Among the more unusual presents the artist Pablo Picasso gave to his elder daughter, Maya, was a box of his nail clippings. These she took to be a token of trust. “My father gave them to me because he was frightened that people would use them against him,” recalled Maya Widmaier-Picasso, who has died of pulmonary failure aged 87. “He was afraid that someone, anyone, would take them and cast a spell on him.”
As with much in the relationship between the Picassos père and fille, the story feels ambiguous. Maya saw the gift as evidence of the bond between them, but it has something of the air of a curse, the clippings part reliquary and part fetish-object. This ambiguity would shape Maya’s life, even after the death of her father in 1973.
