Maya Picasso, daughter of artist Pablo and important archivist of her father's legacy, has died, aged 87

Maya Widmaier-Picasso, the eldest daughter of Pablo Picasso, died of pulmonary complications on 20 December in Paris, aged 87. The news was confirmed by her son, the television producer Olivier Widmaier-Picasso. He tells The Art Newspaper that she “died peacefully, surrounded by her family”, including himself, his sister the art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso and their father Pierre Widmaier, husband to Maya.

The Picasso Museum in Paris is currently showing two exhibitions, curated by Diana, which are dedicated to Maya's life and collection and which run until the end of the month. The first presents the works offered by Maya last year to the French state as “payment in lieu” of inheritance tax. She had selected six paintings, a sculpture, a sketchbook and a tribal statue, to complete the huge collection which founded the Musée Picasso after her father's death in 1973. “She was very attached to the idea that her inheritance should go to a museum,” Olivier says, “so I always thought I had a ‘little brother’ called the French public collection."

"For my mother it was a duty," Diana says. "She was deeply attached to Picasso’s legacy. She became an expert of his oeuvre and gathered a great body of archives."

The second exhibition in the museum shows the private life that Maya shared with her father, through the portraits he made of her in the 1930s. One of them had been stolen in a burglary in 2007 in Diana’s apartment and recovered by the French art police in a spectacular gang arrest. The exhibition also shows the numerous drawings, photographs, poems and other testimonies of their daily life. "He even kept bits of nails and hair, as a talisman to protect her," Diana says. Another show currently at the Musée Montmartre in Paris is, in a first, dedicated to Picasso’s first companion, Fernande Olivier.

These exhibitions contribute to a growing movement to illuminate the role of the women in Picasso's life—and his treatment of them. But alongside this, a more nuanced view is emerging, revealing an affectionate father behind the gruff exterior who was very attached to his children. Maya’s mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, described him as “merveilleusement terrible” (wonderfully awful).