Maya Widmaier-Picasso helped to revive her father’s creativity

Two weeks after the liberation of Paris in 1944, Maya Picasso, then nine, made her way to her father’s studio. Such visits were precious, because the family was complicated. Her father did not live with her and her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, but was still married to Olga Khokhlova. Maya and Marie-Thérèse were his secret family, though for a while they lived in a flat almost directly opposite his. Her father was also seeing a woman called Dora Maar, whom Maya did not like. She had met Dora only once, in that very studio, standing beside her father’s “Guernica”, with its tangled bodies and that terrified horse’s head, and she had begun to cry. Her father painted the two women fighting over him, black and white doves in a cage. He was happy, even delighted, with the way things were. Maya minded more; but she also knew she was his boquerona, his “little anchovy”, the joy of his life.