Why is Picasso granddaughter selling off paintings of his worth £200m?

There are many reasons for selling masterpieces – making money undoubtedly being one of them.

In the case of Marina Picasso, granddaughter of Pablo, though, the motive appears to be a form of revenge, reports The Independent.

Revenge on whom? Revenge on her celebrated grandfather, who mostly ignored her during his lifetime and let her grow up in near-poverty.

In a book in 2001, Picasso: My Grandfather, Marina complained that the artist had no interest in children and “drove everyone who got near him to despair”.

Ms Picasso, 64, has let it be known this week that she is willing to accept offers privately for seven of her grandfather’s works worth an estimated £200m. She is also planning to sell the artist’s famous villa near Cannes, La Californie.

When she sold two Picasso paintings last year, Marina announced that other sales were on the way. “For once, I’m doing something with my grandfather, even if he is no longer with us,” she said at the time. “This sale is a way of making him take part in my life’s work.”

Marina Picasso’s “life’s work” is to support poor or orphaned children, notably in Viet nam. Most of the proceeds from last year’s sales went to her children’s association, the Marina Picasso Foundation. By disposing of part of her Picasso collection – she is thought to have around 400 paintings and 7,000 sketches – Marina is, in effect, forcing the curmudgeonly genius to do something for children 41 years after his death.

Marina Picasso, born in 1950, lives in Geneva, She is the daughter of Paulo, Picasso’s first child from his brief marriage with the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. She has yet to comment on the proposed new sales but she said last year: “I am selling my paintings to give myself a reason to exist… I spent part of my own childhood in great poverty. For many years, I couldn’t look at my grandfather’s work because, to me, they represented immense suffering.” The future sales were revealed this week by an unnamed “friend” of Marina Picasso, talking to the New York Post. She has decided to sell privately, apparently because she was disappointed with the £5m proceeds of two paintings that she sold at Sotheby’s Paris last year.

The seven works now on sale are said to include the 1923 portrait of Marina’s mother, Olga Khokhlova, which is valued at around £40m. The others includes a 1921 painting called Maternité (£35m), and a relatively early work, before the development of the characteristic Picasso cubist style, Femme à la Mandoline (£40m).