Picasso
My Grandfather
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
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 Côte 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author Picasso, granddaughter of the richest artist who ever lived, inherited almost a quarter of Picasso's wealth, including 400 paintings of great value. With Valentin, known francophonically for an untranslated biography of French singer Edith Piaf (Piaf : l'ange noir ), an erotic novel (36.15 : tapez, sexe) and novelizations of French TV shows, she weighs in with an unrelievedly grim and bitter memoir of the artist-patriarch. A tedious one-sidedness becomes clear early on, when during a visit, Picasso asks his grandchildren how they are and how school is going, and the adult Marina comments: "Empty questions that don't need answers. A way of taming us whenever it suits him." She overreacts throughout the book, such as when Picasso and his son file their nails by rubbing them against a wall in Spanish peasant style: "It made me blush and feel sick with shame." The thuddingly prosaic text is not helped by a poor translation, as when Marina recounts her shock at seeing Picasso in his underpants, with "his overflowing attributes visible" or when she and her brother "sob silently while munching our misery apple." Readers will munch their own misery apple through this whiny narrative that accuses Picasso for not using his grandchildren as models in his art, instead "infecting" them with the "Picasso virus," which is apparently a result of neglecting family matters.
