Bernard Ruiz-Picasso: "People who don't even know what they're saying are launching ridiculous accusations against Picasso"

2022-10-25T06:08:42.041Z

The grandson of the artist and founder of the Museo Picasso Málaga, he vindicates his grandfather's creative Spanishness and criticizes the ignorance of his work in Spain and the accusations of misogyny leveled against him from certain sectors.

Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 63 years old) is one of the six grandchildren of Pablo Picasso.

He is the son of Paul Ruiz Picasso —the painter's eldest son who committed suicide in 1975— and Christine Ruiz-Picasso.

In 2003, he founded the Museo Picasso Málaga with his mother, to which he initially donated 180 paintings and sculptures from the enormous private collection of works by the artist that he owns, surely the largest in the world (“I have enough, I have no problem eating ”, he will admit ironically in the course of this interview).

He is president of the executive committee of the museum in Malaga and continues to regularly lend works for different exhibitions in that center, just as he lends them to museums around the world for exhibitions about his grandfather.

He is currently a member of the National Commission for the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Pablo Picasso, the Spanish chapter of the celebrations that until the beginning of 2024 will pay tribute to the memory of the genius from Malaga through fifty exhibitions throughout the world and the celebration of different congresses and debates in France and Spain.

Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, who lives between Monaco, Brussels and Paris, co-chairs, together with his wife, gallery owner and art dealer Almine Rech, the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art,

Guernica

, as well as the organization of exhibitions.

This conversation took place in mid-September in an office at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where Bernard Ruiz-Picasso went for the presentation of this

Year of Picasso.

What results or achievements would you like to see achieved with the celebration of the Year of Picasso?

That art be more diffused in the sense that it is also we, the public, who ultimately create the work of art.

In this sense we can remember the words of Marcel Duchamp: “There is the artist, there is the work and there is us”.

And those three elements are what create artistic life.

Here you and I are talking about a celebration, but, in the end, what we have is a human relationship with the legacy of Picasso in our century.

I spend a lot of time with young artists and I can see the importance of the heritage of the 20th century, and within it, that of Picasso, even for

millennials

The lesson that I think my grandfather taught us is optimism and the will to continue creating, always.

Do you think that there remains a sentimental connection between Picasso and today's younger generations?

Correct, because in the end Picasso reappropriates or interprets his century, his present.

But also the history of art in general, from the era of prehistoric caves.

In some way, it concentrates a common desire of the 20th century, that is, that with it and through it modern art is conceptualized.

That's why he's a giant, a genius, and geniuses have a mythical ability to be outside the norm.

The word “Picasso” has strength in itself, a sonority, like an aura, it is as if it rumbled…

Of course it is.

Is Picasso immovable, something already said and settled in the history of art, or could there be new avenues of rapprochement between his work and the public?

Can Picasso be renewed?

I own part of his work, as you know, and after 40 years I'm still studying things in it that I don't understand.

My work at the Almine-Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation consists of, in addition to organizing exhibitions, investigating the work of Picasso in the company of curators, experts and professors.

And what I see when we talk about her is that new things always come up.

The ability to be something so polyform allows you to always reconnect to it from different ways of thinking or studying.

There are great artists of our time who have with Picasso that professional relationship of admiration for his ability to always go further.

This is very complex and very interesting.

The artist does something that comes from his brain, it is a kind of poetic formulation.

Often his mission is to conceptualize a word that then appears in a painting or sculpture.

Picasso's grandson (left) and Claude, son of the genius from Malaga, at an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1998.Rebecca Naden (PA Images / Getty Images © Succession Pablo Picasso; VEGAP; Madrid; 2022)

"Art was his life, everything else was secondary."

They are his words about his grandfather.

Yes. I never stopped, I never stopped thinking, I never stopped creating, I thought that life was beautiful and that wasting time on stupid things was stupid in itself.

And that powerful message is expressed through his work.

There are artists, writers, musicians, scientists... with such a capacity for work and creation that they leave a very important message that life deserves to be lived.

I say this bearing in mind, of course, that I feel favored by life and bearing in mind that there are people for whom life is very difficult.

Unlike other giants in art history, such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer or El Greco, Picasso lived and died rich and famous.

You could almost say that he was a pop icon in life...

It is that he was a pop icon and he is a pop icon, he is a 100% pop artist.

A popular artist in every sense of the word.

He painted the prostitutes, the flower girls, the circus people, he painted what was there, the street..., his work is an autobiography.

He told the good and the bad of life, nothing was left out, in front of so many human beings who are ashamed to tell the truth.

Maybe that's why kids like it so much.

I feel great pleasure when I see children in a museum copying Picasso's paintings.

True, it draws their attention, they are rarely bored with it.

Sure, it's normal, it arouses something called curiosity.

And about him there has been a lot of debate, and today there is still a lot of debate about some artists, for example, Jeff Koons, who is a friend of mine.

Many criticize him, but the children love his balloons, they love his dog

Puppy

... Picasso is in the educational programs of many schools, because he allows you to do very different things, his creative formulation allows you to get out of the usual rules of everyday life, it is the total freedom, and children like that.

Intellectual friends of his, like Michel Leiris, for example, used to go to see him at his house and they asked him to see if they were doing this or that project, that they had doubts and fears about psychoanalytic and neurotic issues and such and such, and he told them: "Well, do it and don't think about it so much!"

He was like that.

A little “do and then think” instead of the other way around?

Something like that, yes.

And that links him a lot to Spain, to the history of Spain and to Spanish art.

Much more than the French intelligentsia.

That poetry, that hardness too.

That makes it clear that Picasso is a Spanish artist.

The bulls, for example.

Yes too.

A horrible thing but that without a doubt is part of an identity.

In other words, Picasso loved bulls, but you don't like them...

Yes, yes, very much.

From childhood.

My father knew many bullfighters, he was friends with some, he drove the gangs by car... I think they took me to the first bullfight when I was six months old.

It is that as he has said that it is “a horrible thing”…

But it is life.

And death.

Yes, it is the fight… I will tell you that some nights, in the living room at home, with my wife, it is similar to the bullring…

But no blood, I hope!

LOL!

Sure, and speaking of life and death: all this is something that calls the attention of politicians.

They want us to think we are immortal.

In political discourse, death never exists, how curious.

But Picasso questioned the same life as death.

Bernard Ruiz-Picasso poses in the Nouvel building of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.Gianfranco Tripodo

Does it weigh carrying that last name?

Or, on the contrary, are they just advantages?

It was more difficult when I was young, because I had to survive the total confusion.

Then I no longer had a real chance to choose what I wanted to do and I had to dedicate myself to this job of making exhibitions, lending works of art, studying... My name is Bernard and that's it.

And I also have a very famous last name and it suits me.

You and your mother, Christine-Ruiz Picasso, founded the Museo Picasso Málaga in 2003, whose executive committee you chair.

What room for improvement does the museum have, now that it has been 20 years since its opening?

The Museo Picasso Málaga means giving back to people a little of what we received from Picasso.

Now we have a 10-year project on our hands to meet the needs of an audience that has evolved, that wants other things and that is not the same as the 1980s and 1990s.

The museums are very active now, there is quite a positive energy and they need to be renewed.

Before they were places for an elite and now they are not.

Do you think there is a risk that something we could call the

Picasso constellation
—the market, sales records, money, fame, family disputes, the artist's wives and his problems with them…— could dilute or hide your construction site?

Ufff…

I mean... is there a risk of distortion of Picasso, now that the 50th anniversary of his death is being commemorated?

It's a posibility.

Surely some journalists are going to say: "Ah, again Picasso, once again!".

The media partially communicate what culture is.

In Spain nobody really knows who Pablo Picasso is.

And there are thousands of little things that come out about him non-stop, but there hasn't been, for example, a big television program about his work, something serious.

Now the figure of him is going to capture the attention of the media for a year, that is true, but that year will pass.

There is no danger of a Picasso dictatorship.

Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, with his grandfather, along with Jacqueline (centre) and Christine Ruiz-Picasso, his mother, on the beach at Cannes in 1962.© Christine and Paul Ruiz-Picasso Archives;

Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art;

Madrid - © Succession Pablo Picasso;

VEGAP;

Madrid;

2022)

Within that noise that the work can hide, do you think that this debate or pretended debate about your relationship with women and your alleged misogyny can play a leading role?

You have said that he was “a great feminist”…

Let's see, I said that in an interview and the journalist took that sentence out of context.

I was talking about the Picasso

exhibition , blue and pink

[opening at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in September 2018] and how, when Picasso painted a prostitute with syphilis in prison, he was proving to be a feminist at the beginning of the 20th century because he told what really happened to some women .

I believe that civil society today has the capacity to speak much more and more freely than before.

Is there too much, too much, too little, good, bad talk?

I think talking is always good.

The way the system works is not in favor of women, of course, and, for example, I think my grandmother did not have a very pleasant end of life, but let's see: what woman wants to live with an artist of such wingspan like Picasso?

Doesn't she feel that there is risk in living with such a man?

What do you like a man like that?

Okay, but whoever climbs the Himalayas knows that he can fall.

Let's be serious

Some ridiculous accusations are being leveled against Picasso by people who don't even know what they're saying because they haven't studied or read even a little bit.

He painted the women he lived with quite well, and when those women had nervous problems, he painted them too.

His responsibility is in his work.

How to repair things when they are already done?

Look at the whole issue of the culture of cancellation…, who has the right to say that something or someone has to be canceled in a democracy, instead of talking and discussing?