Picasso Heirs Clarify Authentication Process

Last September four of Picasso’s five surviving heirs—Claude, Paloma Picasso, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and Marina Ruiz-Picasso—circulated a letter announcing the establishment of a new procedure for authenticating works by the artist.

The letter states that all requests for authentication should henceforth be addressed to Claude, specifying that “only his opinions shall be fully and officially acknowledged by the undersigned.” Among the undersigned, however, one signature was conspicuously absent: that of Maya, the artist’s elder daughter.

Under French Law,

The right to authenticate Picasso’s work, however, is considered an inherited moral right, or droit moral. Only individual heirs have this right. When Claude [Ruiz-Picasso exercise’s] his droit moral to authenticate works by his father, he does so as an individual heir (as does Maya), not in his capacity as the estate administrator. Under French law, an artist’s descendants are presumed to have an innate understanding of—or at least a privileged firsthand familiarity with—the art created by their progenitor, and are thus entitled to issue certificates of authenticity.

So, it seems that there is now only one Picasso authority, minus one Picasso heir.

Via ArtNews.

Tags: art, authentication, france, french law, heirs, law, Moral Rights, Picasso