Marina Picasso the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso, who had a famously fraught relationship with the artist, is quietly selling off some of his works from her private collection for more than $290 million or £190.8 million, reports the New York Post’s Page Six website.
She is also placing her grandfather’s famed Cannes villa, “La Californie.” on the market. According to sources, Marina – the daughter of the artist’s son, Paulo Picasso – is selling at least seven of the artist’s works, including a 1923 portrait of Pablo’s first wife Olga, titled “Portrait de femme (Olga)” for about $60 million, or £39 million, a 1921 work titled “Maternité” for about $54 million or £35 million, plus 1911’s “Femme a la Mandoline (Mademoiselle Leonie assie)” for around $60 million.
The works date from 1905 up to 1965, and are being sold directly by Marina, who will meet clients personally in Geneva. Marina has written that Picasso refused to financially aid her family when she was a child. The granddaughter of the artist opened an exhibition in Cannes in 2013 exploring the nudes in his work. Two thirds of the 120 pieces in ‘Picasso: Nudity Set Free’, were from Marina’s private collection. However, the inheritance of his artwork is one she says she was “given without love”.
Marina was in her twenties when her grandfather died, although her relationship with the artist was in any case a distant one. Although Khohkolva remained married to Picasso until her death in 1955, by then the pair had been separated for 20 years. Marina says Picasso “loved women and used them in order to be creative”.
Some of his muses met tragic ends: Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he fathered his second child, hanged herself, his famous muse Dora Maar suffered from depression and Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, shot herself aged 59, following his death, and Marina’s brother committed suicide in 1973, reportedly after not being allowed by Picasso’s second wife, Jacqueline, to see his grandfather at the time of his death.
“He drove everyone who got near him to despair and it engulfed them,” Marina wrote of Picasso in a 2001 memoir. It is reported that a friend of Marina’s told Page Six that her decision to sell was about “letting go of the past.”