María de la Concepción, nicknamed Maya, was born on September 5, 1935 from the passionate union between Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, and became a young muse for modernist.
Maya pursued a career as an art historian specializing in the work of her father. She received several honors including the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2007 and the title of Commander of Arts and Letters in 2016 for her participation in the influence of the artist in France and around the world. In 2021, Maya and her three children made a donation of nine works by the great artist to the Picasso museum in Paris. Maya died on December 20, 2022 just days before the end of the museum's double exhibition revealing the nine works, a powerful testimony of a relationship between a father and his daughter.
Related: Picasso's Daughter Donates Nine Works to France
When Maya was born in 1935, Picasso was still married to the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova with whom he had a 14-year-old son Paul. The birth of Maya precipitated the separation of the couple and upset the artist who stopped painting for almost a year, until February 1936.
Related: On and Off the Canvas: Art's Most Famous Muses Picasso devoted many paintings to his children, but it was Maya who captivated him the most. In just one year, when Maya was four years old, he devoted 14 portraits to her and then many drawings in which he meticulously studied her physical and psychological development.
Maya and her father even drew together, collaborating on artworks. During the war, Maya brought a lot of joy to the artist who created toys from recycled materials that brightened up a daily life obscured by the German occupation and restrictions.
Related: Picasso: The Universal Artist
At the end of the war, the artist moved to the south of France with his new partner, Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two more children, Claude and Paloma. This move separated the father and daughter. Nevertheless, Maya maintained a very strong bond with the blended family and frequently visited. She would assist her father and Henri George Clouzot in the production of his film "The Picasso Mystery" from July to September 1955. This collaboration characterized the last moments of life shared between Maya and her father, who died in April 1973 in Mougins, France.
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Despite his new union, Picasso also maintained ties with Marie Thérèse Walter, Maya's mother. The couple met in 1927 at the exit of the Galeries Lafayette when Marie-Thérèse was only 17 and the artist was 45. He housed the young woman in an apartment on rue de La Boétie, a few numbers from the apartment which he shared with his first wife Olga. The couple dated for eight years before having Maya in 1935. Marie-Thérèse was a major muse for the artist, who can be found in his art in symbolic form (guitars with the "MTW" monogram), or expressively in female nudes with voluptuous and sensual shapes.
Surviving Maya Picasso are her three children, including her daughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso who has carried on her mother's legacy as a Picasso art historian.
