They are the ultimate “how to draw” books for a young child, created by a doting dad who just happened to be one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. The granddaughter of Pablo Picasso has discovered an extraordinary collection of sketchbooks used by the artist to teach his eldest daughter to draw and color.
Picasso filled the pages with playful scenes — animals, birds, clowns, acrobats, horses and doves — which would delight any child, as well as adults.
He created them for Maya Ruiz-Picasso when she was aged between five and seven. On some pages, the little girl made impressive attempts to imitate the master. She also graded her father’s work, scribbling the number “10” on a circus scene, to show her approval.
Photo: AFP
He drew two charming images of a fox longing for grapes — inspired by the 17th-century fabulist Jean de La Fontaine’s sour grapes fable, The Fox and the Grapes — and Maya colored in one of them. He also drew simple but beautiful eagles in a single movement, without raising the pencil from the paper, conveying his love of form and pure line to her.
The previously unseen collection includes exquisite origami sculptures of birds that he brought to life for Maya from exhibition invitation cards.
His granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso, found the works by chance while looking through family material in storage. Intrigued, she showed them to her mother, now 86, for whom memories came flooding back.
Photo: AP
Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso told the Observer: “She said, ‘Of course, those are my sketchbooks when I was little.’ We tend to be very visual in the family so immediately she was plunged into that time. It was a very moving moment, not only because you’re talking about one of the greatest artists but also because it made it very human. I was excited. Then I was moved.”
Picasso, who died in 1973, had been taught to draw by his father, a professor of drawing, “so that was something natural for him to do” with Maya, his granddaughter said: “There’s a beautiful page where he’s drawing a bowl and she’s drawing a bowl.
“Sometimes she’s making an image and he’s doing another, showing her the right way to do it. Sometimes they would depict different scenes. Other times, he would draw a dog or a hat. Sometimes he’s using the whole page to draw one particular thing. Other times, he’s depicting certain scenes, scenes of the circus. It’s very interesting.”
Maya particularly remembers that, during the second world war, color pencils and notebooks were in short supply: “That’s probably why my father wrote in my exercise books and colored with my pencils. I still have fond memories of those moments when we met up in the kitchen to draw together. It was the only place in the apartment where it was warm.”
Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso is an art historian, curator and jewelery designer, who has just published her latest book, Picasso Sorcier, exploring his superstitions and belief in magic.
She described the discovery of the sketchbooks as “fortuitous” because she was co-curating a major exhibition for the Musee Picasso-Paris on his close bond with his first daughter, born of his passionate love for Marie-Therese Walter, whom he met in 1927 when she was just 17 and he was 28 years her senior.
The exhibition, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, daughter of Pablo, runs until Dec. 31 and includes his many portraits of Maya, personal possessions and photographs, along with the sketchbooks and origami sculptures, which are being shown for the first time.
Whether the origami birds were made from invitation cards for his own exhibitions is unclear. The granddaughter said: “I didn’t want to open his work.”
In the exhibition’s accompanying book, she writes: “Who has never heard it said when looking at a canvas by Picasso, ‘A child could have done that!’ Many of the artistic revolutions of the 20th century were greeted with mockery and scandal, it is true, but in Picasso’s case there is a hint of truth in that judgment. As Maya, his first daughter, recalls, ‘the mystery of life, and therefore of childhood, always filled that father of mine with interest.’”
She adds: “Seeking a pictorial language that would break with the exhausted codes of academic realism, Picasso borrowed extensively from the unruly lines of children’s drawings. Where Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse concentrated on the graphic and pictorial naivety with which children draw, Picasso emphasized more the elements that upset figurative traditions, that is to say, distortion and deformity.”
Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Musee national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, is currently staging a Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, a collaboration with the Musee Picasso-Paris. Noting that these sketchbooks reflect the artist’s fascination with childhood, he said: “Who learned from who?”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS