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If Picasso lived today, he might be experimenting with digital art, says his grandson

MADRID – As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages, Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece Guernica is more relevant than ever, his grandson said.

Picasso painted the iconic canvas after reading reports of the Luftwaffe Condor Legion’s indiscriminate bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica on market day in 1937 during the Spanish civil war.

The painting, which hangs in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, has come to symbolise the horrors of war and “may be one of the most famous artistic statements of the 20th century”, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso tells i.

“[Picasso] had a firm conviction. Very often one person of the society makes everyone else pay by starting a war or through terrorism,” he said.

Mr Ruíz-Picasso spoke about his grandfather as Spain and France mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death in 1973 with a series of about 50 exhibitions in both countries under the title Celebracion Picasso.

Among these shows was an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Museo Picasso in Malaga, the city of the painter’s birth. His grandson helped found the museum 20 years ago.

Picasso is renowned for changing his style throughout his life, from the blue period to Cubism.

If Picasso was alive today, he might be experimenting with digital art, believes Mr Ruíz Picasso. “He could be using NFTs or digital art. He changed techniques,” he said.

Widely regarded as a genius who created some of the most iconic pieces of art of the last century, Picasso also had a reputation as a misogynist who treated his wives and lovers appallingly.

However, Mr Ruíz-Picasso said that despite popular views of his grandfather’s personal and professional life the artist was human, like the rest of us.

“At the end of the day, as my aunt Paloma Picasso said, my grandfather was just a man. I don’t know if you are perfect, or I am perfect? I think there are great people on the planet, but they are either men or women,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Monaco.

“My opinion is that of course he is an artist. So, he was not very conventional and being Pablo Picasso, he was even less conventional. He was the most important artist of the 20th century. He had a great hope that he could do something to make things better.”

Mr Ruíz Picassso, 64, who lives between Monaco, Brussels and New York, remembered how he regularly met Picasso during summer holidays at the artist’s house in the south of France.

He regarded Picasso not as a world-famous painter but simply as his elderly grandfather. “I was quite young when he passed away. I used to go with my parents for summer holidays to his place in Cannes. And though I think of being in the home of someone who was very creative, it was a very simple way of life,” he remembered.

“He had been through the Second World War and 20 years later, people were trying to enjoy life. I remember the beach and the swimming. I was living in Paris at the time. He was just my grandfather to me, not a famous person. I was between zero and 13 years old when I knew him.”

Mr Ruiz-Picasso oversees part of the Picasso estate. He and his wife Almine Rech, an art dealer and gallery owner, run the Fundación Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, which promotes contemporary art.

The 64-year-old is the son of Paul Joseph Ruiz-Picasso, the first child of Picasso and his first wife Olga Khokhlova, a dancer.

Thanks to his grandfather, Mr Ruiz-Picasso says, he lives “a kind of a dream life” travelling around the world promoting Picasso’s genius.

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