Picasso : My Grandfather - Softcover

Picasso, Marina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099437031 ISBN 13: 9780099437031

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

Marina Picasso remembers being six years old and standing awkwardly in front of the gates of Picasso's grand house near Cannes. She was there with her father and eight-year-old brother to collect from her grandfather the weekly allowance that Picasso grudgingly gave his eldest son to support is family. Sometimes they were sent away and on other occasions, the gates would be opened and they would walk into the intimidating, exciting chaos of Picasso's studio to face the man himself and his unpredictable moods. Looking back, Marina can understand why Picasso had so little interest in his grandchildren; but at the time, she and her brother longed for him to love and understand them. Just a few miles away down the Cote d'Azur, they led a hand-to-mouth existence. Her father was a weak man, reliant on his father for everything and her mother lived in her own fantasy world; the family were therefore utterly dependent on Picasso. People assumed they were rich and privileged because they were Picassos and they were to live their lives under the burden of these assumptions. It was this that caused Marina's brother to commit suicide and when her father died Marina found herself in the ironic position of being one of the major heirs to Picasso's estate.

About this title

Review

Pablo Picasso showed a lifelong fascination for monsters, populating countless paintings and drawings with their hideous forms. To judge by his granddaughter Marina's anguished memoir, he might have found their model in the mirror.

In this highly impressionistic account, Marina Picasso writes of life with a man who set impassable boundaries "between the inaccessible demigod and us." And with a vengeance: Picasso terrorized his son, Marina's father, who took refuge in downward-spiraling alcoholism, his ambition crushed. "To make a dove," Picasso once wrote, "you must first wring its neck." The grandchildren fared little better; they provided Picasso only with a little local color, just as women provided him with sexual prey, and in the end everyone in her grandfather's life, Marina writes, wound up as a victim, "sacrificed to his art."

Many books have portrayed Pablo Picasso unfavorably, but this is the closest we have to a fly-on-the-wall account of the artist in his cruel prime. The picture isn't pretty, but it is captivating. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Marina Picasso is the founder of several charitable organisations that help underprivileged children in Vietnam. She has five children, including three adopted Vietnamese children, and lives in La Californie, the villa in the South of France that she inherited from Picasso. She is one of the five heirs to the Picasso estate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099437031
• ISBN 13: 9780099437031
• Binding: Paperback