Paloma Picasso described how, despite having one of the most culturally important names of the 21st Century, she worked hard to make a name for herself in the jewelry world.
Speaking at the 1 Hotel South Beach to a crowd of art and fashion luminaries in Miami for Art Basel, Paloma described how she was determined to step out of the shadow of her famous name from a very young age, “The name Picasso is so big, and since I was this high, [people would say] ‘Oh a little Picasso’. People would ask me, ‘Are you going to become a painter like your father?’ I had to find something else to do for myself and I wasn’t sure what I was going to be, but I was afraid to be compared to my parents.”
The daughter of Pablo Picasso and author and painter Francoise Gilot, jewelry designer and style icon Paloma continued, “I have to be my own person, and I always tried not to do something that would look like the work of my father or my mother, because I knew people would be looking for this connection..Especially in the beginning, it was kind of an obsession of mine that whatever I did, there would be no link to their work, in order to make sure that people would see my work as something on its own, and nothing related to them. Because I respect their work very much.
“In a way the stakes were higher, I knew I didn’t have room to make errors because everybody would be pointing it out. But you can think negatively or positively, so I decided to take this as a springboard to being my best.
“I always viewed myself not as an artist, I don’t call what I do art. But it is important for me to share. I think that an artist works in his own bubble if you like, whereas what I do, I work thinking about somebody is going to wear what I am designing, it’s going to become part of their life…I try to put myself in the shoes of the person that is going to buy my jewelry.”
She started by creating necklaces for the Folies Bergeres, and then presented her work to Yves Saint Laurent who commissioned her to design jewelry to complement his collections. In 1979, famed Tiffany design director John Loring invited her to participate in an exhibition, and a year later she produced her first exclusive collection.
When asked if she thought her mother and father had an awareness of their audience, “I think that is what differentiates them from me, they were doing … their work or creation, from their own minds, without thinking what people were going to think about it. Whereas for me I need to think that someone is going to wear it, and that is actually my impetus to create.”
Paloma, 67, is celebrating 35 years of designing jewelry with Tiffany & Co, and made a return for the first time in nearly two decades to her former home of Miami to mingle with the art crowd.
The French designer, who lives with her husband in Dr. Eric Thévenet in Lausanne, Switzerland and Marrakech, Morocco, appeared at an event hosted by Interview magazine, founded by her longtime friend Andy Warhol.
Of their time hanging out in the Seventies, “He really liked meeting people but at the same time he also wanted a certain distance with people … He needed this group of friends around him to kind of shelter him, and at the same time he was very curious about people.
“It was a very free time, and now I feel that is missing, people don’t intermingle like they did at the time. At those parties in New York there would be the old guard, the very grand families from new york and at the same time very poor artists and crazy actor or actress or singer…it was a big mix and that is what made it exciting.”
But, she added, “It is liberating for me to work in New York. Europe is more conservative, and in New York you are much more regarded for what you do rather than who you are, I could sense that people here would judge me on what I created rather than my name, and that gave me a sense of freedom.”