It was important for him that we were around when we were children. It refreshed memories for him. When he was a child he was quite gifted, but he was always under the watchful eye of his father, who was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Malaga, then Coruna, then Barcelona. He had this extremely severe academic and traditional training. Once he proved to his father and to himself that he could do whatever in that academic vein, he endeavored for the rest of his life to break all the rules.
He had a much fresher and more childlike attitude than any of us. He would push us to see things in a freer way. For example, once we went to a bullfight and there was this bullfighter called El Cordobes. He was very unconventional, and he had one big problem: he had difficulty killing the bull dead. So one day I said to my father, “Really he’s so unconventional; he always does all these tricks, and he cannot ever kill the bull properly.” And he said, “You should like him. He’s the new generation. He’s the way things are done today.” He admired that, he was someone a little daring who would take risks. This is one thing that my father always did also: he took risks. He could have been a perfectly nice painter, been a commercial success, very young, because he had the capacity. But that was completely uninteresting, so he went out of his way to take the utmost risks by doing what was not expected of him and mostly what his father didn’t want him to do. And I think that’s how he became Picasso.
He liked to make things: cut out paper, toys, little objects. Sometimes they are amusing because they look like myself or Paloma, and they are animated, like little marionettes or they show me dressed up as a musketeer or in some sort of costume. Because that’s more fun. We have them, they are private; they are not great works of art, they are just pleasant, amusing things.
We were exceptionally lucky to arrive in the world at that point, at that place, in this environment. You know, our father was Picasso, and his friends were all the most incredible people. So it was always exciting to be around. Things were sparkling most of the time.
