Paloma Picasso: Calling my father sexist is absurd – he’s uncancellable

As a child, Paloma not only grew up surrounded by artists, writers and poets, but “spent hours, days”, watching her mother and father create. “He would smoke Gitanes,” she says with a smile, “and then cut up the cardboard packaging and make funny little animals out of it.” She never felt that art was “stealing either one of my parents away from me”, she assures me when I ask, “because I found the process so fascinating.” Even after her mother left Picasso, in 1953 – when Paloma was four and Claude six – the two of them continued to “have a great relationship with him” for years. Then, maybe an hour later, he’d say: ‘Look, I never liked school, and look where I am today!’ We’d have to say: ‘Yes, but we’re not Pablo Picasso, Daddy, so we do have to go to school.’” It was only after Picasso married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, in 1961 that they ceased to see him, and after his death in 1973, Paloma and Claude were forced to endure a lengthy legal battle to be recognised as heirs. Ask Paloma what she might say to the father she never got to reconnect with at the end of his life, and she shakes her head: “It’s complicated. I’d rather not get into it.” When I come back, later, to whether she feels he was a good father, however, she looks surprised I should even ask.