The Battle for Picasso’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Empire

“I had a papa who painted,” Maya Widmaier-Picasso once said when she exhibited some of her father’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors that she inherited after he died, in 1973. Her papa was Pablo Picasso. Her mother was Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom Picasso met one evening in 1927, when she was 17 and he was 45. Nine years before, Picasso had married Olga Khokhlova, one of Diaghilev’s dancers, with whom he had a son, Paulo, but the marriage was collapsing.

Maya’s mother later confided that Picasso had seen her leaving the Paris Métro and said, “You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you.” She had no idea who Picasso was, so he took her to a bookstore to show her a book about himself. Maya’s parents had split up when she was about eight, but she spent a great deal of time with her father.

Now 80 years old, she lives in Paris, has three children, and is one of Picasso’s five surviving heirs, all of whom have become multi-millionaires. The other heirs are Claude Picasso and his sister, Paloma, the children of Pablo and his mistress Françoise Gilot, the only woman who ever left him; and Marina and Bernard Picasso, the children of Paulo, who died in 1975. Since one of Picasso’s paintings, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) (Maya had watched him paint it), set a record last year for a work sold at auction ($179.4 million), the five Picasso heirs—who control the art world’s richest dynasty—are likely to become even richer.

They’re also likely to find themselves embroiled in the occasional public drama. In January, Maya emerged as the star, if you can call it that, of an unfolding court saga whose cast includes various super dealers at the highest levels of the art market—Larry Gagosian, Guy Bennett, and the now disbanded art-advisory firm of Connery, Pissarro, Seydoux. The dispute centers upon Picasso’s 1931 plaster bust of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a highlight of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Picasso Sculpture” exhibition. There are allegations that the piece, titled Bust of a Woman, was sold nearly simultaneously by Maya’s representatives to two buyers: once, in November 2014, to Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani for $42 million, and then, a few months later, to Gagosian for $105.8 million. Courts in New York, Switzerland, and France are trying to unravel Bustgate and determine the sculpture’s rightful owner.

Picasso surrounded by family, mid-50s. By Mark Shaw/MPTVImages.com.

When Picasso died, 43 years ago at the age of 91, he left an astounding number of works—more than 45,000 in all. (“We’d have to rent the Empire State Building to house all the works,” Claude Picasso said when the inventory was completed.) There were 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 7,089 drawings, 30,000 prints, 150 sketchbooks, and 3,222 ceramic works. There were vast numbers of illustrated books, copperplates, and tapestries. And then there were the two châteaux and three other homes. (Picasso lived in and worked in about 20 places from 1900 to 1973.) According to one person familiar with the estate, there was $4.5 million in cash and $1.3 million in gold. There were also stocks and bonds, the value of which was never made public. In 1980 the Picasso estate was appraised at $250 million, but experts have said the true value was actually in the billions.

Picasso did not leave a will. The division of his holdings took six years, with often bitter negotiations among the heirs. (There were seven then.) The settlement cost $30 million and produced what has been described as a saga worthy of Balzac. The family, writer Deborah Trustman noted at the time, “resembles one of Picasso’s Cubist constructions—wives, mistresses, legitimate and illegitimate children (his youngest born 28 years after his oldest), and grandchildren—all strung on an axis like the backbone of a figure with unmatched parts.”