PICASSO’S DAUGHTER: A SKETCH

“People say, ‘Oh, to be the daughter of Picasso!’ But it’s not as extravagant as it seems. He was very special, very vibrant, but he was my father. I didn’t have another.”

Paloma Picasso never wanted to make a career of being her father’s daughter, but she can’t avoid one persistent query: What was it like to live with the 20th Century’s most celebrated artist?

The question came up again recently when she took time off from her perfume and jewelry business to promote “Je suis le cahier,” a book and exhibition of works from Pablo Picasso’s sketchbooks, opening today at the County Museum of Art. About 200 drawings and watercolors from sketchbooks owned by the artist’s heirs are being shown for the first time, following an inaugural splash at Pace Gallery in New York that elicited critical raptures.

During an interview in Los Angeles, the 37-year-old daughter of Picasso and Francoise Gilot cheerfully shifted from talking about the sketchbooks to musing on her childhood. Though her parents (who never married) separated when she was only 4, Paloma Picasso spent summers with her father until the mid-’60s and she has compiled her own colorful book of memories.

She talked about sitting on the bronze goat that now stands in the Museum of Modern Art and “giving it a good patina”--with her father’s blessing. She recalled the crowds of autograph seekers that always surrounded the artist when they went out in public. But the memory that impressed her most was that of a man who left her father’s studio walking backward because he couldn’t bear to turn his back on Picasso.

“It was a fabulous present to be part of that,” she said. “It’s very tempting to let it take over your life, but it’s important to do your own thing--so you juggle it.”

Recently Paloma Picasso’s perpetual juggling act has tilted away from her own identity as a designer and toward her famous father’s achievements that have been hidden away in sketchbooks. “When there is something that good, you want it to become a success--although I’m sure it would be without me,” she said of the publication and exhibition.

“The sketchbooks are special because they show the more intimate side of Picasso, how he worked and how he developed some very famous paintings (“Family of Saltimbanques,” “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and “The Rape of the Sabines”),” she said.

Picasso filled and kept 175 sketchbooks which were found in his home after his death in 1973. His estate, valued at $312 million, was finally settled in 1979 with about $78.5-million worth of art going to the French government. The remainder, including the sketchbooks, was divided among his heirs. Forty-five of the books, dating from around 1901 to 1962, are in the exhibition.

The jacket of the book and the title of the exhibition come from the cover of a 1906 sketchbook bearing the sentence: “Je suis le cahier appartenant a Monsieur Picasso , peintre (I am the sketchbook belonging to Mr. Picasso, painter).”

Some of the drawings are done in children’s copybooks or spiral pads, while others are made of pages stitched together by the artist. Art historians E. A. Carmean, Sam Hunter, Rosalind Krauss, Theodore Reff, Robert Rosenblum and Gert Schiff each have written an essay on one sketchbook reproduced in the book.

Noting that the book--a catalogue raisonne of all the sketchbooks--preserves “the original form” of the drawings, Paloma Picasso said that the compilation may correct a common misperception “that everything came so easily” to her father.

“The sketchbooks show the search and it’s logical within itself,” she said. “Things didn’t happen in a day for him. Certain themes keep coming back in the sketches. One drawing is Cubist, another realist, but nature is always there. And if he didn’t say what he wanted to 20 years ago, he would go back and explore the subject further.”