The French wife of the heir to Picasso’s children has bequeathed several dozen works to the Andalusian institution, inaugurated in 2003. She passed away at the age of 97.
In October 2003, Juan Carlos inaugurated the museum of Malaga dedicated to the other king of Spain: Picasso. The efforts were led, among others, by Christine Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s stepdaughter, a key figure in promoting his work. According to a statement from the museum of Malaga, this “respected figure in the museum and cultural world” has passed away at the age of 97 in Provence, another “Picassian” land where she had met the master in the 1950s.
Christine Pauplin, a Parisian potter born in 1928, met the artist while visiting his workshop in Antibes. She then met Paulo, his son with Olga Khokhlova, the young Harlequin from the master’s paintings. Christine had a child, Bernard, with him in 1959. Paulo passed away in 1975. Having observed Picasso’s genius and difficult character up close, she inherited a considerable number of works.
In the 1990s, she supported the creation of a museum in her hometown, where the artist was born in 1881. Christine Ruiz-Picasso and her son Bernard bequeathed 233 works to this institution located in the palace of the counts of Buenavista.
“I don’t want to be treated like a saint; I simply fulfilled Pablo’s wish to see his works exhibited for the first time in Malaga,” she said in 1994 to the Spanish press.
The idea of establishing a museum in Malaga, a place of distant but vivid memories for Picasso, was raised as early as 1953. However, the project remained inactive due to Picasso’s communist sympathies and his anti-Franco painting “Guernica.”
Known for her frequent visits to the “Museo Picasso Málaga,” Christine Ruiz-Picasso criticized an exhibition showing Picasso’s antifascist drawings in 2011, considering it a “partisan” gesture before an electoral period. These accusations were dismissed by the Ministry of Culture.
Despite the event, the ties between the museum and its honorary president, described as an “essential figure in the creation of this institution and a tireless protector of Pablo Picasso’s artistic heritage,” remain strong. In 2006, Christine Ruiz-Picasso was moved by the ceramics from the Antibes period, which were, in a way, the work of her life: “Imagine what it means to me, in the twilight of my life, to see these works in Malaga,” she said.
