Picasso granddaughter to sell artist’s ceramics collection

 ^{Marina Picasso in front of the Cannes villa whose gates were often closed to her while Pablo Picasso was still alive.} 

Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter is to sell one of the most extensive collections of the artist’s ceramics in an attempt to help her turn the page on a traumatic, miserable childhood, The Guardian reported.

Marina Picasso is selling, through Sotheby’s, a remarkable group of one-off plates, tiles, vases and other small sculptural figures that her grandfather made between 1947 and the late 1960s.

The sale is important for Marina and the art market more widely. But it also shines a light on a family history blighted by alcoholism and suicide.

Speaking to The Guardian from the 19th-century villa La Californie, Picasso’s house in Cannes which she inherited and uses as a holiday home, Marina explained the reasons for the sale and reflected on the psychological turmoil that came from being related to the most famous artist in the world.

Marina is the daughter of Picasso’s son, Paulo, who was born of the painter’s first marriage to the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova. Both Marina’s parents struggled with alcoholism, and they split up when she was five months old, leaving her and her older brother, Pablito, to be cared for by their mother.

She has written about how she and her brother grew up in misery and her father had to beg for money from the artist. They rarely saw Picasso and would have to wait for hours at the gate of his house to be received.

Aged 22, when Picasso died without a will, she inherited a fifth of the artist’s estate despite never being given any of his work when she was alive and having no relationship with him. Gripped by the pain of the poor family relationships and Picasso’s treatment of her father and his family, her first gesture after inheriting his villa was to turn all Picasso’s paintings to face the wall.

Marina, now 64, owns an astonishing collection comprising more than 10,000 works, including around 300 paintings; she recently revealed she planned to gradually sell off works to fund her charity activities.

The sale is also a way of putting her affairs in order now that her five children, including three she adopted as babies from an orphanage in Vietnam, were grown up. She said she could not keep the works for ever.

“The sale is certainly also a way of turning the page. It’s about turning the page on a whole childhood. I suffered a lot as a child and a young woman. Being Picasso’s granddaughter was very hard. I don’t snub the inheritance, not at all, I just want a lighter way to live and to be able to devote myself to my humanitarian work. There is absolutely no hatred, no bitterness, no vengeance on my part.”

All the ceramics are unique. “I chose to put together a collection of work that was beautiful and interesting, which could go on sale and be shown. And often a part of these sales – sometimes all of it – I chose to give to humanitarian projects or hospitals.”