Maya Ruiz-Picasso

María de la Concepción "Maya" Widmaier-Picasso (5 September 1935 20 December 2022), later known as Maya Ruiz-Picasso, was the eldest daughter of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter. She devoted part of her life to the study and preservation of the legacy of her father. Biography Born on 5 September 1935, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, she was named María de la Concepción after her father's sister Concepción, who had died in childhood. She came to be known as "Maya" due to her own pronunciation of "María" as a child. She was the second of her father's four children. She had one older half-brother, Paulo (1921–1975) (the father of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Marina Picasso), from her father's marriage to ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and two younger half-siblings, Claude (1947–2023) and Paloma (born in 1949), from her father's relationship with painter Françoise Gilot. According to his biographer John Richardson, Picasso registered her birth to state that the father was unknown, due to the restrictions of French law that dictated that a married man was not allowed to register as the father of another woman's child. At her baptism in 1942, he declared that he was her godfather. At the time of her birth, her father Picasso was still married to Olga Khokhlova, with whom he had one son named Paulo. Her mother Marie-Thérèse Walter had been in a relationship with Picasso from January 1927. By the summer of 1936, he had secretly moved on to a new relationship with the surrealist photographer Dora Maar.