Just two months after his mother, the French painter and writer Françoise Gilot, died at the age of 101 in Manhattan on June 6, Claude Ruiz Picasso, Pablo Picasso's third son, died this Thursday in Switzerland, according to reports confirmed his lawyer, Jean-Jacques Neuer, without mentioning the cause. A strict administrator of the painter's rights for decades through the Succession Picasso, he had ceded the reins of the organization just last July to his sister Paloma, two years his junior, also the daughter of Gilot and Picasso and the only one of the four offspring of genius still alive.
Claude Ruiz Picasso was the third son of the genius after Paulo Picasso (1921-1975), born from his marriage to Olga Jojlova, and Maya Widmaier-Picasso (1935-2022), his first daughter, born from his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter . Claude was born in 1947 in Boulogne-Billancourt and during his life he worked as a photographer, businessman and director.
His parents separated in 1953, when he was six years old, and eleven years later Françoise Gilot would publish the famous book Life with Picasso, a memoir of their ten years together in which she describes him as domineering, sexist and cruel, which would alienate her Claude from his father until the time of his death. A Claude who would study film at the New York Actor's Studio and would shoot a documentary about the singer Barbara. He also moved into the world of photography, where he was an assistant to Richard Avedon, who would make a famous portrait of him together with his sister Paloma de él.
Claude Ruiz Picasso has been administrator since 1989 of the Succession Picasso, which handles the rights related to the artist's work and image between 1989 and 2023. The Succession Picasso has a monopoly on the copyright and reproduction rights of the artist's works , and also the moral right and the trademark, and delivers certificates of authenticity and is in charge of the fight against false paintings. The Succession belonged indivisibly to Claude and Paloma Picasso and to the artist's grandchildren, Marina Picasso, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Olivier, Diana and Richard Widmaier-Picasso.
A Succession in which Claude in 2008, after a call from the Saint-Ouen cemetery announcing that they were going to send the remains of a grave that no one had paid for in a long time, that of Carles Casagemas -a great friend of the painter and who committed suicide at the age of twenty in Paris-, decided to take charge of the grave.
