Diana Widmaier-Picasso is the granddaughter of Marie-Thérèse Walter, arguably Picasso’s most passionate lover and the subject of many of his paintings and sculptures. Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter when she was only 17 years old and he was 45; he asked if he could paint her and told her that they would “do great things together”. This was the beginning of a love story between the two of them.
Picasso’s granddaughter and scholar, Diana Widmaier-Picasso, has set out to build a Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso’s sculpture, no small undertaking, as Picasso rarely dated or numbered his sculptural work. With a team of researchers, Widmaier-Picasso is tracking down all of the sculpture she can get her hands on, noting that the value of Picasso’s sculpture could dramatically rise once all of the works have been documented.
Marie-Thérèse Walter on the left and Picasso on the right.
Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Pablo Picasso’s Bust of a Woman depicting Marie-Therese Walter, 1931. Currently Larry Gagosian claims ownership at a price of $106 million in October 2015, whereas a Qatari Royal Family Agent claims the sale was to them in 2014 at 38 million euros, or $47.4 million at the time of the sale.