling merchandising licenses. Of the last, they are still facing embarrassing questions regarding the decision to lend Picasso’s name to a Citroen car in 2006.
Picasso on socks
“Picasso is vulnerable,” Bernard says during the talk with art historian Devika Singh at the DAG conference, “to people trying to steal his name, images and identity, and make money.” Interestingly, he feels that the court battles they have fought and won also provide better support for other artists. “In a democracy, to better protect copyright, you have to sign contracts,” he adds, presenting a convoluted logic that suggests that to protect an artist’s identity, one has to protect the right to use it in any way one sees fit — even on towels, socks and cars.
At our interview the next morning, he attempts to explain this again. “In democracy, or in life, you don’t do everything you like to do, but sometimes it’s required because it gives power to what you want to protect. Also, it was a family decision. In the beginning I was not very fond (sic) to see Picasso’s signature printed on a car, but, well, why not? People like it,” he shrugs.
As family members, Picasso’s heirs have largely had complicated relationships with him. Bernard, though, recalls childhood memories of visiting an indulgent grandfather during family holidays. “Picasso was a Spaniard, a Mediterranean spirit. He was not an Icelandic, cold kind of grandpa,” he says. He remembers being at a ceramic exhibition, when Picasso took hold of his hand and gave him money to go to the candy store. “He knew children preferred candy to visiting art exhibitions.”
Staying relevant
What does it feel like to “possess Picasso” the artist who also, in a sense, belongs to the world? “It’s a kind of a paradox,” Bernard says, giving the example of the public-private collaboration of the Malaga museum. “I experienced that with a public administration, if you are too generous, they don’t care. If it is unconditional, you don’t count any more.” He says the promise of donation of artworks from his personal collection to the museum was an insurance for the Spanish government to invest in the building’s renovation, a different space for education, and the auditorium.
“During the dialogue with the public administration, this enabled us to sit at the same rank around the table for the good of art, not for any economic reason. What I am doing is providing access to the viewer, through the exhibition organiser, to my collection. But to simply donate things doesn’t make sense because then you are not in control, not in charge. It is important to be in that constant dialogue. And you need some ammunition to be in that dialogue,” he concludes.
