On the Heels of an $88 Million Picasso Sale, Olivier Widmaier Picasso Talks Art, Life, and His Very Famous Grandfather

“My grandfather was born the day he died,” Olivier Widmaier Picasso likes to say. Although a few of his artworks scattered the family home, and Picasso’s mother, Maya, referred to him fondly as “Papa,” Pablo and Olivier had never met.

Pablo’s presence in Picasso’s life had been spectral, at best. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Oliver’s maternal grandmother, was Pablo’s muse and mistress from 1927 to about 1935, and there had been many women (and many children) since.

But in April of 1973, when Picasso encountered a news report on television announcing his grandfather’s death, his life changed for good. “That day I realized [that he was] probably much more than I thought,” Picasso says. Friends and strangers wondered aloud about who would inherit what (1,885 paintings; 7,089 drawings; 1,228 sculptures; 6,112 lithographs; and 18,095 engravings were scattered between several houses, with no recorded will to divide them up); and there were lots of knotty disputes over money (Pablo’s estate was reportedly appraised at $250 million in 1980 but could be worth much more). An awareness of what it meant to be part of the Picasso universe—both the privileges, and the burdens—came to Olivier Picasso right away. But the far slower and more difficult task would be getting to know Pablo Picasso, the man.

This Sunday, Christie’s auctioned off 15 Picasso masterworks—“a record of sorts, we think,” for one sale, says head of Impressionist art Max Carter—amassing $88,866,500. In town from Miami for the occasion, Picasso sat down with Vogue to discuss art; his book Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (Tate); and the problem of forging a private relationship with a looming public figure.

Even in the dim lighting of Le Bilboquet, Picasso’s physical resemblance to his grandfather is striking. Beyond having a similar build, he shares Pablo’s dark complexion, and gourd-shaped nose. When Picasso frets about his English, which is fluent but heavily accented (born in Marseille, he is based now in Paris), he inadvertently recalls Pablo’s aversion to recorded interviews. “He didn’t like to listen to his Spanish accent,” Picasso would explain the next night at Christie’s.

To hear him describe his life’s course—from studying tax law, to working in music and television, to helping his uncle Claude Picasso combat unauthorized uses of the Picasso name, to writing his first book, Picasso: The Real Family Story—is to sense that he’s done it many times before. At 57, Picasso, who was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011, and nominated an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016, knows exactly where he fits within the sprawling story of his grandfather’s life. He is part historian, part ambassador, part publicist.

“There were so many rumors, so much ‘fake news,’ so much vague information about Pablo Picasso,” he says, “and because I studied law, I thought, okay, I’m going to set the record straight, and to see what is true, and what is not so true. This is how we started [on the book].” He was, for example, quite keen to clarify that his grandfather was not a greedy man, contrary to reports. “He helped a lot of people: the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War; people in hospitals; [his] children; Marie-Thérèse, Françoise [Gilot],” Picasso says. “[Pablo received] something like 100 to 150 requests per day [for] money, artworks, and this and that. So of course he had to protect himself—but he was absolutely not selfish. This was important.” In all, the project took him two years to complete. “My publisher was saying, ‘Okay, send me the document.’ I said, ‘Give me two more days, three more days, because I want to get this and this.’ ”

The resulting text is informative and revealing without veering into salaciousness; that Picasso is neither an art historian, nor a gossip-mongering outside party, has a lot to do with this. “I get good reviews because I try to stay where I am,” he says. “I don’t want to be in the art world, and I don’t want to just be a celebrity chronicler.”

Indeed, his distance from Pablo, temporally and emotionally, has been an enormous asset. As things are, Picasso has enjoyed all the spoils of association with virtually none of the baggage. “I know that it was probably not easy to be the son or grandson of Pablo Picasso [in the] ’50s,” he says. To illustrate the point, he tells the story of Pablo “Pablito” Picasso (the son of Paulo Picasso, Pablo’s son by his first wife, Olga Khokhlova), who committed suicide in 1973, at 24. “From the very first day, it was a mistake to call the boy Pablo Picasso,” he says. “He was always someone else.”

Things were easier for Picasso. So much easier, in fact, that in 1986, he took advantage of Article 43 of the French Law No. 85-1372 of 23 December 1985, which permitted a person to use both of his parents’ names. He, for one, was happy to shoulder the Picasso mantle.

Distance—or is it perspective?—has been useful to him from a business standpoint, too. Unlike his sister, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso, Olivier’s appreciation for art is bound up in valuations and licensing agreements—the monetization of it all, in other words. “I don’t have the same sensitivity my sister has,” he says. “She has a kind of passion for art, and me, I’m more pragmatic. I’m more into results. So if I do something like a contract, I want it to be big.” Art lovers, he reasons, want access—proximity to creative genius—and there are several ways for them to get it. For those with the money, there are auctions; for those who can get to them, there are museums; and for others, there’s merchandise. For all intents and purposes, Picasso had a full-fledged retail business built into his family tree, and he’s done his best to put it to good use. “You have to protect, and promote,” he says. “People want some stationery, they want T-shirts, they want scarves—[and] we can work with that. Other times, you go further if you can.” Discovering that the name “Picasso” had been slapped indiscriminately onto goods the world over (“It was like a brand,” he says. “[It] didn’t represent an artist—it was just a famous name”), Picasso decided to do something about it. In 1998, he brokered a deal with Citroën on a fleet of “Picasso” cars; thereby drafting the automaker’s lawyers into his war on trademark infringement. He also worked with Moët Hennessy on a special line of cognacs (“it was for the duty-free world, where we had problems in Asia”), and figured in the launch of the Picasso restaurant at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Whether his tactics are shrewd or shameless depends on whom you ask; in 1999, his cousin Marina came out strongly against the Citroën partnership. “I cannot tolerate that the name of my grandfather and of my father be used to sell something as banal as a car,” she told a French newspaper, according to The New York Times. “He was a genius who is now being exploited outrageously. His name, his very soul, should not be used for any ends other than his art.” But for Picasso, this was just one of a thousand ways to navigate what Pablo had left behind. (He now advises the descendants of Gustave Eiffel in a similar capacity.) “We share the same past, but not the same story,” he says of his family. Each person has had to learn to “live with Picasso,” as he puts it, in his or her own way.

Naturally, his mother’s relationship with Pablo was (and is) much closer, as his daughter. In the 1950s, as the artist worked on The Women of Algiers, a series of massive canvases inspired by Delacroix (one of them, Version ‘O,’ would claim a record-breaking $179,365,000 at auction in 2015), Maya was about 19. “He would wake her up at night and say, ‘Hey, come to see what I’ve done!’ ” Picasso says. “A man of—at that time he was probably 73, 74 years old, waking up his daughter, just to show her. He was like a child.” He also recounts the story of how, as a baby, Maya once toddled up to Guernica (which was not yet finished) and pressed her hands into its paint. “She was saying Mama, Mama, because she was seeing the face of Marie-Thérèse [in the painting],” he says.

Picasso is touched by the intimacy of these memories, and grateful to Maya for sharing them with him. “With my mother, I have a charming, easy access to Pablo Picasso,” he says. “He’s not only an inventory.”